Jen remembered what a wise man told her long ago when she was similarly obsessed with the problem of consciousness. It had been an astronomer friend of Thomas’s, a very great mind, she recalled, who listened patiently for hours as she expounded the hottest new concepts of cognition and perception. Then, when at last she ran out of steam, he commented. “I’m uneducated in formal psychology. But in my experience, people generally react to any new situation in one of four ways:

Aha!… Ho-hum… Oy Vey!… and Yum, yum…

“These illustrate the four basic states of consciousness, dear Jennifer. All else is mere elaboration.”

Years later, Jen still found the little allegory delightful. It made you stop and ponder. But did those four “states” actually map onto human thought? Did they lead to new theories that might be tested by experiment? She recalled the astronomer’s smile that evening. Clearly he knew the deeper truth — that all theories are only metaphors, at best helpful models of the world. And even his clever notion was no more real than a mote in his own eye.

There are one hundred ways to view Mount Fuji, as Hokusai showed us. And each of them is right.

Jen wished she had someone like that old astronomer to talk to now.

Today I’m the aged professor with no one to talk to but a bright high school dropout. So who is there to give me reality checks? To tell me if I’m off on a wild goose chase?

She was treading a narrow path these days, skirting all the pitfalls of pure reason — that most seductive and deceptive of human pastimes. Jen had always believed philosophers ought to have their heads knocked repeatedly, lest they become trapped in the rhythms of their own if-thens. But now she was hardly one to cast stones. While crises roiled on all sides, the compass of her own existence contracted, as if her once far-flung reach were drawing inward now, preparing for some forthcoming contest or battle.

But what battle? What contest?

Clearly she wasn’t equipped to participate in the struggles being waged by Kenda and her grandson. Likewise, the ferment surging through the Net would go on unaffected by anything she offered. By now it was starting to reach stochastic levels. A billion or more anxious world citizens had already been drawn from their myriad endeavors, hobbies, and distractions toward a single strange attractor, one gnawing focus of angst. Nothing like it had been seen since the Helvetian War, and back in those days the Net had been a mere embryo.

Messages piled up in her open-access mailbox as numberless correspondents sought her opinion. But rather than get involved, Jen only retreated further into the circumscribed world of thought.

Oh, she left the catacombs regularly, for exercise and human contact. In Kuwenezi’s squat, fortresslike ark she spent ninety minutes each day with her only student, answering his eager questions with puzzlers of her own, marveling at his voracious mind and wondering if he’d ever get a chance to develop it.

But then, walking home under the merciless sun, she would pass near towering termite mounds, built by patient, highly social creatures at regular intervals across the dry hills. They hummed with unparsed commentary, a drone that seemed to resonate inside her skull, even after the rickety lift cage started descending into the cool silence of the abandoned mine, gliding past layer after gritty layer of compressed sediments, returning her to those caverns where hard-driven men labored like Homeric figures under her grandson’s long-distance guidance, wrestling for the fate of the world.

Their efforts mattered to Jen, of course. It was just that no one seemed to need her at the moment. And anyway, something even more important had to be attended to.

Her train of thought. It was precious, tenuous. A thread of concentration that absolutely had to be preserved… not for the world, but for its own sake. It was a self-involved, even selfish attitude, but Jen had long known she was a solipsist. Except during the years when her children had been growing, what had always mattered to her most was the trail cf the idea. And this was a very big idea.

From the Net she drew references stretching back to Minsky and Ornstein, Pastor and Jaynes — and even poor old Jung — examining how each thinker had dealt with this peculiar notion… that one could somehow be many, or many combine to make one.

Her young student Nelson Grayson had really hit on it with his fixation on “cooperation versus competition.” The dichotomy underlay every human moral system, every ideology and economic theory, from socialism to free-market libertarianism. Each tried to resolve it in different ways. And every attempt only dredged up more inconsistencies.

But what if it’s a false dichotomy, after all? What if we’ve been seduced by those deducers, Plato and Kant and Hegel? By the if-and-therefore of linear logic? Perhaps life itself sees less contradiction than we do.

The motto on the old American coin haunted her. “From many, one.”

Our subselves usually aren’t distinct, except in multiple personality disorder. Rather, a normal person’s drives and impulses merge and cleave, marry and sunder, forming temporary alliances to make us feel and act in certain ways.

So far so good. The evidence for some form of multimind model was overwhelming. But then came the rub.

If I consist of many, why do I persist in perceiving a central me at all! What is this consciousness that even now, as I think these thoughts, contemplates its own existence?

Jen remembered back when Thomas had tried to interest her in reading novels. He had promised that the best ones would prove enlightening. That their characters would “seem to come alive.” But the protagonists were never realistic to Jen. Even when portrayed as confused or introspective, their thought processes seemed too straightforward. Too decisive. Only Joyce ever came close to depicting the real hurricane of internal conflict and negotiation, those vast, turbid seascapes surrounding an island of semi-calm that named itself “me.”

Is that why I must imagine a unitary self? To give the storm a center? An “eye” to revolve around? An illusion of serenity, so the storm might be ignored most of the time?

Or is it a way to rationalize a semblance of consistency? To present a coherent face to the outside world?

Of one thing Jen felt certain. The universe inside a human mind was only vaguely like the physical one outside, with its discrete entities, its species, cells, organs, and individuals. And yet, the mind used those external entities as metaphors in the very models it used to define itself!

Today, Nelson had gotten worked up about one such model. Government, he said, consists of a nation’s effort to settle the differences amongst its component parts — its citizens. In olden times, the resolution was a simple matter of the imposition of fiat by a king or ruling class.

Later still, majority rule improved matters a little. But today even small minorities could make bombs and death bugs, if they got angry enough! (The blueprints were all there in the net, and who dared claim the role of censor?)

So compromise and consensus were absolutely essential, and governments could only tread carefully, never imposing solutions. Serving instead as forums for careful rapprochement.

In other words, the ideal government should be like a sane person’s conscious mind! It was a fascinating comparison. Almost as interesting as the next one Nelson spun out.

The World Data Net, he said, was the ultimate analog. Like a person, it too consisted of a myriad of tiny subselves (the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and alliances merged and separated… sometimes by nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special interest groups that leaped all the old borderlines… all waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world’s agenda and to affect their lives in the physical world.