The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  :5:

  It looked like a hotel room, but it wasn’t a hotel and so there wasn’t a minibar, which was good, since the circumstances would have sorely tested my new sobriety. There was, however, a terminal with internet access, so I sat for half an hour and browsed. The daft thing was that neither Irma nor Kostritsky had told me the name of the Institute, so I couldn’t google it. I faffed around following links to AI research and supercomputers, and hazarded a quick search for ‘Roy Curtius’. Nothing very much. Then I browsed Kant, and found myself drawn in to the rococo intricacies of his systems. So I shut the machine down, and went to bed in my clothes, because I hadn’t brought any pyjamas.

  Almost as soon as I turned the light off there was a short drumroll knocking sound. Looking back, I wonder if she was waiting in the darkened hall – Christ knows for how long – until the horizontal line of light vanished from under the door. I turned my bedside light on again, and got up, and unlocked the door, and opened it, and light spilled out into the darkness and Irma was standing there.

  She came inside, and shut the door behind her. Then she said: ‘The questions you were asking in the car.’

  And I said: ‘The questions I was asking,’ like an idiot, because my heart was suddenly gulping hard inside my ribcage.

  ‘About me, the personal ones. There’s an answer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She took my hand in her hand. ‘You need to understand, and we need to understand one another. I don’t like kissing, nothing on the mouth. No penetration either. All right?’

  This was so bewildering that I almost whinnied like a horse. I said: ‘I didn’t bring any condoms anyway. Unless you did?’

  She shook her head. ‘Condom or no, no penetration. Not what I’m into. And you’ll need to wash your hands and scrub your nails before you can touch me. I’ll need to watch you wash, to make sure you do it right.’

  I couldn’t think what to say. I couldn’t think at all. My cock was stiff as steel. She tugged my hand a little leading me uncomplaining into the adjacent bathroom, where I washed my hands three times under the mixer tap. Then back in the bedroom, and she undressed, and with a wordless nod instructed me to do the same. Then we got under the covers together and I ran my clean hands over her clean skin, and kissed her with my scarred face although always below the neck. She came, I think. Then she spat in her hand, once, twice, three times, with what sounded upsettingly and yet arousingly like contempt and applied her palm to my member and undertook the necessary motion. She used her left hand, which may or may not have been significant to her, and which made me think of her driving and handling the gear-stick – a spurious memory, this, since the car that had chauffeured me here had been an automatic. It didn’t take long. I lay there panting, and she slipped from the sheets, and vanished into the bathroom. The light went on, and from where I was lying I could just about see her splashing her abdomen with water and towelling it dry. Then she came back to the bedside, dressed with the light from the bathroom behind her in a series of intensely beautiful silhouetted shapes. There was a click, and the door pulled shut, and she was gone.

  I fell asleep.

  And then it was morning, and the light was coming through the windows, and the bathroom light was still on. I drank from the cold tap and pissed the previous night’s coffee into the toilet bowl and took a shower. My tooth throbbed. I made Francis Bacon faces at myself in the mirror. It looked OK.

  There was nothing except yesterday’s crusty clothes to wear, and so I dressed in them. Unsure about leaving my room, and for want of anything better to do, I switched on the computer and surfed the net some more. I put on Radio 4 via iPlayer to hear the news. Perhaps turning on the system alerted them to my being awake, because very soon afterwards there came a single, firm knock upon the door.

  It was Kostritsky. ‘You driving me home personally?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you want breakfast first?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to head straight off?’ But her expression said: You’re not going anywhere and we both know it.

  My heart went bippety bippety, and I had to make the conscious effort to restrain myself from agreeing too eagerly.

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying for cool. ‘Breakfast.’

  Kostritsky led me down a different corridor, and down some stairs rather than up them, and through a weird dog-leg series of spaces into a large canteen. A dozen long tables, and a bank of serving counters at the far end. It was entirely deserted except for the two of us, although the lit-up counters were well supplied with rectangular stainless-steel containers inside containing, variously, bacon, hot beans, scrambled eggs, button mushrooms in their own hot juices and so on. Kostritsky took a tray and I followed suit. An automated machine filled my mug with coffee. I watched the black circle rise like a piston-head inside its chamber, and all the time my brain was thinking: If I give the impression I’m not eager to say, she’ll have to send in Irma again tonight.

  There was an open door frame to the kitchen: lights on, ovens and other cooking apparatus visible. I didn’t see any kitchen staff. Maybe they were on a fag break. I followed Kostritsky to a table, and all the time my brain was thinking: I can surely leverage once more – but what about after that? How to make my assistance conditional upon Irma visiting me? Should I say that outright, or would that be too crass? Can I take it as tacitly understood by us both? I hated myself for thinking with such reptilian ruthlessness. That’s not an exaggeration. I really hated myself. But I was in the grip of something that mere self-hatred couldn’t dislodge. Of possibility. The step up from solitary isolation to that oneness and totality we call sexual connection.

  I sat down. It’s a negotiation, I thought. It wasn’t though. It was the beginning of a conversion narrative. It was a direct line from this to me believing in God and running around the Arctic ice in my socks.

  Seriously.

