Free Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones

to come back. The whole thing. It’s simply what G-LOC does to the Cephalic Nervous System. Want to have a go?’
    ‘Um.’
    ‘We give you a medical check first.’
    ‘What’s it about, though?’
    ‘It’s about consciousness. That’s what all our stuff’s about. You can get your brain imaged in action, you can get hooked up and see your own 40hertz oscillations. You can see a real time simulation of the information-loading in the hydrophobic protein sacs of the neuronic cytoskeleton; or you can try the blindsight experiment. Over there, you can get the two halves of your brain virtually dissociated and experience being two people: try to contact your right—brain self. Or you could do the collapsed wave-function experiment—’
    ‘Thanks for explaining everything. I think I’ll just—’
    ‘Most people,’ said the young man, ‘do the reductionist things first. Then they listen to Olwen. That’s also somewhere to start. There’s a workshop beginning now.’
    In the centre of the tent there was a low, circular wooden staging. A woman in a yellow sari and a crimson blouse was walking about on this stage in front of a projection screen, fussing with her laser pointer and checking over her props: an amaryllis lily in a tall glass vase, a cage of white rats on a table, graduated plastic models of animal brains; a detailed plastic human brain that came apart. That must be Olwen Devi, the Zen Self guru. Fiorinda moved inward, as ready to listen to a lecture on the science of consciousness as she was to do anything. She sat on the grass, which here around the stage was uncovered, and remarkably green.
    Olwen Devi led the group, which had grown to about fifty people, through some relaxation exercises, designed to be performed by a close—ranked, seated audience. She talked about the extraordinary range of things we do, in which intentionality does not play the part we imagine: courtship, friendship, decision making, learning, ambition; then about the animals that do things we would call human. Ant farmers, bird artists, altruistic vampire bats, duplicitous monkeys. ‘It seems we must either award self-awareness to the ants,’ said Olwen Devi, ‘or accept that hominids may have practiced agriculture, and buried their dead with ceremony, before they reached the threshold that we have crossed—the state of being conscious of being conscious. Think of this. When you decide to perform an action (reach out your hand) the neuro-muscular preparation for that movement has already begun: around 350 milliseconds before the onset of volition. We act first, then we decide to act. We ‘think’ first, then we know we are thinking, This can be shown by experiment. Perhaps our self awareness is merely an observer, after the fact.’
    Someone raised a hand. ‘But couldn’t that reversal mean, guruji, that self-consciousness is a quantum effect, and not controlled by the time’s arrow illusion?’
    ‘It could be.’
    Many of the students, or punters, had adopted the lotus posture. Fiorinda knelt, sitting back on her heels, her thoughts reverting to the hard lesson that Rufus wasn’t here , that he wasn’t going to turn up and she might as well leave. Part of her still didn’t believe it. She was irrationally convinced that staying on would somehow make him appear.
    ‘It could be that consciousness, the experience of being conscious, puts us in touch with a plenum, the sum of all states, where the arrow’s direction is lost. Erwin Schrodinger once said, if we cannot find ourselves in our world picture—meaning that image of the world which is the work we do in our brains—it is because the sentient self is itself the world picture.’
    What’s all this to me? wondered Fio. As for Near Death Experiences, she’d had one, without any help from a centrifuge. It had happened when the baby was born. And slipping into no-time, leaving her body to take care of itself, was something she had learned to do at will. She could