I still didn’t understand. If Dionisio had been alive, he would, at that moment, have paused in order to take a long breath and resume his lecture, but, since he was a zombie, he merely paused. Habit, not hope, is the last thing to go.
“In brief, qualia is the living being’s capacity to establish a connection between his experience of the world and the self.”
“Yourself ?”
“No, no, not myself—the self. Let’s see. . . . A living person can understand that the things that happen to him, happen to something that is him, his self, the consciousness of being one’s own self. If he feels joy or sorrow, if he’s overwhelmed by beauty or by danger, he knows that he himself is feeling all of these things in such a way that he perceives the attributes of each.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not,” sentenced Dionisio, “nor will you ever. I won’t either. And this is the best evidence there is that we don’t possess qualia.”
“But then, how . . . ?”
“How can I speak with such authority about something I don’t understand?” he said, cutting me off, then shrugged his shoulders. “I can explain it to you, but they are empty words that I’ve accumulated over the centuries, like someone who can recite perfectly a page written in a language he doesn’t understand.”
“What you haven’t told me is what qualia has to do with my research. Whatever it is, it must not be indispensable. If I’ve gotten this far without it, achieving dead what very few ever achieve alive, it must be a superfluous characteristic, like breathing, which, by the way, I also haven’t missed.”
“That’s where you’re mistaken,” said Dionisio, raising a fleshless phalange. “The quality of a thing is what indicates how that thing will affect you. And that information is crucial in order to make certain decisions and to recognize certain types of results. I’ll admit that you’re an intelligent zombie, the most intelligent I’ve met in a long, long time, but believe me, in order to achieve your goal you’re going to need qualia.”
I changed the subject without too much difficulty, and the evening took its course. I said goodbye quite late, but at the door it occurred to me to ask him one last question.
“Dionisio.”
“Yes.”
“If qualia is as you’ve described it, it seems to me that all of eternity would be insufficient for one of us to comprehend it as well as you have, if I’m to judge from your earlier exposition.”
Dionisio didn’t respond right away. The silence he allowed to grow between my words and his was a sign of reluctance. His face, inscrutable in its state of total decomposition, registered an incomprehensible expression. I stayed put.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. . . . It just occurs to me that, in the same way that you’ve explained it to me today, someone must have explained it to you, once upon a time.”
Dionisio twisted his lips and busied himself squirming under the strap that held his left shoulder in place.
“I was not mistaken when I said you were intelligent,” he murmured, half closing his flashing ocular cavities. He finished fighting against the strap, laid his elbows atop the counter, and nodded his head. “Someone explained it to me. A long time ago . . . Someone who understood it.”
The color red is a neural response to the stimulation of electromagnetic waves upon the retina; in other words, it’s an idea, a figment of the imagination, a label that our brains affix to that part of the visible spectrum that exhibits the wave of greatest longitude. From red to violet, in descending gradation, our brains distinguish ranges according to the distance between the crest of one wave and the next. And in order to separate and indicate the experience of each of these ranges it invents a sensation: orange, yellow, green, blue—the labeling of each as arbitrary as the invention of a word to designate any given object.
A color is, in fact, a word, but a word so indelibly imprinted upon our experience of the real that we cannot imagine that it could be any other way. And yet it could be. . . .
We believe that colors exist in and of themselves, for themselves, but no. Colors, such as we perceive them, don’t really exist. To the longitudinal range that we normally know as red, our biological architecture could have assigned that other optical experience that we call green.
We are capable of perceiving only the most minimal portion of the totality of the electromagnetic spectrum. We call this insignificant segment light. But what strange and indescribable color would x-rays be if we could see them? Or UHF waves? What color would the air surrounding us be if we could detect radio waves? What would the universe look like if we could see cosmic rays, the terrible light that illuminates the extremes of the spectrum beyond ultraviolet rays?
What occurs with colors also occurs with tastes, sounds, textures, smells. Our five senses are not portals through which we are conveyed to an external reality, but rather ports that receive stimuli utterly lacking in intrinsic qualities, that our brains adorn in accordance with evolutionary requirements in order to present them as Truth. But what really, then, is softness, blueness, sweetness? What is the real appearance of the world? What does “real” mean? Is it correct to speak of an “appearance”?
And yet, all of these fictions come to me. I receive them and they constitute my world. They define me. I exist insofar as it is I who experiences these lies. In the world everything happens to me. I am the collection of reactions and emotions aroused by the farce put on by my brain—like one who plays chess with himself. Wouldn’t it be fair to say of love, hate, hope, pleasure, and, in short, of all emotions unleashed in answer to the existence of that supposed “exterior world” of which our senses speak to us—wouldn’t it be fair to say of them the same thing we’ve said of colors? Is it possible that existence is not a feat of balance? Created from nothing, sustained by nothing, and sought by nothing, aren’t we, every single one of us, but a single step away from dissolution? What separates us from the void?
Nothing separates us from the void. We carry it within.
We are the void.
2. A DILIGENT EXECUTIVE / LABORATORY No. 3
I’m executive vice president of the Research and Development Division of the local branch of Eli Lilly. I’m in charge of twenty-eight plant chemists divided among five laboratories. I enjoy the confidence of my superiors and have a flexible schedule, and recently my name has been included on the list of executives with clearance to access confidential documents and the restricted substances stored in the vault on the ninth floor. I’m not a bureaucrat imprisoned in an inaccessible office; I labor away at the same lab bench as the rest of the employees, singeing my eyebrows over the Bunsen burner and graduating solutions into beakers like an apprentice. No one who has ever seen me at my place of work has ever seen me without my lab coat, cranking away.
I’m the only child of an affluent couple who, upon their deaths, left me all of their assets; in order to enjoy them the only thing I need to do is, well, simulate life. The fact that I’m independently wealthy doesn’t make me soft; I’m no spoiled brat. I arrive early, before my coworkers. For a time I used the main entrance. The shift guard would open the door for me and bid me a good morning in a rugged voice. He was friendly and respectful. A few weeks later I became certain that he was a zombie. It wasn’t the steel in his voice that gave him away,