“What is all this? What are you working on?” She already knows the answer. She sees it in the arrows and diagrams and equations in his haphazard scrawl; even the air feels hothouse-hot from thinking, from the growth of invisible things, as if in the small one-bedroom apartment an entire jungle had grown up, died out without a trace, grown up again, on and on, cyclic with Kierk’s moods, thoughts, ravings, the boom and bust lifecycle of ideas rushing in to fill the space, failing, detritivores rushing in again to trigger pullulate growth. An ecology of mind. Inhalation wets her lungs.

“In every field I look I find the same thing . . . I fought with Moretti about it today . . .” He rubs at his face violently. “Here, let me give you an example. Neuroscience relies on information theory, but information theory presupposes an observer. A conscious observer. Causation presupposes a . . . a set of counterfactuals, a set of possible world and distance and difference relations. Again provided by an observer. In computation: a readout, or code. Again provided by an observer. In biology there’s teleology and function, the notion of some fundamental unit of selection . . . again provided by an observer. In physics it’s all over the place. Quantum physics, possibly. But also maybe renormalization group theory. The flow of time. Some other issues. All of science has these . . . classical conscious observer mechanics. Do you remember our conversation at the bar together? That first night? We talked about how the relations of the brain, the relationships between the neurons, the, the damn meaning of it all, where all the consciousness must be hidden, is itself dependent on some consciousness. Dependent on an observer consciousness to carve out those relations. To say what’s what. And it’s true everywhere I look. In every science I find the same thing: frame-variance. Trace back any field for long enough and you’ll find observers standing at the end of a long regression. I thought maybe I could define the phenomenon as a kind of operator that conscious beings apply to systems to give them definitiveness. Then you can apply this hypothesized observer-operator to get semantic contents from mere syntax. You can apply it in the form of interventions to get causal structure. To get borders from chaos. Spatiotemporal scale. Functions. Probability. Difference. That sort of thing. The operator really triggers a form of collapse, in a sense. Ontological collapse brought about by conscious observation. I don’t mean in physics, I’m not talking about that, but something resting at the heart of nearly every scientific field. And this can all be formalized mathematically!”

For Carmen, sympathy mixes with awe. Once mixed, they cannot be separated. Careful not to sound accusative, she says—“Kierk . . . When was the last time you ate?”

He looks confused, then shakes his head vaguely.