Paz’s boat was a locally made plywood craft, ugly as the devil and painted peeling pink. It had been calledMarta, but one of the stick-on metallic letters had fallen into the sea and so it wasMata now, which Paz had liked as being suitable for a homicide dick and had left it so. It was damp and uncomfortable and ran like blazes on its planing hull in front of twin Mercury Optimax 200s. Just now it was anchored in Florida Bay over a hole Paz had been fishing for years. They had been out since just past dawn and caught two fat snook (Paz) and a small permit (Zwick) and now it was eleven and the fish had stopped biting. The only person still fishing seriously was Amelia, who was methodically feeding live shrimp to the crabs on the bottom with her hook.
The two men were sitting on a padded locker, working on their second six-pack. Zwick had been talking about his work, a subject he was never reluctant to pursue, but Paz had been encouraging. As a result he had learned a good deal about Penrose’s theory that consciousness was in some sense a quantum phenomenon lodged in the exquisitely fine microtubules of neurons, and Edelman’s theory that the brain is a set of maps, with sheets of neurons having systematic relationships to sheets of receptor cells wired to the whole sensorium. In this theory, sensory experience essentially constructs consciousness. It was Zwick’s idea that the real key lay in a concordance of the two theories: Edelman’s notion of reentry mapping explained the way the brain built a picture of the world and of the self within it; Penrose explained, as far as Paz could understand the jargon, why minds were not like machines, why human minds could think up new stuff, something no computer had ever done. Paz listened, asked questions, received detailed answers, some of which he even understood, and waited patiently for Zwick to get drunk enough to deal with Paz’s less orthodox queries. He thought it was a lot harder absorbing information from Zwick than from a naked woman in bed, which had been for many years Paz’s almost exclusive tutelary venue. Did sex make the neural sheets more receptive? Or did the spray of testosterone that Zwick emitted when making a point have the opposite effect? A good doctoral thesis, Paz thought, but one unlikely ever to be written.
“So what about hallucinations, Doctor?” he asked now. “It can’t be a mapping thing because by definition it doesn’t exist to be picked up by the senses. But it seems real.”
Zwick waved his hands dismissively. “It’s all bad connections, neurotransmitter imbalances in the midbrain. We can produce any type of hallucination we want by electrical stimulation, magnetic fields, chemicals…it’s not a particularly interesting field of study.”
“Unless you’re having them. What about a hallucination that leaves physical evidence behind it?”
“Then by definition it’s not a hallucination.”
“Unless the evidence is also hallucinatory. Where do you draw the line?”
“Through your dick. What are you talking about, Paz? More spooky shit?”
“Spooky indeed. Are you drunk enough to give me a scientific opinion?”
“Barely. Why isn’t this vessel equipped with daiquiris? Isn’t that a Coast Guard requirement?”
“Only in international waters. What do you think of shape-shifting? Speaking as a renowned physicist and drunk?”
“What do you mean, ‘shape-shifting’?”
“I mean that it’s universally accepted among shamanic peoples that certain highly trained people can turn themselves into animals.”
“Oh, that. I thought they onlythought that the spirit of the great lion, or whatever, was taking them over and they growled and imagined they were chasing zebras.”
“Yeah, they have that, but I meant for real, assuming there’s such a thing as real. What it is, I was called in recently to consult on a Miami PD case. A couple of citizens got killed, and all the evidence says it was done by a large animal, a cat of some kind. We got footprints, we got claw marks, the wounds are consistent with teeth and claws. They even figured out how much it weighs, a little over four-fifty. Needless to say, no one has reported such an animal in the area. We also have this little Indian running around town, comes from the jungles in South America, got a grudge against the victims, and also claims to be able to change into a jaguar, more or less. We also have some anecdotal evidence this guy has the ability to, let’s say, modify his appearance. What do you make of all that?”
“Of that I make horseshit,” said Zwick. “Technically, we in science are not allowed to say that anything’s impossible, just that some things are so improbable as to be not worth thinking about, and this falls in that category. I mean organic forms do change shape, obviously, but as growth over time, and via evolution over humongous ranges of time. They don’t just change shape like in fairy tales, not in real life.”
“Okay, but look at it another way. If you were God, and making a world in which something like thatcould happen, how would you do it?”
“Oh, well, that’s the way to my heart, letting me play God.” Zwick laughed and finished his beer, tossing the can over his shoulder into the bay. “Although among the many improvements I’d make, that one would probably not be high on the list. Let’s see now…” Zwick leaned back against the rail and opened another can. His eyes lost focus as he raised his head to the sky, seeming to seek counsel from the current deity. Paz observed him with interest, as a phenomenon of nature. Watching Robert Zwick cogitate was less fascinating than watching Nolan Ryan pitch or Michael Jordan shoot baskets, but it was the same sort of thing, a thing regular people couldn’t hope to do.
“Right,” said Zwick after several minutes of this. “We all have in us a neural map of our bodies. No one knows how detailed it is, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it descends to the molecular level. So your shape-shifter would have to have a duplicate image of the selected animal in there somewhere. How it’s instantiated we don’t know, but it’s not through any strictly biological process. On the other hand, we’re constantly discovering biological processes we never suspected, so call that a gimme. We observe in nature the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a completely different creature, over a fairly short time. Let’s say it’s the same kind of thing, but faster. Okay, we need energy. Well, there are humongous reserves of energy in the universe, the so-called dark energy for one thing, and ordinarily we have no access to it. But suppose Penrose is correct, that consciousness is partly a quantum phenomenon, and suppose our little guy has solved the dualism problem, don’t ask me how…”
“Sorry, what problem?”
“We talked about this before, remember? Substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is its own thing and exists independently of the material brain, as Descartes believed. It satisfies all the problems of consciousness by explaining them away-the ghost in the machine, as they call it, or rather all problems except one, and that’s the killer: how do you imagine any gearing or connection between the material and the immaterial? How does an immaterial mind cause a material event, say, the firing of neurons in the motor cortex that move your arms? Which is why it’s bullshit, and also why there’s no God.”
“Except you.”
“Of course. But never mind that for the moment. Substance dualism implies conscious immaterial beings that are nevertheless capable of influencing matter, so that takes care of a lot of your energy concerns. This putative being moves the molecules into the right place according to the alternate body plan he keeps in his head. Animal flesh is just air and water and a few minerals, easily obtained from ordinary dirt, if you have godlike powers. So that’s one solution. Alternatively, we could posit that there are other universes intimately connected with our own, the unseen world of superstition. We think that our four dimensions are generated by vibrations of the strings wrapped up in the Calabi-Yau geometry, but for the math to work there have to be seven other dimensions tangled up in there, of which we know zip and probably never will. Again, the central question is, What is consciousness? Maybe it can get in there and arrange for the passage of mystic beings. Maybe that’d be a simpler solution than assembling your jaguar from molecules on order. The thing just steps through, and the little Indian goes back the other way, like a revolving door. The energy cost would be huge, but who’s counting?”