Prosthetic Conscience

The perfectly symmetrical singing bell

The perfectly symmetrical singing bell used by the Crbcyr of Gvorg is a remarkable and truly beautiful artifact, albeit one that is quite disturbing to many people encountering it for the first time. An ordinary bell, when rung, produces a tone which is symmetrical in space. The vibrations of the chime spread out evenly in all directions from the bell, diminishing as they travel away from the source. Likewise, as the vibrations propagate through time, they diminish as they get further from the source, but you will note one difference: they spread only forward in time, not backward. The Crbcyr bell produces fully symmetrical tones. You will hear the tone ringing in the edge of your hearing, getting slightly louder second by second, until it peaks at the instant the bell is struck, when it again begins to gradually fade away.

For the Crbcyr, the implications of these bells for causality are not problematic, as their culture helps them place their actions within the totality of the universe, and does not burden them with such notions as intentionality. For one of us, on the other hand, the rationalizations we go through when faced with a ringing bell can be both upsetting and humorous. Suppose you are alone in a Crbcyr temple, and you come upon an unattended bell, which begins to ring. Do you step up to ring it, trying to hit the bell at the exact peak of its ring? Or do you wait and hope someone else will show up and take care of it? And if you panic and give up on waiting, and strike the bell right on time, what does that mean? Did you have to hit the bell? What if you hadn’t? What if no one had? What if you had a bell in your hand, and decided to ring it, and it began ringing, and then you changed your mind, and resolutely decided that you would not ring it no matter what? When you give in and ring it, is it weakness on your part? Fear? Curiosity? Destiny?

Many philosophers have siezed upon the disturbance of the mind when faced with these as evidence that consciousness is something special, that is not quite compatible nor at ease with the material universe. Others look at the fact that the thought process someone deciding whether or not to strike the bell goes through looks very much like a post-hoc rationalization to prove that consciousness and the mind are very much a part of the same universal web of consequences as the bells. The Crbcyr that are willing to discuss the matter maintain that holding either side in the debate is indicative of a profound lack of perspective, and, indeed, of common sense.

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