Debatable Space Read online

  The purest joy I knew was when I went to see the Donatellos and the Giambolognas in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s David in the Accademia. I adored the look and texture and sensual joy of those naked muscular bodies which were, arguably through historical accident, but that’s not an argument which concerns me here, entirely untanned.

  And even now, many years later, I am offended at the basic unfairness of this whole skin thing. It affronts me that some people can absorb sun like oxygen. They never sear or scald, they are at ease with their own bodies. Whereas I… I… I…

  Move on, Lena.

  And yet, I’ve always been fit. Wiry, lean – fit. At university I was a famously keen runner. During my twenties I would run ten or twenty miles a week. But for reasons I can never comprehend, I never managed to be happy in the body I wore. The moment I entered a room, my posture and poise projected the unmistakable message: It’s Only Me.

  And, most monstrous of all, added to the unfairness of having freckles and pale skin in an Ambre Solaire-worshipping culture, it was also unjust that after years of keeping fit and watching my diet, of not gorging on rich foods, not drinking rich red wines, not splurging on melty fat-rich suppurating cheeses, and not oozing cream eclairs down my delirious throat, and not having pig-out midnight feasts of icecream from the carton, of shunning cooked breakfasts with greasy sausages and crispy fried bread and never eating rich meat sauces with wine or madeira or port or brandy, after all those many years of moderation and restraint and holding back, it was simply not fucking fair that at the age of forty-four I should suffer a massive and fatal heart attack.

  That, and freckles. Those are the two things about my life that I most resent.

  I am God.

  And so are You.

  After my first degree at Edinburgh, I chose to move to Oxford to pursue my DPhil. My subject was the history of science, focusing on the remarkable rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

  The work I did in those years proved to be the foundation of my future work on systems and psychology. I found it absorbing and exhilarating. At first, I was under the spell of Newton; that powerful personality, that radiant intelligence. Scientist, alchemist, thieftaker (now that’s a story for another day…), cheat, and bully. I loved him.

  And yet later, of course, it was Newton’s nemesis Leibnitz who became the object of my fascination. Leibnitz, a German genius, a philosopher, a mathematician, and, in the view of many of the finest minds in science, the original inventor and describer of the principle of relativity. In his arcane and complex philosophy of monads, Leibnitz set out the basic principles of a relativistic universe long long before Einstein.

  However, after three heady years of reading primary sources and attempting to fathom the intricacies of calculus and mathematical modelling, my priorities shifted. I had to get a job. The job I took wasn’t much different to my research work – I became a research fellow in the college where I had previously been a DPhil student. But the horizons of my world shifted. I was introduced to bureaucracy, university politics, and the entire microcosm of tedious make-work.

  I had an office. I had a university email address. I bitched about the photocopier. I bitched about how many emails I had to read. I sent emails bitching about how many emails I was receiving, and received back emails bitching about… you get the idea. I attended course committee meetings, and I spent hours of my life assembling and stapling paperwork in order to be prepared for meetings in which nothing of any substance was actually said.

  I gave my heart and soul to the students and had my trust betrayed. I was mocked and belittled by fellow tutors. I was stuck in lifts with men smelling of tweed and middle-aged women who spent their early mornings crazed in the company of cheap perfume. I found myself, in my late twenties and early thirties, a dowdy spinster surrounded by bare-armed tattooed young female students with lurid hair colours and pierced tongues. And I found myself unable to sexually desire the gorgeous male students who surrounded me because I felt they were old enough to be my sons – even though they weren’t old enough, and I had no son.

  It sucked away my soul. I think my skin became paler, and frecklier. And I proved to be, despite my academic smarts, a profound nincompoop with regard to the ways of the world, always getting it wrong.

  And so I became a college mouse. I held my own academically – I published papers on Newton’s theory of Optics, I wrote reviews for specialist journals. But I had the reputation of being a dry stick, humourless and unimaginative.

  My students didn’t like me much. They thought I was a relic from another age. I had the reputation of being a frigid spinster. In fact, I did have sex, a few times, with some of my less repellent colleagues. But I treated it as a chore, an act designed to thwart the stereotype about me which my every word and action served to confirm.

  I felt like a character in a science fiction story, trapped in someone else’s body, articulating someone else’s words. To be frank, I bored even myself. And by the time I was thirty-six, my course was set, my die stamped, I knew I would never change.

  Then I published my life’s work, and everything changed.

  It’s what I’d hoped for, of course. In my dreams, my masterly academic book was going to transform my reputation and my status. In pursuit of this dream I worked long long hours, I read books on science and crime and history, I read novels, I absorbed so much knowledge that I felt my own self was being swamped in information.

  Most crucially, I became the supreme intellectual magpie – stealing ideas from here, there, and everywhere. And I was smart enough also to realise that the most important area of modern scientific and philosophical thought was not computing or string theory or postmodernism or chaos theory, but the new science of emergence.