  ‘Believe me, Charles,’ she said, without preamble. ‘I was as sceptical as you are now. But that’s all changed.’

  ‘Sceptical about what?’

  ‘The Kant stuff. I trained as a proper scientist, no time for metaphysical gobble-gook.’

  ‘Uh, gobble-dee …’

  ‘I used to think it airless speculation by a narrow-minded German thinker. But now I know it’s true. And that changes everything.’

  ‘What’s true?’

  ‘The transcendental categories are true. Space and time as intuitions of perception, not structures innate to reality. The necessary subjectivity of all scientific investigation.’

  ‘Mumbo jumbo,’ I said, taking a mouthful of scrambled egg, and all the time thinking: Should I just come out with it? Tell her I’ll stay if she guarantees continued night visits from Irma? And at the back of my mind the still, small voice, trying to make itself heard: that amounts to prostitution, Charles. This isn’t ethical, Charles. Are these really the terms on which you want Irma to sleep with you, Charlie? Wouldn’t it be better if she did it because she wanted to? Ah, the still small voice. Because it had a cliff to climb, that voice. And the cliff was: the choices are between her doing it because she thinks it is in her better interests, or her not doing it all. This ‘her doing it because she wants to’ is not even an option.

  ‘Whilst you eat,’ said Kostritsky, ‘I’d like to talk through the four categories. Because, as I promised you last night—’ Was there a faintly leering emphasis upon those two words? ‘Promised you last night, you deserve the full story. The total vision. And the total vision has four parts to it.’ She put down her cutlery, and pulled out a large-screen smart phone. ‘And once I’ve explained, I think you’ll be more inclined to stay.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to sound mysterious. ‘The thing about staying …’

  ‘Look,’ she said, putting the screen next to my plate.

  1. Categories of Quantity

  • Unity

  • Plurality

  • Totality

  2. Categories of Quality 3. Categories of Relation

 
• Reality • Inherence and Subsistence

  • Negation (substance and accident)

  • Limitation • Causality and Dependence

  (cause and effect)

  • Community (reciprocity

  between agent and patient)

  4. Categories of Modality

  • Possibility—Impossibility

  • Existence—Non-existence

  • Necessity—Contingency

  ‘Okily dokily,’ I said, and went for some bacon.

  She waited patiently until I came back. ‘Kant says: we perceive the real world, but we only have those perceptions. We can’t get behind them. Something out there – the thing in itself, he calls it – affects us, and we process the incoming data. But the way we process that data is distinctive to us. Space, time, and these categories, these are in our perceiving mind, not in the thing in itself.’

  ‘So it’s all in our mind, yeah? It’s the Matrix and we can’t get out of it. There’s no real, it’s all relative.’

  ‘No. Not at all. Of course there is a real world. Kant is very clear about that. Here’s you, sitting there, perceiving the real world. Here’s me, doing the same thing. And there is a real world for us to perceive. If there weren’t a real world, then there’d be nothing for us to perceive. But—’ And her she held up a single finger, like a schoolteacher. ‘The crucial thing is that the reverse is also true. If you weren’t there to observe, then there’d be no real world to be perceived. At least, not in the way you are perceiving it right now – space, time, causality, modality and so on.’

  ‘Spurious symmetry of ideas,’ I said. ‘I’m not an idiot; I’ve been sitting in my hotel room reading your canny Kant.’ Actually I’d browsed online, and read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, but I figured that was close enough for government work. ‘He thinks there are twelve categories that structure our experience of the real universe. Four neat little groups of three. I might be minded to believe him if it weren’t so just so. So neatly ordered and arranged.’

  She angled her head a little. ‘You have a problem with the neatness?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Isn’t your job to make things neat and clean?’ Before I could reply she said: ‘Maths is all about the patterns. About the neatness. Physics is basically applied maths.’

  ‘This is a theory of everything, and it’s neat as a pin. It’s like constellations in the night sky – the stars are scattered more or less randomly. When we group them together as bulls and ploughs and whatnot we say nothing about the stars and everything about the human obsession with order. Kant’s categories are like that. Disposing everything that exists into four neat little boxes called, eh,’ I consulted the screen, ‘quantity, quality, relation and modality. Subdividing each of those into three further neat little sections. It’s— OCD, is what it is. I read up about Kant, and that’s just the kind of man he was. Got up every day at exactly the same time, crossed the town square on his way to work so at exactly the same time that people used to set their watches by him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging. Takes all sorts. But he was a weird little man obsessed with order and neatness, and he produced a philosophical system that – surprise! – discovered order and neatness to be the truth of the whole cosmos.’

  She said: ‘I agree.’

  ‘You do? Well there we are. Can I go home now?’

  ‘Except that you’re making an argument in favour of what Kant says.’

  ‘I am?’ I sniffed. ‘It’s like,’ I added, abruptly, remembering something, but not remembering from where I remembered it, ‘the story of the scientist who looked into a microscope and sketched what he could see, and then it turned out he hadn’t used the device properly and had ended up sketching the reflection of his own eye.’

