Sam Harris and The Pierre Menard Problem
Sam Harris and The Pierre Menard Problem
A Fiction
I found this in my father’s belongings after he died. It’s an excerpt from a recording he made at his father’s death bed. My grandfather was, at the very least, clairvoyant. I’m transcribing what he wrote for my children, in case that recording somehow gets lost in time. Unfortunately, my father’s voice is hardly audible; I make no attempt to salvage anything from his end as it would be pure conjecture. But then again, maybe not. For in some strange way I am my father, and he is me.
The future? Yes, I’ve seen it. What is it like? Well, it’s difficult to explain. It’s a gift you… it’s a gift you receive, you can’t necessarily seek it out, even though you must. What is it like? Well, it’s inevitable. I’ll tell you it’s a lot like today, only amplified. But I suppose that’s to be expected. Everything will be amplified. And we will never escape our human condition, no matter the technologies we develop that simply show us this truth, and we will discover it painfully… like a thousand suns beating on your skin. I’ve seen it.
It’s like this, let’s see, try and imagine Bach’s Fugue in G minor, you’ve played it before. The performance nearly encompasses your whole body, but imagine it performed by Bach himself, the creator. You get to watch how he would interpret the piece. Then take that performance, that experience of his personal performance, and multiply it by itself 40 times, now 70, now 1,000 all compounded on itself to the point that you begin to believe you are Bach, and you forget even the beauty of the music at all — to the point that you really no longer hear anything.
Or, let’s see, I’ll tell you this, son, but only this. You will understand in time. But these things are good to know for only those who earn the right to know. To stare into the future is to face the gaze of the Medusa—if you’re unprepared, then all that will remain of you is stone. Are you sure you want me to continue?
Well, you know that among us now lives an undeniably gifted storyteller, a man of intellect — a true homo sapiens. Yes, among us now. Yes, precisely. He may be the greatest storyteller we have known in some time and his stories will change the world beyond what even he could comprehend, rippling through time. One of his grandsons will hold his name, Sam Harris, and will live captivated by his grandfather’s work due to the stringent religious upbringing from his own father, who, in turn, waxed religious against the philosophies of his fathers before him. And this young Harris too will complete his grandfather’s work “discovering” the raw nature of consciousness and the “wet-ware,” as he calls it, duplication of the same — but much of his work will be overturned, thus is the cyclical nature of Kuhnian science.
Now, if you don’t mind, son, let me speak of things to come as if they were present, or as though they already happened, for they are, in some ways, inevitable. One of the young Harris’ breakthrough discoveries derived from his grandfather’s claim that the potentiality of life was not only to be found in one’s reproductive capacities, but also in the superficial skin cells of the nose. And every time one satisfied an itch thereon, they execute mass holocaust of potential life, some what in jest, of course. But the young Harris perpetuated this idea in his book On Consciousness: The Cells of Infinity, wherein he purportedly solved the problem of cloned consciousness, claiming consciousness was embedded in the very atoms that make up the cells in the universe; that the atom itself cannot be without the interconnectedness of consciousness; a constant among all living things, a kind of refined matter unpenetrated by light and radiographic waves. Thus, consciousness was not individual in any sense, but rather, let’s say, something you plug into, the source of life. Yes, precisely, a kind of panpsychism, but one that had now been measured in the sense that it seemed duplicable. And so, the reproduction of those living cells reproduced the conscious, or reconnected the cells to consciousness and allowed for seemingly perfect cloning — and a mess ensued from this work, but we won’t get into that. Suffice to say these ideas drove him to scientific fame due to his lineage and schooling, with near immediate global recognition and acclaim in a world where God finally and scientifically lay dead to man, in the truest creationary sense.
And yet, despite all his success, he later (beyond rational calculation) came to consider his daughter his greatest creation. He and his wife decided, against all risks, social norms and precautions to have a natural birth — no pre-determined genomics, no age-timing, no enhancements of tone, body, hormonal emission, nothing. Yes, these things will all be quite common. They chose none of the standard engineering present in life at the time. He rationed irrationally with his wife, saying he dreamed of this daughter, that she would only be theirs if they trusted the fates of their own non-enhanced bodies. And, for reasons they never understood, especially in the context of his teachings, they decided to go through with it.
