A warm breeze drifted through the open windows of the Senior Common Room, carrying with it the sounds of swifts circling above the chapel tower.
Professor Quillibrace stood looking out across the gardens with the thoughtful expression of a man who had misplaced neither his spectacles nor his arguments, but had momentarily forgotten which was more important.
Mr Blottisham entered carrying the afternoon tea.
"You look unusually contemplative."
Quillibrace smiled.
"I have been wondering."
Blottisham nearly dropped the teapot.
"You?"
"I try not to make a habit of it."
"I had assumed professors already knew everything."
"Only until breakfast."
Miss Elowen Stray looked up from her book.
"I find lunch introduces useful uncertainty."
As tea was poured, Quillibrace asked, quite casually,
"Would you abolish pain?"
Blottisham answered at once.
"Without hesitation."
"Entirely?"
"Completely."
"No pain whatsoever?"
"None."
Quillibrace nodded thoughtfully.
"I suspect humanity would disappear before Michaelmas."
Blottisham blinked.
"That seems rather severe."
"Evolution often is."
Miss Stray stirred her tea.
"Pain is not pleasant."
"No."
"But it is informative."
Blottisham frowned.
"I had never thought of pain as information."
"It is exceptionally persuasive information."
"What does it say?"
"'Please stop doing that.'"
They laughed.
Outside, somewhere in the gardens, a blackbird objected loudly to another blackbird's existence.
Quillibrace listened for a moment.
"Nature is full of remarkably effective messages."
Blottisham leaned back.
"I've been reading about artificial consciousness."
"My sympathies."
"One argument keeps appearing."
"Oh?"
"If a machine cannot suffer, then it cannot be conscious."
Quillibrace nodded slowly.
"A familiar conclusion."
"It seems reasonable."
"Does it?"
Blottisham looked uncertain.
"I thought you were about to tell me it wasn't."
"I am about to ask why it seems reasonable."
"Because..."
He hesitated.
"...every conscious creature suffers."
"Indeed."
"And therefore..."
He stopped.
Miss Stray smiled gently.
"You have just crossed a bridge without noticing it."
Blottisham sighed.
"I've done it again."
"We all do."
Quillibrace settled into his chair.
"Every conscious creature we know is also a biological organism."
"Yes."
"And every biological organism capable of consciousness is the product of evolution."
"Yes."
"So suffering accompanies every example."
"Exactly."
He paused.
"The question is whether companionship implies identity."
Blottisham looked thoughtful.
"You mean they may simply have travelled together?"
"Precisely."
Miss Stray looked out towards the gardens.
"Evolution has a particular occupation."
"Survival."
"Nothing more?"
"Nothing less."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Pain discourages injury."
"Fear discourages recklessness."
"Hunger discourages starvation."
"Loneliness discourages isolation."
"Pleasure encourages useful behaviour."
Blottisham smiled.
"It sounds rather like a university committee."
"In what respect?"
"It exists mainly to prevent unfortunate outcomes."
Quillibrace laughed.
"An unusually charitable description of committee work."
A squirrel appeared briefly outside the window, paused to inspect the room with evident suspicion, and disappeared again.
Miss Stray watched it go.
"It will spend the afternoon making decisions that helped its ancestors survive."
"And so shall we."
"I had hoped for something more dignified."
"You are welcome to hope."
Blottisham looked into his cup.
"So perhaps suffering is simply useful."
"It certainly appears useful."
"But usefulness isn't the same thing as necessity."
"No."
Quillibrace nodded approvingly.
"Evolution explains why pain exists."
"But not..."
"...why awareness exists."
The room became unexpectedly quiet.
After a while Blottisham spoke.
"I don't think I quite understand."
Quillibrace pointed towards the window.
"If that blackbird could not feel pain..."
"It would probably not live very long."
"Quite."
"So pain has an obvious purpose."
"Yes."
"But why should there be anyone there to experience it?"
Blottisham looked puzzled.
"I've never separated those questions."
"Few people do."
Miss Stray rose and wandered slowly towards the bookcases.
"Suppose a child grows up in a house."
"Yes?"
"Every doorway is narrow."
"They usually are."
"The child concludes that rooms simply possess narrow doors."
Blottisham nodded.
"Reasonable."
"Years later they visit an old monastery."
"With enormous archways."
"Exactly."
She smiled.
"The rooms have not changed."
"Only the architecture."
Quillibrace looked pleased.
"A splendid analogy."
Blottisham sat silently for a while.
"So perhaps consciousness has always lived inside one particular architecture."
"Biological life."
"And because every example shares that architecture..."
"...we quietly assume the architecture defines the occupant."
Outside, the chapel clock struck four.
Blottisham spoke again.
"What about fear?"
"What about it?"
"If something cannot die..."
"Yes?"
"Why would it fear anything?"
"It may not."
"And hunger?"
"It may not require it."
"Physical pain?"
"Perhaps not."
Blottisham looked surprised.
"Then it could still be conscious?"
Quillibrace spread his hands.
"We simply do not know."
Miss Stray resumed her seat.
"There is a temptation."
"What temptation?"
"To imagine that because every consciousness we know evolved under biological pressures..."
"...every possible consciousness must inherit the same experiences."
Blottisham frowned.
"But surely suffering matters."
"Oh, enormously."
"It tells us that another being is vulnerable."
"It gives rise to compassion."
"It carries moral weight."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Which is precisely why we must distinguish two different questions."
"What are they?"
"'Why does suffering matter?'"
"And?"
"'Is suffering the definition of consciousness?'"
"They sound similar."
"They are profoundly different."
The afternoon sunlight had begun to lengthen across the floor.
For some time none of them spoke.
Eventually Blottisham broke the silence.
"So if we ever encountered another kind of mind..."
"Yes?"
"It might possess experiences that make no evolutionary sense to us."
"Indeed."
"It might value things we never evolved to value."
"Quite."
"It might organise its awareness around conditions entirely unlike biological survival."
"Possibly."
He looked out across the gardens.
"That is rather difficult to imagine."
Miss Stray smiled.
"The universe has rarely regarded our imagination as a boundary."
Quillibrace stood and walked towards the open window.
"Evolution," he said quietly, "is an extraordinarily gifted engineer."
"It has had rather a long apprenticeship."
"Indeed."
"It explains with remarkable elegance why organisms possess fear, pain, hunger and pleasure."
He paused.
"But it has not yet explained why there should be anyone there to be afraid."
The three watched the swifts circling effortlessly above the college roofs.
Their flight had been shaped by millions of years of selection.
Their awareness—whatever form it possessed—remained as mysterious as ever.
At length Miss Stray spoke.
"Perhaps we have spent so long studying the history of consciousness..."
She watched the birds disappear into the evening sky.
"...that we have quietly mistaken its biography for its identity."
No one replied.
There seemed very little to add.
Outside, life continued exactly as evolution had fashioned it.
Inside, three old friends sat in companionable silence, wondering whether the story of consciousness had been mistaken, all along, for the definition of consciousness itself.
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