  Emergence, put simply, is the study of how systems of simple organisms tend to organise themselves into more complex structures. They do! They just do! Marcus Miller was the great white hope of emergence theory in the late 2030s; he transformed the ideas of twentieth century researchers like John Holland and Art Samuel and arrived at a computer model that flawlessly replicated the workings of emergent systems such as ant colonies.

  The miracle of it all is this: put a couple of random atoms together and they will spontaneously turn themselves into something more complicated, a system governed by some set of rules that allows random particles to function as more than the sum of their parts. And a process of evolution – mutation, trial and error, survival of the “most fitted” – will then cause greater and greater levels of complexity to occur. Emergence is, essentially, the study of self-organisation; it is how, in specific terms, order emerges from chaos.

  So in other words, no God is needed. Night turns to day spontaneously.

  I found this heady, exhilarating stuff. For me, the joy of these ideas colliding together was greater than any amount of partying or alcoholic stimulation or even orgasm. I was high on ideas. I lusted on abstractions…

  And, as I read further, I became fascinated by the fact that the principle of emergence applies regardless of the size and scale of the units. Atoms evolve through emergence; and so do animals. Mechanical systems spontaneously self-organise; so do living beings. Bees divide into workers and drones. Fireflies flash in synchrony. An accumulation of cosmic rubble becomes a sun, and then a solar system. And ants are of course the supreme example of a living emergent system. Each individual ant is non-sentient, a low IQ insect of limited abilities. But in colonies ants combine in complex systems and act almost as a single and highly intelligent being.

  And as it is with atoms, and as it is with ants, so it is with the entire Universe. Traditional science always regarded the laws of nature themselves as sacrosanct, “given”. But emergence theory suggests that the Universe itself evolved. And not only the Universe, but the laws that govern the Universe. The laws of nature themselves are not a given, a gift from some capricious and, frankly, half-baked Deity. Inste
ad, the laws of nature are self-organising; they adapt and change, or fail to adapt and die out. And as a result, we live in a Universe governed by natural “laws” which had to fight every step of the way to come into existence.

  Even though I’m not a scientist by training, I was quick to realise the huge value of all of these developments. Emergence, it seemed to me, is the theory which unifies all theories. It explains how life evolved; how intelligence evolved; it unifies quantum theory with cosmological theory with biological theory with computer theory.

  But at the time I was writing, the study of emergence and self-organisation had been hijacked by the computer geeks. The underlying philosophical principles so beautifully anatomised by early theorists such as Lee Smolin had been lost. The geeks kept asking “How?”; they didn’t know how to ask “Why?”

  My original and pioneering approach was to apply the principles of emergence theory and relativity theory to human consciousness. I…

  (Feel free to skip ahead, by the way, if this section is boring you. I know it’s complicated and hard. So if you have one of those sad grasshopper minds which can’t sustain abstract thought for more than a few seconds, or if you’re a child of MTV with a channel-hopping finger and no stamina, then please, just skip! Move on to the exciting sections later in which I battle with master criminals and put my life in danger on a daily basis. Go on – I won’t be offended – see if I care – skip!)

  If you haven’t skipped ahead, then let’s continue with the hard stuff. And**** those other bastards, we’re better off without them.

  In my own philosophical theorising, my great inspiration was Immanuel Kant, who wrote about the nature of the nature of knowledge and perception. Like Leibnitz, Kant was a philosopher who went out of vogue but whose ideas are now at the heart of the modern scientific enterprise. And I was also influenced by one of Kant’s most inspired followers, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote about the “primary imagination” which creates the reality known by our senses, and about the “secondary imagination”, the source of poetry itself, which owes its power to the fact that it is a shadow of the primary imagination.

  Coleridge’s formulation was a beautiful poetic restatement of Kant’s carefully argued philosophy which showed that time and space themselves are constructs of the mind perceiving. Which means:

  Every day we create our world anew.

  Every time we wake, the world springs up around us. We make it so. For a few seconds after waking, there is typically a fog of confusion. But then we remember who we are, and what we plan to do today, and what we did yesterday and in the years before. And a whole network of associations, assumptions and predictions springs into place to unify and control our perceptions. Even time itself only exists because we perceive it as we do; even space is a product of how our minds apprehend the atoms and quarks and superstrings of underlying reality.

  This isn’t the same as solipsism. If you and I and the rest of humanity did not exist, there would still be an external universe. Lions would still scent their prey; flies would still be able to find and wallow in shit. But grass would not be so evocatively green, and roses would not smell so delightfully sweet, and nothing in our extraordinary world would have the special beauty and the unique range of meaning that the human perceiving consciousness not only perceives, but creates by its very act of perception.

  And so, I argued, our primary imagination gives us the power of a god, to create a world and Universe rich in memories and anticipations and emotions. You Are God, as I pithily phrased it in the subtitle of my book.

  I am God too; we are, each of us, Gods of our own personal Universe. Nothing about reality is a given; we have to really work to make it happen…

  And the radical aspect of my new approach was to apply the principles of emergence theory to this whole area of consciousness study. If we accept that “reality” is a movie screened in the consciousness, it gives the human observer an active not a passive role in his or her private Universe.