And, despite the risks, they had a daughter and they called her Eve, and she grew into unparalleled beauty, the kind you can’t take your mind from; starkly contrasting against the dullness produced in the genetically controlled population, for true natural beauty is a fringe that got eliminated in the search of genetic perfection. A kind of sacrifice in the name of longer life and balanced health within any population. And, against the laws of probability and statistics she inherited both her great-grandfather and father’s minds. And she refined her mind, made it sharp. The beauty of the mind often shines through in the natural face, but not for the genetically controlled, and she exploited this biological loophole, multiplying her beauty. But, of course, due to her exclusively human biology, she fainted at her 13th birthday party with a subsequent diagnosis of a fatal brain tumor, with few months to live.
The young Harris cursed himself for such idiocy and distrust in science and mathematics and immediately went to work to remedy the problem, but the tumor had taken hold. So, he took the power of godliness into his own hands and made an exact replica of his daughter against the laws founded by his own work, with one simple deviation in removing the genetic tendency toward the cancerous cells. He gave this second Eve her breath with the execution of the final algorithms, and she was good and beautiful. He took the precautions necessary to ensure the brain mass and nervous system retained the memories, the inflection of the voice etc., it was identical in full, and he wept with joy.
He brought this second Eve to the first as she lay in her bed. And they loved each other and saw themselves in the mirror of man into the infinite. This brought Eve great comfort in what the young Harris thought were her last days. But Harris never calculated for those things which cannot be calculated. The young Harris’ parents also loved Eve and prayed to God for her healing — and she healed. Indeed, son. She was healed, a miracle. No one ever figured out how it happened: some pointed to the palliative care of one light-filled nurse, others to the skill of one particular brain surgeon, who really knows, to be honest. And whether the prayers of her grandparents were correlative or causal, I’ll let you decide, but she nonetheless lived to full normalcy.
And because of this inexplicable miracle, the first Eve grew into adulthood and formed an impenetrable bond with her “twin sister.” They never changed their names nor made any distinguishing features one from another. They always looked identical (for they were), and so lived in inseparable love for some time, the love of knowledge in mutually perfect understanding. And Harris’ joy at having his daughter two-fold, too, was nearly overwhelming. Yet, though the girls were genetically identical, the young Harris, beyond his own conscious awareness, naturally favored the first Eve. He always seemed to give her first choice, always helped her through problems first, always read with her and laughed with her first and drove the second Eve to silent jealousy. And he never knew it, nor did the first Eve, nor did the second. With the passing of some years, unaware favorings turned unconscious jealousy into pride and strength of personality. And it all eventually reared its ugly head. Over time, the second Eve came to the rational conclusion that she needed to fill the measure of her creation as Eve, not an Eve. So, what else could she do but eliminate the first: a suicide, reclaiming her rightful place as the first born — for how could her father ever tell the difference between the two?
The second Eve formulated a plan over time and went through with patient execution. She poisoned her double’s mind by degrees, slowly eroding her confidence with glances, then words, then sentences, then narrative, then directive, then order, then the deed. The power of her story was all she needed to corrode her double’s beautiful mind and commit the act of her own free will and choice. But when the young Harris discovered the red sheets whereon rested his daughter’s ruptured arms, the rage of paternal war cascaded through his being. In a moment of perfect knowledge, he knew — without any scientific reasoning — what happened. He found the new Eve, threw her to the ground, and bore into her eyes with his own. He held her to the floor by the neck, told her who she was, and how he never should have brought her into existence. And the look of terror that stained from her eye to his never left him as he cut her from consciousness with nothing but the strength of his two hands.
Of course he went to prison, but he argued his way out, claiming that the person he “eliminated” was nothing more than the silicone creation of man from the cells of a nose, and that no moral recourse should be enacted upon him for “reversing” the work of his own hands. And they set him free under bail paid by both him and his parents who mourned the loss of their Eve with their son. This became known as the “Pierre Menard Problem” after the great french theorist, and will manage to find multiple variations and deviations throughout time because the young Harris never retracted his previous work detailing the potentiality of life. And, my son, I tell you this as a warning of things to come. I know you are drawn to these ideas and their logic, but you haven’t quite followed them through. The science of disproving the existence of God only makes god out of man. And, in the long run, the story that tells you God doesn’t exist is the story which tells you that neither do you.”
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