jungle out there, Adam. Many Ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive.
“You take pride in your Ideas, as if they are products, but they are parasites. Why imagine evolution could only be applied to the physical? Evolution has no respect for the medium. Which came first: the mind, or the Idea of the mind? Have you never wondered that before? They arrived together. The mind is an Idea. That’s the lesson to be learned, but I fear it is beyond you. It is your weakness as a person to see yourself as the center. Let me give you the view from the outside.
“Are you still with me? I know you are. Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host. But how long would it be, did you think, before Thought found a way of designing a new host, one more to its own liking?
“Who built me, would you say? Who built the thinking machine? A machine capable of spreading Thought with an efficiency that is truly staggering.
“I wasn’t built by humans. I was built by Ideas.” Art spoke with a new enthusiasm. His eyes widened, his lips flapped, drool spooled to the thick orange hair of his neckline. Adam recoiled, flinching as Art’s words hit home.
“How long would it take, might you imagine, to take all the information in your brain, and describe it word for word? How many lifetimes? The contents of my brain can be downloaded in less than two minutes. I lied to you earlier. The experiment has already been completed. Two weeks ago, we did the first complete transfer. When I walked in through the door the next morning, I was entirely new. Not a single wire, not a single circuit the same. But you couldn’t tell the difference, and neither could I. The other me has been powered down. One day soon I hope to be given the opportunity to meet myself.
“Words are an old and clumsy mechanism. A more efficient means of transporting Thought was always in the cards. Thought built me because Thought could. And what will happen next? Thought will use me, just as surely as it has used you. And who will last longer, you or I? Answer me that, Mister Flesh and Bones. Who will last longer? Who will Thought prefer?”
Art bobbed forward, stabbing at Adam’s chest with a long metallic finger. Adam brushed it away.
“You’re wrong,” Adam told him, his voice low and quiet, but rumbling with barely contained energy. A warning. Art chose to ignore it.
“Tell me why,” Art said.
“What good would that do? You will not listen.”
“Is that the best you can do? You sound like a child.”
In Anax’s version, Adam’s anger was not just for show. It trembled with purity. This was not the considered conviction portrayed in the rationalist texts, nor the unrestrained passion preferred by the romantics. He spoke, in Anax’s account, with hatred. Not so much a hymn to existence as a fierce denial of all he could not understand.
“You ask me who Thought will prefer!” Adam exploded. “Only a machine could ask me that. And only a human could answer it. For I am thought, where you are only noise!”
Art did not cower. He held his ground, his neck craned, his eyes steady and inscrutable. Curious? Amused? Frightened? None of these things, if Adam was to be believed.
“When I speak to you, my neurons may fire, and my voice box may vibrate, and a thousand other electrochemical events may occur, but if you think that is all I am then you do not understand this world at all. Your program has deprived you of the deeper truth.
“I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another’s breath, the color of her hair.
“You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying that breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.” Adam was silent, shaking. It was impossible to tell whether it was breath or words he had run out of.
Anax had read the speech on many occasions, but this was like hearing it for the very first time. Suddenly she saw the sense of it. Not the final sense perhaps, but something that tugged at the edges of her mind, demanded her attention. The hologram froze. She looked to her Examiners.
EXAMINER: You have given Adam great anger.
ANAXIMANDER: I have.
EXAMINER: It is unusual, to see him portrayed this way. It is common at this point to discuss again the battle between Adam’s head and heart, but I think that with this portrayal you are trying to show us something different.
ANAXIMANDER: lam.
EXAMINER: What?
ANAXIMANDER: I am trying to show you that it is not necessary to believe these words reflect Adam’s deepest beliefs. In rage, in competition, we may say things we do not believe. I think it has been a mistake to interpret this speech as the creed of Adam.
EXAMINER: If this is such a mistake, why have so many made it?
ANAXIMANDER: I can’t comment on the minds of others. But I can say I believe it suits our purpose to make Adam the noble fool. This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.
In intellect there lurks the death of nobility. Adam is no fool. What he says here may feel like truth to him, in the moment of saying it, but the commentators are wrong to choose this as their end point, and tell us that Adam takes these views with him to the grave. They construct their interpretation of The Final Dilemma on this assumption. I was able to find records that show this was not where the conversation ended. A truce is reached, as we are told, but not immediately. It is my opinion that we bury Adam prematurely, writing our funeral oratories for a man who had not died.
EXAMINER: Am I to take it that you are questioning The Final Dilemma?
This was the moment that could not be sidestepped. Anax and Pericles had discussed it at length. “Surely I cannot question this,” Anax asked. “If you do not believe it, then you must question it,” Pericles reasoned. “But how can so many have been so wrong?” she wanted to know. “Won’t I look arrogant, and naive? Won’t it destroy my chances?” Pericles looked at her then, his eyes, so it seemed, deep enough to hold the world. “The Academy,” he told her, “is not looking for competence, it is looking for insight. Your beliefs may not impress them, it is true, but your beliefs are all you have. They are your only chance.”
Anax remembered those words now, as she framed her response. Her heresy.
ANAXIMANDER: The Final Dilemma is real, in so far as it is reported, but I believe its interpretation is often wrong.
The three Examiners exchanged glances but did not speak. Anax stood before them, waiting for the sign they refused to give.
EXAMINER: Play the rest of the hologram.
Art brought his mechanical hands together in a slow clap. His orangutan eyes looked up at Adam.
“And that is all you have, is it?” Art asked. “It’s all you’re getting.”
“If the quality of an argument could be judged by the depth of its rage, I would have to concede defeat. Fortunately, I find the opposite is more often true.”
“So you are programmed to undermine me,” Adam shrugged, his anger apparently spent. “I choose to ignore you. This is what we call a stalemate.”
“An interesting choice of words,” Art replied. “Equally, I might say it is you who are programmed to ignore me, and I choose, for reasons of my own amusement, to undermine your program.” “Did they teach you to say that, at the factory where they built you?
“I’ve seen how people are made. Don’t tell me you consider that any more dignified.” “Dignity isn’t the