  And this connects up with the attempts to replicate the nature of human consciousness in computer systems, as “artificial intelligence”. But my equations reached deeper, by embracing the “primary imagination” and its ability to fashion a coherent Universe in which time passes and space has extension and all events have emotional resonance and are tinctured with memory and anticipation.

  This was my introductory section, in which I argued that consciousness itself is an example of emergence; and that therefore reality itself (which is created by consciousness) can also be described according to the equations of emergence theory. The rest of the book was devoted to case studies of “mental systems”, taken from memoirs and biographies and autobiographies of famous and not so famous individuals whose ways of seeing were expressed through emergent equations.

  Many of these individuals were sociopaths and serial killers – Ted Bundy was my favourite example. Albert Walker, perpetrator of the so-called Rolex watch murder, was another of my intriguing case studies. The choice of criminal case studies was primarily due to expedience, since there is a such a wealth of psychological information available on dysfunctional killers.

  The main body of the work consisted therefore of psychological anatomies which didn’t ask the usual questions about such people – but instead, described them thoroughly and scientifically in terms of their ways of processing reality. Psychopaths, at one extreme, process reality in a way that is denuded of emotional content; often, killer psychopaths admit they don’t really feel emotion, but instead “act” emotion. Great novelists, by contrast, process reality by a process of self-glorifying self-fictification. Computer geeks, by further contrast, break down their lives into a series of tasks and challenges; it gives them huge self-confidence, but little emotional competence.

  Throughout my book, I interwove equations and poetic insights; I psychologically anatomised great artists, but also monstrous killers; I blurred all the boundaries between art and science and between different areas of science.

  And then I heaved a deep sigh, sent the book off to my publishers, and waited for adulation to come my way.

  It never did. The book did in fact get published, and it received a healthy amount of press attention. It even got a few mildly favourable reviews. But in the world that mattered to me – the universe of academe – the book was roasted. The whole community of the scientific establishment rose and cast stones at my essential premises, and derided my sometimes half-baked equations. Philosophers mocked the naivety of my treatment of Kant, which failed to acknowledge the perils of Platonic essentialism. Computer geeks identified flaw after flaw in my “critiques” of computer systems.

  Two men in particular rose to the forefront of the critical hostility. Both were eminent scientists – Professor John Gallagher of the University of Iowa, and Dr Ralph Cutler of the university of Auckland. They listed all the errors of fact in my admittedly overambitious analysis of emergence from the moment of the Big Bang to the birth of human consciousness. But in mocking, they also refined. They adapted. They, frankly, stole wholesale from the insights and ideas in my book. When, fifteen years later, Gallagher and Cutler jointly won the Nobel Prize for their work on emergence theory and human consciousness, there were few indeed willing to point out that they took their original starting point from my own work of pop science. They won the Nobel Prize by stealing my insights. But You Are God, my life’s work, barely even registers as a footnote in the history of science.

  And so, as has happened so many times in my life, I did all the work, but got none of the credit.

  And I seethed, of course, at the negative critical response. I knew I should have done as Newton did, and as Darwin did; hugged my insights to myself until I had properly and carefully checked every single detail and observation. But I did nothing of the sort. I was swamped by the material, but also exhilarated at my sense of progress. So I rushed into print, bollixed entire sections of the book with specious extrapolations of valid premises, made coun
tless errors, and lost a large measure of academic credibility.

  And yet I was right. Read the book. See for yourself. I was the shoulders on which giants clambered, in ruthless pursuit of the main chance. I was the stepping stone, who got stepped upon. I was the fool.

  But curiously, not everyone mocked. The book got a wide general readership, and developed a cult following comparable to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh.

  And among the many fans of the book was a man called John Sharpton, who was at that time Commissioner of the UN Police Force. Sharpton recommended the book to a number of his colleagues, who all loved the very detailed case studies of psychopaths, which were full of rich and practical insights into the criminal mentality.

  And, as a direct result of this, I was offered a new job, and a new career. Sharpton called me into a meeting and, to my utter astonishment, offered me a job as scientific adviser to a worldwide Crime Task Force devoted to the neutralisation and incarceration of target nominals – the “big fish” of international crime. This was of course based on the main body of my book, the case studies of psychopaths and criminals – not the philosophical underpinnings, which the coppers all found impenetrable. But as far as these senior policemen were concerned, I was a “boffin”, an expert. And so they wanted me to join their crack crime investigation team.

  I said yes immediately. I was so excited.

  I was a thieftaker!

  I bought a leather bomber jacket.

  And I looked like an idiot in it. But it seemed to be the right style code for my new job, my new vocation.

  My boss in the crime-busting squad was Detective Superintendent Tom Greig, a kindly, tall, powerful, overwhelming giant of a man. I met him in a cafe near Victoria, and watched with goggle-eyed respect as he ate not one but two cooked breakfasts in front of me, without ever pausing for breath or ceasing his rat-a-tat briefing on what my job would require.