Consciousness Without An Object
Adriana told me that Dr. Pneumonic was in actuality a scientist that had failed utterly in his prime goal and was now forced to remember it with deplorable clarity. Apparently there had originated a theory which if applicable would permit for the partial erasure of memory. Initially the drug was acclaimed for its ingenuity, thought in application it was very limited. He had developed a pill that would basically erase immediate experience, for every pill was capable of erasing the last four minutes of experience, and one can not quite know how this worked but the base line was that if you would have taken one of these pills the last four minutes would not be something that you could recall, and anything that you experienced in those four minutes would not be a part of your psychology. Thought some scientist disputed how absolute the erasure was, some suspected it was only an erasure at the conscious level but experiments later done under hypnotic estates revealed nothing conclusive.
Later Dr. Pneumonic received a huge grant from clandestine organizations which had immediate uses for something that could erase say, the last four minutes of torture, but the grant exclusively wanted the memory effect loss to be more exacting, that is, capable of erasing particular memories. And indeed the good doctor’s four minute pill worked for four minutes at a time, so in theory you only needed to take one after the other and the lost minutes would logically accumulate. But in reality the aggregation of pills did not compound the erasure, and so it was with faulty logic that people who wanted to forget their childhood’s, or even being born attempted to take a few thousand of the four minute pills, but their attempts were thwarted by an overdosed death, which the good Dr. might have still considered a success of sorts.
His research eventually produced some pills that were able to erase particular memories and so for obvious reasons they were called explising pills. It was extremely interesting. The process required the user to take the pill, then to immediately actively listen to recordings, and to recall and view pictures of the particular events that he or she wanted to, or was being coerced to forget. This was proven quite effective in specific situations like forgetting mathematical formulas, but one could argue that forgetting anything mathematical was a natural condition and the pill was only taking credit for it. More difficult to explain were cases of fallen lovers. The good Dr. Pneumonic would take those suffering from the ills of fallen love, and record say the name of the loved one, particular instances such as locations that were favored during the romance, or actions and emotions described with some accuracy; then the suffering lover would take the pill which was the size of a good horse pill and while laying on a couch the subject would then actively listen to the prerecorded memories, then the words were accompanied by music which the good doctor had, for reasons still kept secret, concluded added reinforcement to memory loss. Of course, the reliving the romance during the treatment did bring in the unpleasant side effects of remembrance, and so the patients were driven to a tear bath of sorts, but at the end of the session it seemed the tears were indeed cleansing memories.
A painful treatment indeed, but still observations revealed that the subjects had indeed forgotten a good portion of their experiences with the loved one. In fact to the point of completely forgetting the name and physical appearance but, for some odd reason, memory loss did not constitute emotional loss. In short they could forget memories, they could not forget the emotions produced by those memories. The disadvantage of having emotions that were not complimented by memories became grossly apparent by the number of participants that wanted to murder the good Doctor. And so for his own safety and perhaps the safety of others he was placed on this ward under the title Dr. Pneumonic, an obviously humorous category when related to him, yet here he remembers everything.
An interesting critic of Dr. Pneumonic attributed his failure to the interesting concept of consciousness without an object. The pills were removing the object but not the consciousness of the object hence the displeasure. After reading this particular critic I recalled a personal pubescent experience. One night, while attempting to fantasize about a very attractive neighbor I found myself unable to remember her name, and I could not even recall her facial characteristics. Still little boy that I was, feeling quite in need of fantasizing about her, I decided not to be deterred by this and so I fantasized about her but in my fantasy, having I not the crudeness to give her the face of another, and wanting not to think of anyone else but only of her, whom, I could not remember, I proceeded to imagine her nameless and literally headless. Fortunately for my particulars that night this was sufficient and this was as close as I ever got to consciousness without an object. My point is that consciousness without an object is possible under certain controlled circumstances.
Later Dr. Pneumonic received a huge grant from clandestine organizations which had immediate uses for something that could erase say, the last four minutes of torture, but the grant exclusively wanted the memory effect loss to be more exacting, that is, capable of erasing particular memories. And indeed the good doctor’s four minute pill worked for four minutes at a time, so in theory you only needed to take one after the other and the lost minutes would logically accumulate. But in reality the aggregation of pills did not compound the erasure, and so it was with faulty logic that people who wanted to forget their childhood’s, or even being born attempted to take a few thousand of the four minute pills, but their attempts were thwarted by an overdosed death, which the good Dr. might have still considered a success of sorts.
His research eventually produced some pills that were able to erase particular memories and so for obvious reasons they were called explising pills. It was extremely interesting. The process required the user to take the pill, then to immediately actively listen to recordings, and to recall and view pictures of the particular events that he or she wanted to, or was being coerced to forget. This was proven quite effective in specific situations like forgetting mathematical formulas, but one could argue that forgetting anything mathematical was a natural condition and the pill was only taking credit for it. More difficult to explain were cases of fallen lovers. The good Dr. Pneumonic would take those suffering from the ills of fallen love, and record say the name of the loved one, particular instances such as locations that were favored during the romance, or actions and emotions described with some accuracy; then the suffering lover would take the pill which was the size of a good horse pill and while laying on a couch the subject would then actively listen to the prerecorded memories, then the words were accompanied by music which the good doctor had, for reasons still kept secret, concluded added reinforcement to memory loss. Of course, the reliving the romance during the treatment did bring in the unpleasant side effects of remembrance, and so the patients were driven to a tear bath of sorts, but at the end of the session it seemed the tears were indeed cleansing memories.
A painful treatment indeed, but still observations revealed that the subjects had indeed forgotten a good portion of their experiences with the loved one. In fact to the point of completely forgetting the name and physical appearance but, for some odd reason, memory loss did not constitute emotional loss. In short they could forget memories, they could not forget the emotions produced by those memories. The disadvantage of having emotions that were not complimented by memories became grossly apparent by the number of participants that wanted to murder the good Doctor. And so for his own safety and perhaps the safety of others he was placed on this ward under the title Dr. Pneumonic, an obviously humorous category when related to him, yet here he remembers everything.
An interesting critic of Dr. Pneumonic attributed his failure to the interesting concept of consciousness without an object. The pills were removing the object but not the consciousness of the object hence the displeasure. After reading this particular critic I recalled a personal pubescent experience. One night, while attempting to fantasize about a very attractive neighbor I found myself unable to remember her name, and I could not even recall her facial characteristics. Still little boy that I was, feeling quite in need of fantasizing about her, I decided not to be deterred by this and so I fantasized about her but in my fantasy, having I not the crudeness to give her the face of another, and wanting not to think of anyone else but only of her, whom, I could not remember, I proceeded to imagine her nameless and literally headless. Fortunately for my particulars that night this was sufficient and this was as close as I ever got to consciousness without an object. My point is that consciousness without an object is possible under certain controlled circumstances.
posted by Ricardo Correa at
1:06 PM
