Factoring Humanity

Kyle was frowning. “Oh, come on, Heather. You don’t believe in mind reading any more than I do.”

“I don’t believe people can do it at will, no. But it’s been reported as an occasional phenomenon since the dawn of time; perhaps there is some validity to it. Jung himself argued in his later years that the unconscious functions independently of the laws of causality and normal physics, making such things as clairvoyance and precognition possible.”

“He was just a confused old man by that point.”

“Maybe, but my department head did his Ph.D. at Duke; they’ve done lots of interesting work there about ESP, and he — ”

“Work that doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.”

“Well, sure, it’s clear that there’s no such thing as reliably reading minds — but there are a number of pretty solid studies suggesting that under sensory-deprivation conditions, certain people can guess with somewhat enhanced accuracy which of four possibilities someone else is looking at; you’d expect a twenty-five-percent success rate based on random guessing, but there were studies done by Honorton in New Jersey that show a thirty-three- or thirty-seven-percent success rate, and even one test group of twenty subjects that had a fifty-percent success rate. And the four-dimensional overmind — ”

“Ah,” said Kyle, amused. “The coveted FDO.”

“The four-dimensional overmind,” repeated Heather firmly, “provides a theoretical model that can account for occasional telepathic linkages.”

Kyle was still grinning. “You looking to get a new research grant?”

Heather internalized a smile of her own. One thing she’d never be lacking again was grant money. “This model could also explain flashes of brilliance,” she said, “especially those that come while sleeping. Remember Kekule, trying to work out the chemical structure of benzene? He dreamed of a snake-ring of atoms — which turned out to be exactly right. But maybe he didn’t come up with that breakthrough on his own.” She paused, reflecting. “And maybe I didn’t come up with this notion on my own. Maybe the reason we sleep so much is that that’s when we interact most closely with the overmind. Maybe dreams occur while our daily individual experiences are being uploaded to the overmind. It can kill you, you know — not dreaming. You can get all the rest in the world, but if you take chemicals that prevent you from dreaming, you’ll die; that contact is essential. And perhaps when a problem is being worked on, maybe sometimes you’re not the only one doing it. It’s like the way your quantum computer is supposed to work — the computer you see will be solving only the smallest part of the problem, but it’ll be working in tandem with all the others. Maybe sometimes during sleep, we touch the overmind and get the benefit of all the nodes.”

“Politely, that sounds like New Age gibberish to me,” said Kyle.

Heather shrugged a little. “Your quantum mechanics sounds like gibberish to most people. But it’s the way the universe works.” She paused. “This is going to excite Noam Chomsky’s followers. In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky proposed that language is innate. That is, we don’t learn to talk the way we learn to tie our shoes or ride a bicycle. Instead, humans have a built-in linguistic ability — special circuits in the brain that allow people to acquire and process language without any conscious awareness of the complex rules. I’ve heard you say it yourself when marking student papers: ‘I know that sentence is grammatically incorrect; I can’t tell you exactly why, but I’m sure it’s not right.’ ”

Kyle nodded. “Yeah, I’ve said that.”

“So you — and just about everyone else — clearly has a sense of language. But Chomsky’s theory is that the sense is something you’re born with. And if you’re born with it, presumably it has to be coded in your DNA.”

“Makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Heather earnestly. “Philip Lieberman pointed out a big problem with Chomsky’s theory. Chomsky is essentially saying that there’s a language ‘organ’ in the brain that’s identical in every human being. But it can’t be. No genetically determined trait is the same in all people; there’s always variation. The language organ would have to show the same sort of variability we see in skin and eye color, height, susceptibility to heart disease, and more.”

“Why on earth would that be true?”

“It would have to be that way; genetics demands it. You know, there are people who digest foods in different ways — a diabetic does it one way, someone who is lactose intolerant does it another way. Even people we consider perfectly healthy may have different approaches, using different enzymes. But on a societal level, that doesn’t matter; digestion is utterly personal — the way you do it has no effect on the way I do it. But language has to be shared — that’s the whole point of language. If there were any variation in the way you and I processed language mentally, we wouldn’t be able to communicate.”