by Erik Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective: IN THE SUMMER after they graduated from college, Kierk and Mike—friends, classmates, and intellectual competitors in many late-night dorm-room debates—had gotten into Mike’s messy jeep with their science poster, “Neural correlates of bistable perception,” secure in a plastic tube rolling around in the back. Together they had road-tripped up from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Toronto, Canada, so that they could present their poster at the 14th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, held by some clerical error on the exact same weekend and only blocks away from the main site of the G20 economic summit. As they drove, around them a legion of other cars bore protesters heading to the economic summit, protesters who were equipping themselves with an armament of balloons filled with paint, who had signs clanking around in their trunks instead of science posters, who were listening to radical podcasts and communicating to one another via encrypted text messages. The occupants in the thousand cars around them were preparing for war.
The morning of the conference had come with the smell of cigarettes. Mike was already out on the balcony, smoking. Mike, thin, tall, Jewish, with curls grown long, unkempt, talked and thought fast in a way Kierk appreciated. In college they played chess with each other while running subjects in neuroimaging studies, and as the research subjects a room over watched the Necker cubes flip in bistability Mike and Kierk would exchange black and white pieces in rapid movements. At the time, the two college friends were also roommates for the summer, living in an apartment absent all furniture except for yoga mats in each of their rooms for sleeping and piles and piles of books on philosophy and science they passed back and forth, until even Mike’s smoking habit had been transmitted to Kierk.
The welcome seminar to the conference was an affair of Brazilian coffee and glass chandeliers, plush leather chairs and bite-size berry tarts. A few people whose books Kierk had read welcomed the crowd. One of the first seminars was run by a member of Antonio Moretti’s lab, which Kierk would be joining in the fall, so for three hours Kierk took copious notes. Next was an array of seminars held in large presentation rooms, which Kierk bounced back and forth between.
There were pathology talks:
“—a blindsight patient acts blind, they use a cane, their family members say that they’re blind, they live the life of a blind person. A lesion to their primary visual cortex severs the main visual input stream to the brain. Yet if you toss a tennis ball at them, they’ll catch it—”
Neuroimaging talks:
“—as you can see, we’re showing this whole-brain ignition, which is very rapid and occurs after the stimulus is presented. So basically, instead of something being processed in a specific region, it’s more about how the signal becomes integrated with the ongoing process that already dominates the brain, but this process is itself a mystery—”
And philosophy talks:
“—while no one has yet solved the scientific mystery of consciousness, it’s worth noting that theories are currently substrate neutral. There’s nothing special about neurons, no magic fairy dust that makes them consciousness. Because of this, we don’t know where consciousness ends or begins in nature. What about complex systems? Or computer programs? Artificial intelligences? Or networks of interacting agents? After all, you yourself are merely a mob of neurons, all acting in concert, and somehow those neurons collectively generate experience—”
In the late evening everyone left the hotel, their black dress shoes and heels shining wet across concrete, oblivious to the watchfulness of the citizens they passed. After a few hours the same polished shoes all stumbled back to the hotel, as did Kierk and Mike after taking shots with some of the grad students, and it was only when they got back and drunkenly switched on the TV that they saw the cop cars on fire and the police in their riot gear marching in lockstep, and protesters called the Black Bloc, who wore ski masks and all-black clothes, and were smashing windshields and throwing Molotov cocktails into empty police cruisers, all of which had happened just blocks from the conference hotel.
The next day Kierk and Mike were standing around their poster, smiling vaguely and hopefully at each passerby. The two of them were wearing their nicest dress shirts and ties, looking out of place for how young they were. Then came the mind-numbing hour of explaining their poster over and over to passersby in thirty-second sound bites.
They ended up outside just after noon, with Mike smoking and Kierk throwing pebbles against the side of the conference building. Far away, sirens wailed, coming and going.
A young man about their age walked past them wearing a backpack. They both noticed it was unzipped and a black mask peeked out. Sharing a look of silent agreement, Mike flicked his cigarette and Kierk threw his last stone and they began to follow him.
As they traveled deeper toward the areas of the previous day’s protests the police activity grew around them. People were walking in odd paths on the sidewalk to avoid the shards of broken glass from shattered payphone booths and bus stops and bottles. Kierk paused in shock when he saw the arm lying on the ground in front of him before realizing it had been dismembered from a shop mannequin. Other parts were lying about: a leg poised on a bench, a head tilted skyward in a tree. Shop owners were out boarding up windows. Unmarked white vans blasted down empty roads and through red lights for no discernible reason, a sea of tinted windows moving and crisscrossing in a higher order that looked random from the ground.
Mike and Kierk were swept away with the crowd, and soon began to see the first gangs of riot police dressed in black body armor with opaque, light-reflecting helmets, their badge numbers covered up with black flaps of fabric. The two ended up following a thin stream of people through lines of standing cops containing and directing the flow. They realized they were surrounded by an army that was shuffling closed, everyone flowing in the suggested direction, walking quickly or jogging down the only available route, and then they were funneled out into the south end of Queen’s Park.
More here.
