“You will also leave your radio on at all times; I will want to contact you again.”
Abruptly the signal ended. The two men on the bridge stared at one another.
XII
Each human instinctively and unconsciously develops the equivalent of computer programs in his mind—a set of more or less integrated and often incompatible programs that together crudely simulate the world. Your programs collectively constitute the world as you know it, and the state of those programs at any given time makes up the only world you know. They are the means through which your brain, your organic computer, operates. You make decisions and take actions on the basis of the printouts of that computer, printouts from programs which are part of your model of the world.
Hendricks has discussed the deficiencies of the system at length. Only one of them seems directly relevant to our discussion here—the egocentricity of those programs. The focal point, the emotional center, of the programs constituting your world, is occupied by your enthroned ego. It colors not only all you think and do, but all you “know” as well. It makes your subjective world what Kuznetsov dubbed the ego world.
It has been suggested that this centrality of the ego is essential as an integrating reference point and for survival of the organism; that without it, man would lack, among other things, a survival instinct. The ego may indeed have begun as a reference point for the integration of data, and its growth may have been a by-product of the survival instinct, but it seems unessential to either. Descriptions and analyses of the barbarian telepath, Nils Järnhann, all point to his lack of an ego, as the concept of ego is defined today. Yet even allowing for some small degree of exaggeration in the reports of the expedition, Nils did an exceptional job of integrating information and surviving remarkably hazardous situations.
To be convincing, any refinement of ego theory must now consider Nils Järnhann. Which is to say, it must consider the probability of a strong and effective survival mechanism and an integrating center of reference independent of any powerful, albeit unconscious, emotional image of the self as the center of the world.
At the same time, of course, we must reject the “explanations” of the New Movement gnostics. These are essentially pre-technological theology in pseudo-scientific trappings, with the unlikely premise that the human ego is the “spirit” or “soul” in a somehow degraded condition. Nils Järnhann, then, is “explained” as a case in which the degraded condition was somehow miraculously dispelled or perhaps avoided! . . .
. . . Operating with a set of seemingly objective programs, a non-egocentric world model, Nils showed unique ability to learn. Mrs. Kumalo found existing intelligence tests inadequate for precise determination, but established that he did in fact possess “substantially superior mental equipment.”
An alternative, or more likely complementary, explanation might be that his objectivity itself enabled him to discern, learn, and reason more effectively than the great majority of men.
Of course, his direct access to the thoughts of others must have helped, but most other telepaths seem not to approach him in ability to learn or to make correct decisions.
All in all there was that about him which makes one uncomfortable when trying to explain him scientifically. And that is entirely aside from the interesting apocrypha that have grown up about him. It seems as if he was playing a joke on us by being what he was.
Mrs. Kumalo questioned him in a specific effort to understand his gestalt (sensu Watanabe). She stated categorically that she never succeeded, but felt she could characterize certain aspects of it. She wrote that, among other things, he did not have or use a conscious mind in the usual sense of the term. Yet he was obviously very conscious indeed. He was more sensitive to what happened around him, more aware, than anyone else she had ever known, an impression of him shared by the expedition generally. Nor was he a cold hard logic machine—a biophysical computer so to speak. He has been described as cheerful, considerate of others, charismatic, and possessing a sense of humor, which, to me at least, is reassuring.