word
severe
to describe how my sister looked. Her eyes were candlelit green saucers that flicked between her fidgety hands and my face.
“I should at least have an inkling of what you’re doing at the university,” I told her. “Need to have something to tell Mom if she calls.”
She cupped her beer and tapped her rings against the glass. There was no rhythm in the sound, only the twitch of anxious energy. “Fuck Mom.”
I shrugged, neutral.
“I’ll have to dumb it down for you,” she said. Then she grinned crookedly, amused by her own insult.
I laughed. “Humour your idiot brother.”
The bartender stacked some glasses behind the counter. Grace jumped in her seat. Then she straightened herself and drank some beer using both hands to raise the glass.
“I suppose what we’re trying to do is measure and quantify subjective experience,” she said. “Ultimately, we’d like to do it in the absence of objectivity.”
“That’s the dumbed-down version?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you make it dumber?”
She was visibly irritated by my use of the word
dumber.
I scored it as a point for myself and gave her a smug look.
She shook her head at me, squinted, and tried again. “Did the universe exist before you were born?”
“What?” I asked. She didn’t respond so I thought about her question. “O.K. It existed. So?”
“How can you be sure?” she said.
“Are these trick questions?”
“No. So how can you be sure the universe existed?”
“Well,” I said. And thought again. “I mean, there’s evidence. Science. Dinosaur bones and such. But I guess I can’t say for sure, without any doubt, that the universe existed. Or that it exists right now. I could be some brain in a jar. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Not really.” She laughed. “But maybe in a roundabout way. You say that all of this”—she swooped one arm in a wide arc—“could just be a figment of your imagination. You could be a brain in a jar and I could just be a creation of your nonconscious bits. That idea, that the only thing that really exists is pure subjectivity, that we’re all just figments of your imagination, they call that solipsism. And yet you seem more convinced by dinosaur bones and science, right?”
“I guess it seems more reasonable than being a brain in a jar,” I told her.
“Perfect. Yes. Exactly. ‘Reasonable.’ We have a reasonable degree of information that an objective reality really exists, outside of our minds. It’s reasonable to think that the tree is still in the woods, even when there isn’t someone there to observe it.”
“Oh god,” I said. “You’re going to do the tree falling in the woods.”
She scowled, stood, and scuttled to the bar. Her skirt was long and made of a heavy fabric and it swished like a curtain. A minute later she returned with two more pints of beer, though I wasn’t nearly finished my first.
“Yes, you asshole,” she said after she’d sat down again, “I’m going to do the tree falling in the woods. Let’s say somebody is present, though. The tree falls and causes ripples in air pressure, which in turn are transduced into an electrical signal by specialized cells in your ear. In the end, we hear a sound. What our lab is interested in is the qualitative and quantitative difference between the objective air pressure and the subjective, perceived sounds.”
I tried to envision what she was saying but kept getting stuck on something.
“It’s just,” I said. “Shouldn’t that be easy? I mean, in a way they’re the same. The form is different, air pressure and brain signals, but shouldn’t they be…I don’t know, parallel? Like a bigger air pressure change would have a larger electrical signal. Or something.”
“In a way, that’s true. But there are important differences. For example, Weber’s Law: we hear logarithmically rather than linearly.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked. I finished my first beer except for a
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