  She smiled at this, making her ugly face uglier. ‘Exactly so. You’re saying that Kant’s philosophy tells us more about the way Kant’s mind worked than about the world. I agree. That’s precisely the point. Kant’s philosophy says that the only thing we can know about the world is the way our minds work. We don’t have some magic access to the way things really are. We only have what we perceive and think. We have what our senses tell us, and what our rational minds can deduce.’

  ‘That’s not true, though. We know loads of things about the external world, independent of my observational bias.’

  ‘You have some magic access to things that doesn’t involve observing them, do you?’

  ‘Not that. But we can combine a whole bunch of different observations, iron out subjective quirks from the data, approximate reality to within really fine tolerances.’

  ‘You’re still thinking in the old paradigm,’ she said. ‘The fact is: you perceive space because “perceiving space” is how your mind is structured. Time is the same. So we perceive the thing in itself, and that data comes in, and our minds convert it into space, time, causality and so on. We can’t help doing that. It’s how we work.’

  ‘So there’s no space, or time, or causality or any of that, in the real world?’

  ‘Kant would say,’ she said, taking a forkful of scrambled egg, ‘we can’t know.’ She ate, swallowed. ‘We can only know what we perceive. We can’t get past our structures of knowledge and reasoning to get at the baseline reality.’

  ‘So I get in my car and drive a hundred miles, I haven’t really gone anywhere. It’s like, what, the Holodeck?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘You know: the Holodeck in Star Wars. You’re saying the cosmos is in the business of tricking us. A giant system of illusion.’

  ‘You mean Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ she said, pouting. ‘That’s a poor analogy, I think. The Holodeck was a room – a three-dimensional space – that created the illusion of being a much bigger space. We’re not talking about that, here. I agree with you; it certainly seems to me that I move through space. I instruct my body to move, and my legs cycle through their stride, and I appear to travel from A to B. If you pressed me, I’d guess something is happening in the Ding an sich that informs my sense data. I’m just not sure what. Maybe it’s a mode of resistance, rather than a mode of distance. Maybe it’s something else.’

  ‘So we feel like we’re moving but we’re actually just walking on the spot?’

  ‘Not even walking on the spot. Our legs aren’t actually moving, any more than we are, because movement of our limbs would require spatial extension. But something about the thing in itself gives us the impressions that we interpret as swinging our legs, as walking along. Something about the thing in itself registers forces as equal and opposite; something actualises the sensations we perceive as spatial and temporal.’

  I thought for a bit. ‘How do you know it’s not, though? You just told me you don’t actually know anything about the thing in itself. Maybe it is structured by space and time after all?’

  She shook her head. ‘Now you’ve come full circle. Now you’re the one arguing the million-to-one coincidence that our perception of the true reality just happens to coincide exactly with that reality. We’re wearing orange spectacles and everything looks orange, but you’re arguing that if we could ever take the spectacles off then everything would actually be orange. Actually, there are good reasons for thinking it isn’t like that.’

  I tried what I can see now, looking back, was my last throw. I didn’t think of it that way at the time; it occurred to me as just another of the great stack of reasons why the Kant stuff was all nonsense. But it was actually the last thread connecting me to my old mode of thinking. ‘You know what makes this all so arid? It doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m saying: I walked a mile, measured on my pedometer. You’re saying I only think I walked a mile, and my pedometer is wrong – that it only appeared to me that I walked a mile. So what’s the difference? Even if you’re right, I still have to walk that mile to the shops to buy milk to go on my cornflakes. Maybe it’s a real mile, maybe it’s an artefact of my perceptions: it adds up to the s
ame thing.’ Warming to my theme, I added: ‘And, like, science. We measure Jupiter and determine it has a diameter of a million kilometres. You say: it only appears to have that diameter, because space is a function of our minds, not of the real reality. That what looks like a million-kilometre-wide planet is actually only some peculiar kink in the Ding an sich. I could agree with you, and it would make no difference. I could disagree, and it makes no difference. No difference at all. We can do things with our spatial measurements of the solar system, like send probes to land on comets and arrange satellites to beam television around the world. So your Ding an sich might be real reality, or might not, and either way it makes no difference to the way we actually live our lives.’ I sat back, feeling (I confess it) suddenly rather pleased with myself. ‘That’s a nice knockdown argument, if you like.’

  ‘What you’re forgetting,’ she replied, ‘is we have something Kant didn’t have.’

  ‘A fucking sense of humour, is it?’

  ‘AI,’ she said.

  This is what set the dominoes trembling in my head, ready to tumble. ‘You what?’

  ‘Kant, as you so eloquently noted, was talking about his own structures of consciousness. His, yours, mine. He said that we can’t get behind them. We cannot get round the back of space and time, any more than a man whose corneas have been dyed orange can help seeing the world with an orange tint. Space and time are how humans see reality, and until very recently we’ve only had human beings’ experience to talk about. Now, though, it’s possible to build a whole new way of thinking.’

  ‘We can’t step outside our way of perceiving the universe,’ I said. ‘But computers can.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Computers still need time,’ I said. ‘Sure they’re fast, but we’re still talking about sequential operations of calculation and iteration. They need to perform physical operations, through circuit boards that have length breadth and width. They’ve been getting smaller, it’s true, but they still take up space.’