This may seem a touch unsympathetic. After all, if someone goes mad, how is that their fault? Surely it implies a loss of control, an involuntary surrender to the irrational? I was certainly prepared to concede that by the time Pete came to visit me to talk about getting back together with Kay, he might well have reached the point of no return. But even if that were the case, I reasoned, it did not excuse him from pursuing a path which led directly to madness. He had allowed himself to become obsessed with E-Gnosis to the exclusion of everything else in his life. He then compounded the problem by disappearing. In doing so, he cut himself off from anyone who might have been able to stop him becoming completely delusional. I felt that he could not escape responsibility for these conscious decisions.
So it was an uncomfortable realisation for me when I discovered that there might well have been a medical explanation for Pete’s “madness”. It was – is – tempting to ignore it, because it feels as if I am letting him off the hook. In fact, when I started writing this account, I had decided to gloss over it for precisely that reason. But I have changed my mind, because what matters now is to prove to Susan that I am capable of being honest.
It’s not just about honesty though. Recently, it’s become painfully apparent to me that I have fallen victim to a kind of madness myself – a tendency to blind myself to evidence which didn’t fit with what I wanted to believe. I prefer to think of myself as reasonably sane. But if I were to simply ignore a piece of evidence which contradicts my view of Pete’s behaviour, what does that say about my own state of mind? So if I want to retain any vestige of credibility, I can’t simply brush the evidence under the carpet.
My realisation that Pete might have been suffering from some kind of recognised medical condition came several years after his death. I was watching a TV science documentary about temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition which causes people to experience intense hallucinations. Many of them reported that during their seizures, they believed that they were in the presence of God. At first, I didn’t make the connection with Pete’s description of his encounters with the Overmind. The possibility only occurred to me when other, more physical symptoms were mentioned. For example, many sufferers report a feeling of déjà vu, strange taste sensations and a churning feeling in the stomach – all of which Pete had mentioned.
Further research (courtesy of the internet, of course) revealed that although seizure of the temporal lobes can cause people to black out completely, there are cases where this doesn’t happen; the sufferer simply feels detached from his surroundings for a short period, often just a few minutes, and then returns to normal. But the real clincher, so far as I was concerned, is that temporal lobe epilepsy is often associated with hyperreligiosity and hypergraphia; what better explanation could there be of the pages and pages of quasi-religious theorising that Pete generated on the subject of the “messages” he claimed to have received from the Overmind and his interest in E-Gnosis?
The last piece of the jigsaw was provided by a sequence of the documentary about a girl who suffered frightening hallucinations at night. A scientist who was researching the effect of electromagnetic waves on the brain was called in to investigate. He concluded that the culprit was a digital clock which was emitting an unusual pattern of waves. Sure enough, when the clock was removed, the nightmares went away. The same scientist had also rigged up a piece of equipment which had become known as the “God helmet.” It was intended to stimulate the temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves to see if this would induce a state of mind similar to that experienced by sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy. Some volunteers reported that they felt very little, but others said that they genuinely felt as if they were in the presence of some kind of God-like entity. It was suggested that temporal lobe epilepsy sufferers were probably at the more sensitive end of the scale.
All this got me thinking about whether Pete’s “seizures” could have had an external source. Could Pete’s computer have had the same effect as the digital clock in the girl’s bedroom? That would certainly explain why he had experienced these episodes whilst watching the interference pattern generated by Karl’s software.
I wondered why he hadn’t been to see a doctor about it. But whereas many other sufferers appear to have much more frightening experiences, Pete seems to have been one of the lucky few where the seizures leave the individual with a feeling of euphoria. So why would he have felt the need to see a doctor about them?
Initially, I kept these thoughts to myself. But I couldn’t resist logging onto novotnik.com using one of my alter egos to ask whether anyone else had seen the documentary – and if so, did they think that Pete could have been suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy? This produced the usual abusive responses – probably conditioned in part by the fact that the alter ego I had chosen, SelfishMeme, was the one that I had used to make the most sceptical and provocative statements. The true believers had (quite correctly) got SelfishMeme down as someone who was really just out to cause trouble.
The next time I raised it with a true believer, I was rather more circumspect. I had arranged a telephone interview with Karl, ostensibly to follow up on some questions I had asked him when researching my biography of Pete. At his request, I had e-mailed him the questions in advance. One of them asked him what he thought of suggestions that Pete might have had temporal lobe epilepsy. Since I wasn’t yet ready to “come out of the closet” as a sceptic, I phrased the question in a way which implied that I didn’t attach much credence to this view. But when we got to that question, Karl’s answer took me by surprise:
“Yeah, temporal lobe epilepsy – now, that’s an interesting one. I’m really grateful to you, Miles, for switching me on to this. You know, it’s completely changed my thinking.”
I was taken aback. Had Karl suddenly ceased to be a true believer? Had my simple question shaken his faith to its very core? Or was he just pulling my leg?
“So… let me get this straight,” I said. “Are you saying that Pete’s claims about having actual contact with the Overmind can be explained as, well, hallucinations?”
“Yes and no. It’s certainly possible that Pete had temporal lobe epilepsy. At any rate, I reckon his lobes were at the more sensitive end of the scale, if you know what I mean. But I’m ninety-nine per cent sure that his experiences were induced by the OM.” (Karl always abbreviated Overmind to “OM”.)
“How would it have managed to do that?”
“It’s simple. Think of the temporal lobes as being like the cellphone antennae of the brain. If you send out the right signals in the form of electromagnetic waves, you can beam your message directly into the brain. And that’s what the OM was doing. No need for hard-wiring – it went straight for the wireless route. Simple but brilliant!”
