The Seed of Evil

“On examination the brain is found to be a physical apparatus, just as a radio receiver, for instance, is a physical apparatus. The comparison is a striking one. An intelligent visitor from another planet, on hearing speech and music bearing all the hallmarks of conscious activity coming from a radio set, might decide to examine the set to discover their source. He would very likely conclude that the set could not, by itself, have been responsible for such a high level of intelligibility. If he were of a materialist persuasion, he would also reject the notion of a non-physical ‘soul’ dwelling within the radio. Instead, he would infer that the apparatus was merely a receiver, amplifying signals transmitted from elsewhere.

“Should we take a leaf from our imaginary alien’s book? Could the brain be no more than a receiver, tuned, so to speak, to a ‘beam of consciousness’ directed from an external source? If so, where, and what, is the transmitter?

“This is a concept which, oddly enough, the materialist is better able to handle than the non-materialist, for if the transmission is itself physical in nature, there is only one source we can reasonably look to. The entity that acts as transmitter can only be the brain’s overall environment, radiating diffuse informational signals which our sensory organs—the brain’s ‘antennae’—pick up. The brain amplifies and focuses these signals, concentrating them into a focal point much as a lens or concave mirror will focus diffuse sunlight into an intense spot. This ‘intense spot’ is what we call individual consciousness. …”

The two beings, far off, who were monitoring the broadcast lecture, as they had monitored much taking place on the Earth planet during the last three thousand million years, turned to regard one another.

“How close he has come to the truth,” said one, his speech a nanosecond hum. In reply the other emitted a similar nanosecond burst. “Except that the real truth is so much simpler. Ascribing consciousness to the general environment is ingenious, but unnecessary.”

“He is far too cautious to entertain the idea of an artificial transmitter, of course. Think how long it took us to arrive at the facts in our own case. Four thousand million years.”

“Do you remember that we once undertook a calculation along the lines of his premise, to determine whether the quality of consciousness, even though it is non-physical, could arise from the collection and collation of environmental data?”

“Yes, I remember it well. We found that consciousness could arise in that way, but only if the items of data to be processed were infinite in number.”

“So putting it beyond the bounds of possibility.”

Those who conversed had the appearance of craggy masses, partly with a dull corrugated sheen, partly twinkling, partly containing patches of electron haze. They hovered in the void, seemingly with the help of dark, curved wings, whose function was not, however, concerned with flight but with collecting sensory data. To human eyes they would not have seemed alive at all, for they had evolved not on a planetary surface but in the interior of a dense dust cloud. They were not even made of CHON, that blend of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen which was the basic substance of the Earth biosystem, but instead were composed of metallic ions.

Their consciousness was more intense and voluminous than human consciousness. They communicated with one another in a comprehensive, multidimensional talk which recapitulated vast ranges of fact, and which could only be suggested by, rather than rendered into, human speech; and every utterance of which, however great its content, took place in exactly one nanosecond of time.

The place where they had evolved, and which they now inhabited, was a dark winding cloud where dust trails made endless caves and tortuous canyons. From out of that dust they had been precipitated, provoked into being by an evolutionary impulse immensely more powerful than the corresponding impulse they had imposed on the Earth planet. During the million million years of their existence they had constructed, out of the dust, three pieces of apparatus. One of these floated nearby: the transmitter which provided all Earth brains, animal and human, with consciousness.

One of the entities emitted another nanosecond hum. “It would be interesting if the lecturer could be transported here and have the consciousness transmitter explained to him. What would be his feelings?”

“It may be imagined that his first thought would be similar to our own in like circumstances,” the other rejoindered. “He would find it strange to think that he would lose consciousness should he step out of the beam. He would then ask: is the machine a generator, as well as a transmitter, of consciousness?”