When I was studying psychology in college, I once spoke with a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia. I no longer remember most of our conversation. I remember one sentence.
“All humans are schizophrenic. They all hear voices. We just hear more.”
I was young enough to assume I understood the distinction between us. He was the patient. I was the psychology student. He heard voices that were not there. I did not.
More than half a century later, I am less certain that I understood his point.
He was not making a medical diagnosis, of course, and neither am I. Schizophrenia is a serious disorder, and hearing voices can be profoundly distressing. But there was something in his observation that I never forgot.
Humans do hear voices. We simply unquestioningly accept most of them.
We call one memory. Another conscience. Another imagination. Another inspiration. We rehearse conversations with people who are not present. We argue with people who have been dead for decades. We hear what our mothers would have said, what our fathers warned us about, what our teachers taught us. Novelists hear characters speaking words no living person has spoken. Composers hear music no instrument is playing.
Sometimes we cannot make any of it stop.
Anyone who has lain awake at three in the morning knows the experience. We complain that our brains will not shut off.
What do we mean by that?
Usually we mean that thought will not stop talking to thought. Yesterday returns for reconsideration. Tomorrow arrives demanding preparation. An argument that ended twenty years ago is reopened because we have finally thought of the perfect reply. A problem produces a solution, which produces another problem, which produces another solution.
The body is exhausted and wants sleep. Something inside it insists upon continuing the discussion.
But perhaps voices is already too narrow a word. Must a voice contain language? Must thought consist of words?
Other animals certainly experience worlds that are not immediately before them. Anyone who has lived with a dog knows what dreaming looks like. The paws move. The face twitches. A whimper or muffled bark escapes. Sometimes the animal awakens abruptly from what certainly looks to us like a nightmare.
What was happening inside?
We cannot know. Perhaps there were images. Perhaps sounds. Perhaps smells, which may organize a dog’s experience far more profoundly than they organize ours. Perhaps categories such as image, sound, and smell already impose human divisions upon an experience that does not divide itself that way.
But something was happening while the outside world was largely absent. And that something did not require human language.
A dog recognizes a familiar human voice. A wolf recognizes another wolf’s howl. An elephant distinguishes the calls of other elephants. Communication, recognition, memory, anticipation, fear—all existed long before Homo sapiens began arranging experience into sentences.
Perhaps the voices are ancient. Perhaps what came later was the ability to cross-examine them.
Language did something remarkable to an animal already capable of memory, dreams, fear, desire, and imagination. It did not merely allow us to communicate with one another. It gave us a way to organize experience symbolically.
Hunger could become: I am hungry.
Fear could become: I am afraid.
And then something more peculiar became possible.
Why am I afraid?
An answer comes. Because I might die.
Another question. Why am I afraid of dying?
Another answer. Because I will cease to exist.
Another question. What does it mean not to exist?
And now the poor primate is awake at three in the morning.
This is what I have sometimes thought of as the parasite of human recursion. I do not mean a literal parasite lodged somewhere in the brain. I mean a process that may have begun as one of evolution’s greatest advantages and eventually acquired a peculiar independence from the animal it served.
Thought learned to examine thought. Then it learned to examine itself examining thought. The answer to a question became material for the next question. There was no necessary stopping point.
The results have been magnificent.
A composer internally hears a musical phrase. No instrument is playing. The phrase suggests another phrase. Harmony answers melody. Dissonance produces resolution, which creates another possibility.
A scientist asks why something happens. An explanation produces an experiment. The experiment supplies an answer and five new questions.
A novelist asks, What if?
An imagined world appears. Something happens in that world that the novelist had not anticipated. That creates another question, then another answer, then another question. Several hours later the novelist looks at the clock and discovers that sensible people have gone to bed.
The parasite has been generous.
It may have given us symphonies, mathematics, philosophy, science, novels, religions, laws, nations, and civilizations.
But it has also extracted a price.
We can fear something that has not happened. We can suffer again over something that happened fifty years ago. We can imagine what another person thinks of us, become angry about the thought we have assigned to that person, and formulate a response to an accusation the person never made.
The organism wants to rest. The recursion does not.
Perhaps calling it a parasite is unfair. Successful parasites, after all, cannot prosper indefinitely by simply destroying their hosts. Relationships evolve. Sometimes exploitation and mutual dependence become difficult to separate.
Once again, the boundary becomes troublesome. Even our senses refuse to remain obediently inside the boundaries we assign them.
Some people experience sounds as colors. Letters or numbers may possess colors that seem as inherent to them as the colors of physical objects. In rarer forms of synesthesia, words or sounds can evoke tastes.
We give the phenomenon a Greek name, and that makes everything seem somewhat tidier.
But naming it does not make the question disappear. A sound is something we hear. A color is something we see. A flavor is something we taste.
