Patty decided to wait in the car. There was a sense of dread about her, as if Jamie would come out of the clinic indifferent to her. Poor girl, thought Jamie. Perhaps many of the reincarnates go amnesiac and forget their new loves. Patty may be scared about me seeing my doctor, but she's holding up, and I need to know what has happened to me.
Dr. Bayer, looking older, but not near his 80+ years, greeted her warmly and sat down in a big leather chair, offering her a similar seat. He looked apologetic, but at the same time like the cat who ate the canary.
"Yes, I'm not strictly rehab, but you are a special case. I'm sorry to tell you this Ms. Southard, but reconstituting a brain into a body is impossible. And, as it turns out, unnecessary for many."
"What?? Then what is this young woman's life I'm leading? A computer simulation? Am I just a disembodied brain sitting in a vat somewhere? Hooked up to a computer? Am I just a program, some kind of Gamechamp? Am I dead? Am I dreaming? You said you never say any signs of cerebral activity in your patients. Am I…"
"Calm down. You are in a vat, of sorts, but that is no different from the vat you used to be in, a vat called Jamie."
"Now you're making no sense whatsoever."
"Where to begin? We've understood this in just the past few years. Ayn Rand was right, and wrong, at the same time. There is an objective universe out there, but we, you and I and millions of others, are not living in it. We did, once."
Jamie looked skeptically at the doctor, who continued,
"Remember when people used to say that trains were impossible, that people could not breathe at 35 miles per hour? We scoff at that now, but once it was true, it was a rule not to be broken. But broken it was. People once said it was common sense that man could not fly, but when it happened we accepted it. This was now the common sense, simple aerodynamics, and we broke another rule."
"Common sense for the common man (or woman) was possible until around the turn of the last century. Then all hell broke loose, and the "common sense" objective world became just a subset."
"We think is was Newton who first codified the true objective world, at least parts of it. He saw it for the clockwork, deterministic world it was. Later, Faraday, Dalton, and Maxwell all expanded our description of 'reality'. But with the electromagnetic catastrophe came the four, well, seven (at least), horsemen: Lorentz, Fitzgerald, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, and of course, Heisenberg. People at the intellectual top. Suddenly common sense was out the window for most people. Then came Wheeler, Hawking, Penrose, Thorne, Trimble, Feynman…all the modern physicists/mathematicians came up with realities that made no common sense to the common citizen. Black holes, curved space, time warps, exotic matter: how could Joeaverage relate to these? In school he dutifully memorized these patent absurdities and repeated them as dogma, like a litany, yet he never really accepted any of them. Then he forgot it all, which is fine, because his tunnel diodes still worked, his laser player still worked-everything worked, even if Joeaverage didn't know why."
"The thing of it is, Ayn Rand determined the real world, but for the last two hundred years, there has been no one real world. Reality has become a vast vat, if you will, a great mixture of possibilities invented in the minds of the few who could grasp what we call the greater world, with the old 'real' world just a small eddy within."
Jamie tried to take this all in. As a former science professor she knew of all the theories and discoveries Dr. Bayer had cited, but she failed to understand just how they could be given substance by the great minds that conceived of them. She said as much to his doctor.
"It's the Schrödinger's Cat scenario turned inside out," he explained. "You know the story: a cat is placed in a box with a lethal poison that may or may not be released. This cat's life is in an unknown state, a flux of probabilities, until an observer peeks in. Then all the possibilities, in this case life or death, collapse into a reality. It turns out that's only half the picture. Those possibilities were created by the observer in the first place, they don't exist without him. Therefore, when David Deutsch conceived of a Multiverse, it was possible for it to exist, and it does, because his conception is so logically consistent that evolved minds can understand and accept it. The conception became appended to the real world, adding to a greater world. It was the number of cognoscenti that was the deciding factor."
"Those at the intellectual top, the right tail of the Bell Curve, have been with us since Babylon, but their numbers have been small. I should say, our numbers have been small, since you and I are part of that group. And we are not just physicists, mathematicians, scientists; those few with an evolved brain can be found in any creative field."
"As populations increase, the number of those at the intellectual top (we call ourselves mentors) has increased, creating an alternate, expanded world, one we alone can fully live in." Dr. Bayer pondered for a moment. "Hmmm. Did you ever wonder why, when a physicist invents a device to prove a theory, it almost always works? Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? In a way; those instruments show the existence of a greater world born of the mind of the inventor, then accepted by those who can understand it."
Jamie was incredulous. "Do you mean, say, lasers work because the user believes they will work? That metastable states are a figment of the imagination? Sounds suspiciously like solipsism."
"Not at all. Joeaverage-called him EveryMan--doesn't know a metastable state from the Golden State, and he's but one of the vast majority of people. But there are enough in that thin top intellectual stratum who do. Since about 1900 our numbers have been great enough to maintain a gestalt, if you will, to buoy up all the non-common sense physical laws our technology relies on. That's why ancient people never got the technology to work-not enough gestalt members to sustain any advanced systems."