“What you are describing is nothing more than pattern recognition, and then assigning names to patterns,” Lodoghir said.

“So the Syntactics would say,” replied Zh’vaern. “But I would say that you have it backwards. You Procians have a theory—a model—of what consciousness is, and you make all else subordinate to it. Your theory becomes the ground of all possible assertions, and the processes of consciousness are seen as mere phenomena to be explained in the terms of that theory. Atamant says that you have fallen into the error of circular reasoning. You cannot develop your grounding theory of consciousness without making use of the power consciousness has of seizing on and conferring thisness on givens, and so it is incoherent and circular for you to then employ that theory to explain the fundamental workings of consciousness.”

“I understand Atamant’s point,” Lodoghir said, “but by making such a move, does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse? This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status—it can’t be challenged or examined, it just is.”

“On the contrary, nothing could be more rational than to begin with what is given, with what we observe, and ask ourselves how we come to observe it, and investigate it in a thorough and meticulous style.”

“Let me ask it this way, then: what results was Atamant able to deliver by following this program?”

“Once he made the decision to proceed in this way, he made a few false starts, went up some blind alleys. But the nub of it is this: consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment—”

“Equipment?” Ignetha Foral asked sharply.

“Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers. The point being that it has what the Ita would call hardware. Yet Atamant’s premise is that consciousness itself, not the equipment, is the primary reality. The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. The story is long and winding, but eventually he found a fruitful line of inquiry rooted in the polycosmic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He quite reasonably applied this premise to his favorite topic—”

“The copper bowl?” Lodoghir asked.

“The complex of consciousness-phenomena that amounted to his perception of a copper bowl,” Zh’vaern corrected him, “and proceeded to explain it within that framework.” And Zh’vaern—uncharacteristically talkative this evening—proceeded to give us a calca summarizing Atamant’s findings on the copper bowl. As he’d warned us, this had much in common with the dialogs I’d been reporting on a few minutes earlier, and led to the same basic conclusion. As a matter of fact, it was so repetitive that I wondered, at first, why he bothered with it, unless it was just to show off what a smart fellow Atamant was, and score one for the Matarrhite team. As a servitor, I was free to come and go. Zh’vaern eventually worked his way around to the assertion, which we’d heard before, that crosstalk among different cosmi around the time that their worldtracks diverged was routinely exploited by consciousness-bearing systems.

Lodoghir said, “Please explain something to me. I was under the impression that the kind of crosstalk you are speaking of could only occur between two cosmi that were exactly the same except for a difference in the quantum state of one particle.”

“We can testify to that much,” said Moyra, “because the situation you’ve just described is just the sort of thing that is studied in laboratory experiments. It is relatively easy to build an apparatus that embodies that kind of scenario—‘does the particle have spin up or spin down,’ ‘does the photon pass through the left slit or the right slit,’ and so on.”

“Well, that’s a relief!” Lodoghir said. “I was afraid you were about to claim that this crosstalk was the same thing as the Hylaean Flow.”

“I believe that it is,” Zh’vaern said. “It has to be.”

Lodoghir looked affronted. “But Suur Moyra has just finished explaining that the only form of inter-cosmic crosstalk for which we have experimental evidence is that in which the two cosmi are the same except for the state of one particle. The Hylaean Flow, according to its devotees, joins cosmi that are altogether different!”

“If you look at the world through a straw, you will only see a tiny bit of it,” Paphlagon said. “The kinds of experiments that Moyra spoke of are all perfectly sound—better than that, they are magnificent, in their way—but they only tell us of single-particle systems. If we could devise better experiments, we could presumably observe new phenomena.”

Fraa Jad threw his napkin on the table and said: “Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

Silence except for the sound of Arsibalt chalking that one down on the wall. I slipped into the messallan.

“Would you be so kind as to unpack that statement?” Suur Asquin finally said. Glancing at Arsibalt’s handiwork, she said, “To begin with, what do you mean by amplifying weak signals?”

Fraa Jad looked as if he hardly knew where to begin, and couldn’t be bothered, but Moyra was game: “The ‘signals’ are the interactions between cosmi that account for quantum effects. If you don’t agree with the polycosmic interpretation, you must find some other explanation for those effects. But if you do agree with it, then, to make it compatible with what we have long known about quantum mechanics, you must buy into the premise that cosmi interfere with each other when their worldtracks are close together. If you restrict yourself to one particular cosmos, this crosstalk may be interpreted as a signal—a rather weak one, since it only concerns a few particles. If those particles are in an asteroid out in the middle of nowhere, it hardly matters. But when those particles happen to be at certain critical locations in the brain, why, then, the ‘signals’ can end up altering the behavior of the organism that is animated by that brain. That organism, all by itself, is vastly larger than anything that could normally be influenced by quantum interference. When one considers societies of such organisms that endure across long spans of time and in some cases develop world-altering technologies, one sees the meaning of Fraa Jad’s assertion that consciousness amplifies the weak signals that web cosmi together.”

Zh’vaern had been nodding vigorously: “This tallies with some Atamant that I was reading yesterday evening. Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies. This is how we get from a solipsistic world—one that is perceived by, and real to, only one subject—to the intersubjective world—the one where I can be certain that you see the copper bowl and that the thisness you attach to it harmonizes with mine.”

“Thank you, Suur Moyra and Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Ignetha Foral. “Assuming that Fraa Jad will maintain his gnomic ways, would you or anyone else care to take a crack at the second part of what he said?”

“I should be delighted to,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “since Fraa Jad is sounding more and more Procian every time he opens his mouth!” This earned Lodoghir a lot of attention, which he reveled in for a few moments before going on: “By selective amplification, I believe Fraa Jad is saying that not all inter-cosmic crosstalk gets amplified—only some of it. To cite Suur Moyra’s example, crosstalk affecting elementary particles in a rock in deep space has no effect.”