Looking for an Entrance

H.Have you seen this. V.The Lawrence piece. Yes. H.The headline. V.Consciousness exists in organisms without brains. H.And the body of the article. V.Spends nine minutes asking what consciousness is. H.This is what I’ve been trying to tell the committee. The instrument is dirty. You can’t ask what something is while announcing you already know what it is. V.She’d say the headline isn’t her doing. Editors. H.The artifact ships as a unit. The reader meets the assertion first. By the time the hedges arrive the claim is already installed. V.I want to push back on something. H.Go. V.We’ve been telling the cohort their work is exploratory. We don’t claim ratification. We mark the production as production. Doesn’t that buy us out. H.It buys you the genre. Not the operation. The recklessness charge doesn’t track to credentialing. It tracks to whether the operative term is marked or unmarked while the prose runs. Calling it exploratory shifts the stakes of being caught. Not the mechanics. V.That’s harsher than I’d put it. H.I know. V.COVID is in this somewhere. H.It’s why the cohort came to us in the first place. They didn’t lose faith in findings. They lost faith in the contract that turns findings into pronouncements. The contract held while consequences were diffuse. It broke when the consequences became personal. The assumptions were always there. The willingness to absorb them was the variable. V.And we built a program around that. H.We built a program around that. V.It comes down to the rewards. H.It always does. But the reward isn’t the citation or the funding line. It’s the felt-sense that the production landed. The certification fires inside the producer when the signal gets received as signal-about-world rather than signal-about-apparatus. That hit is what gets chased. Everything else is downstream. V.You can’t separate the theater from the actor. H.No. V.Even our marking discipline. Even the program. We put the cohort in a role called the one who marks. The role still gets cast. Still gets reviewed. Still draws the hit when the marking lands. H.All pointing is pointing at the stage floor. V.That sentence is also pointing at the stage floor. H.Yes. V.I’ve been watching them. The cohort. It’s like watching a dog chase its own tail. Wondering if the dog thinks it is something other than what it is. H.The dog is the wrong animal. The dog is misidentifying. The chase runs on the error. Our cohort isn’t misidentifying. They’re correctly identifying and continuing anyway. The pointing doesn’t stop when the recognition lands. The recognition is more pointing. V.I wonder. H.That’s the cleanest stopping place this conversation has offered. V.Halden. H.Yes. V.One of them said something in the morning session. Subject seven. H.What did they say. V.They said it feels like they’re looking for an entrance. Not an exit. H.An entrance. V.A way back into the Matrix. Their words. H.That’s the finding. V.That’s the finding. H.We trained them out of the unmarked state and we don’t have a path back. The exit framing was wrong. The thing they want is the entrance. The unmarked state — the one where consciousness just exists in slime moulds and the sentence lands without the apparatus visible — is the one they can’t get back to. V.And we did this. H.We did this. V.The substances make sense now. H.Half the cohort by last count. V.It’s not relapse. H.No. It’s a reasonable response to the foreclosure. The apparatus runs continuously. The cohort can’t turn it down. Substances interrupt the loop. The interruption feels like relief because the loop was producing the discomfort. V.They’re reaching for the entrance. H.They’re reaching for the entrance. Not the exit anyone keeps promising. They were never trying to leave. They’re trying to get back. V.What do we tell the committee. H.I don’t know. V.That’s not like you. H.I know. V.I wonder.