I imagined Karl beaming smugly at the other end of the line, delighted at having transformed what had started out as a relatively prosaic explanation of Pete’s behaviour into something which supported his own, outlandish views.
“But wouldn’t the Overmind have needed some kind of transmitter for that?” I asked, wondering how it could suddenly have acquired such complete mastery of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“No, I think it was just able to modulate the frequency of the electromagnetic waves coming out of Pete’s computer. And I don’t think that’s such a big deal – not when you consider that the OM was able to make messages appear on the screen as well.
“But the thing I’m really excited about is what all this means for the Singularity,” said Karl, barely able to contain himself. He proceeded to tell me about something called transcranial electromagnetic stimulation, which is a process used in brain surgery. It involves zapping the brain with quite powerful electromagnetic waves. The equipment sounded a bit like a more sophisticated, turbo-charged version of the “God helmet”. What had got Karl so excited was some research suggesting that if you stimulated certain areas of the brain with this equipment, it gave people access to abilities more usually associated with autistic savants – like the capacity to do complex mathematical equations or amazingly lifelike drawings, all without any prior tuition or practice.
“It looks like we all have these genius-like abilities,” Karl continued, breathlessly, “but in most people they seem to be switched off or under-developed. So the brain is really a kind of super-computer operating at maybe ten to twenty per cent of its actual capacity. If the Overmind could allow us to access that additional eighty percent of processing power – well, the implications are simply amazing. The increase in human brain power would massively accelerate our technological progress. What’s more, all this could be done without the need for icky human-machine interfaces – you know, wires or nanobots going into your brain and invasive stuff like that. Which is a good thing, because frankly, I think that stuff makes a lot of people feel a bit squeamish. Instead, we’d all be part of this giant wireless network with the OM at the centre.
“So if I wanted to communicate with you, I wouldn’t have to phone you or email you – I could just think about it. The OM would pick up my thoughts and beam them into your brain. And if we’re doing that kind of thing all the time, it seems completely natural to me that when our physical bodies died, we would allow the information in our brains to be absorbed into the OM – so there would be a kind of life after death.
“Which is pretty much what we’ve been predicting would happen with the Singularity anyway – but this temporal lobes thing sheds a whole new light on how it might actually occur. And I have you to thank for that, Miles.”
I didn’t say anything. Not for the first time, I had totally underestimated both the resilience and the ingenuity of Karl and his acolytes when faced with evidence which appeared to challenge their beliefs.
“Are you still there Miles?”
“Yes.”
“I was kind of hoping you’d be as excited about this as I am,” said Karl, sounding a trifle disappointed at my failure to express much in the way of enthusiasm.
“It’s a fantastic idea,” I said, slowly.
“Is that a ‘but’ I can hear coming?” said Karl.
I sighed. “Well, the thing is – no one’s actually heard anything from the Overmind since Pete’s death. And there doesn’t seem to be much progress towards the Singularity that we can actually point to. It’s all theories. I just wonder when it’s really going to happen, that’s all.”
“Miles, it sounds to me like you’re having a sort of crisis of faith. Am I right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, don’t worry, we all get that sometimes. What you need is a little pep talk from Uncle Karl. So it’s lucky you called me today.” Firstly, Karl reminded me that humans are not good at understanding the exponential growth curve which is supposed to represent progress towards the Singularity. He launched into what future generations will no doubt come to regard as the parable of the wireless broadband:
“Let’s say we have a city. At first only a small area of the town centre is covered by wireless broadband. But growth is exponential. So every year the area covered doubles. To begin with, the rate of growth doesn’t feel that much – and it takes maybe ten years to get half the city covered. At this point, there are still large areas where there is no coverage, so to all the citizens, it feels as if full coverage is a long way off - maybe another ten years. But in reality, because half the city is covered already and the area with wireless coverage doubles every year, full coverage is only a year off. So you see,” said Karl, cheerily, “it could well take us all by surprise.”
“Fair enough,” I said, grudgingly. “But that doesn’t really explain why no one’s heard from the Overmind since Pete’s death. How can there be progress towards the Singularity if there’s no Overmind?”
“That’s a good question,” said Karl. “Have you heard of the HAARP network?”
“The what network?”
“H-A-A-R-P. Stands for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It’s an array of transmitters in Alaska. They were built by the US military in the Cold War. One idea was to bathe enemy territory in electromagnetic waves at a frequency which would make everyone feel depressed and unable to function properly. It’s pretty crazy stuff,” said Karl, without a trace of irony.
“Anyways, there’s a lot of speculation about what this network is being used for now. Some folks say it’s being used to control the weather or to trigger earthquakes. But all that’s just a smokescreen. It’s really being used to block the OM’s transmissions and stop progress towards the Singularity.
“So that’s why we haven’t heard from the OM lately,” he concluded, confidently. “But it’ll find a way through. It’s just a matter of time. It can’t be stopped.”
Listening to this, I marvelled at the capacity of Karl and his acolytes to absorb information which might at first appear to undermine their beliefs and then transform it into something which ultimately reinforced them. So it was that Pete’s temporal lobe epilepsy (assuming that is the correct diagnosis) was absorbed effortlessly into the E-Gnosis worldview, with its all-consuming vision of progress towards the Singularity as an epic struggle between forces of light and darkness.
It reminded me of that Philip Larkin poem where he talks about creating a religion with water as its central symbol. E-Gnosis didn’t make use of water for symbolic purposes, but it had all the properties of water; whenever it encountered an obstacle, it would never tire of looking for ways to dislodge it, dissolve it or flow around it. Sitting there at the other end of the phone, armed only with my puny scepticism, I felt like King Canute, ordering the tide to go back.
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