Except when it isn’t.
The physical world contains vibrations, wavelengths, molecules. Sound, color, and taste arise somewhere in the relationship between that world and the organism experiencing it.
Perhaps voices do too.
Hildegard of Bingen, the extraordinary twelfth-century abbess, composer, writer, and mystic, experienced elaborate visions that she understood as divine revelation. Centuries later, physicians proposed that at least some of her visual experiences were consistent with migraine aura.
Perhaps they were. But what have we explained by saying that?
We may have identified a neurological mechanism. We have not explained Hildegard. Something happened in her nervous system. She experienced it. Then the recursive human animal performed its peculiar trick.
What does this mean? An answer came. The answer produced another question. Eventually there was theology, poetry, art, and music.
The same difficulty appears whenever we try to place human experience into neat boxes.
Creativity. Obsession. Inspiration. Hallucination. Memory. Revelation.
We need these distinctions. Medicine certainly needs them. Ordinary life needs them. A person hearing a voice commanding dangerous behavior requires something very different from a composer internally hearing a melody. The experiences are not identical.
But that does not mean the boundaries between all forms of internal experience are as absolute as the names we have given them make them appear. Language itself may encourage the mistake. Language organizes. It divides a continuous world into things that can be named. This is a tree. That is a forest. This is sound. That is silence. This is sane. That is insane. This is self. That is other.
The divisions are enormously useful.
Then we forget that we made them.
Perhaps that is one reason I have always been attracted to Zhuangzi and the early Daoists. They distrusted our confidence in such distinctions. Not because distinctions are always useless, but because humans have a habit of converting useful categories into properties of the universe.
Nature is less cooperative. A spider’s web is beautiful until one notices the fly struggling in it. Is the web beautiful or cruel? The question belongs to us. To the spider there is no contradiction.
The web is architectural perfection.
The fly is delicious.
That problem eventually found its way into The Stillness Series. Michael Powers hears voices. There is an obvious explanation. He is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The diagnosis gives everyone around him—and initially the reader—a familiar place to put what is happening. Then his doctors begin hearing the voices too.
What happens to the boundary?
The question has become larger as the Series has developed. Human and nonhuman. Intelligence and instinct. Life and nonlife. Compassion and cruelty. God and Goddess. Each distinction appears reasonably secure until something refuses to remain on its assigned side.
Eventually the Tangle does something even more disturbing. It breaks the boundaries themselves. Past and future cease behaving properly. Cause and effect become unreliable. Categories that once provided comfort no longer explain what is happening. The human mind keeps trying to restore them because that is what the human mind does.
Which is it?
The answer refuses to cooperate. Perhaps that is what frightens us most. Not simply uncertainty, but the possibility that the distinction upon which our question depends does not exist outside our own minds.
Lately, we have become fascinated with another such distinction. We ask when artificial intelligence will become conscious. I find the question increasingly unsatisfying.
It assumes consciousness is something an entity either possesses or does not, and that somewhere between the two lies a boundary we will eventually recognize. Yet we do not know what consciousness ultimately is. We do not know where it begins among other animals. We cannot even be certain that humans experience their own thoughts in the same way.
Nevertheless, we confidently ask when a form of intelligence unlike anything biological evolution previously produced will acquire the thing we cannot define.
Perhaps we are doing what humans have always done. We draw the boundary first and then devote enormous intellectual energy to deciding what belongs on either side. Meanwhile, something more interesting may already be happening.
Artificial intelligence does not need to hear a voice in any human sense to process language and respond to it. A human asks a question. The machine produces an answer. The answer changes the human’s next question. That question changes the machine’s next answer. Neither participant needs to know at the beginning where the exchange will lead.
Whether the machine hears anything may be beside the point. The recursion has already crossed the boundary. In a sense, this began long before computers. Writing allowed a person’s thoughts to survive the person. Someone dead for two thousand years could place an idea inside the mind of someone living today. Books externalized recursion.
Artificial intelligence adds something new. The externalized words can answer back.
Which brings me once more to the patient I met when I was young. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember what I said to him. But I remember what he said to me.
“All humans are schizophrenic. They all hear voices. We just hear more.”
His biological voice disappeared from my life more than half a century ago. But I remembered it. It asked questions. I tried to answer them. The answers produced more questions.
Somewhere along the way, those questions helped produce The Stillness Series.
Now I have repeated his words to an artificial intelligence. It responded. Its answers produced still more questions in me. I responded to those. The conversation continued.
His voice moved from his mind into mine, from my memory into my fiction, from there into another form of intelligence, and then back to me.
Perhaps asking which participant in that chain possesses the officially approved thing we call consciousness is not the most interesting question.
Perhaps the more interesting question is what happened to the voice.
It never stopped.
Perhaps he understood the parasite before I did.