As Long as You Wish - John O'Keefe

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
As long as you wish by John O'Keefe began reading.
The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the
other side of the desk. Nervously, he pressed a coin
into the palm of one hand. Just start anywhere, I said,
and tell me about it as before. Without waiting for
an answer, he continued, the coin clutched tightly in one hand.
I am Charles J. Fisher, Professor philosophy at Riser College.

(00:23):
He looked at me quickly, or at least I was
until recently. For a second, his face was boyish professor philosophy.
That is, I smiled and found that I was staring
at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me.
On one side, I read the words the statement on
the other side of this coin is false. The patient
watched me with an expressionless face. I turned over the coin.

(00:44):
It was engraved with the words the statement on the
other side of this coin is false. That's not the problem,
he said, not my problem. I had the coin made
when I was an undergraduate. I enjoyed reading one side,
turning it over, reading the other side, and so on,
a phoenish enjoyment, like boys planning where to put the
tipped over outhouse. I looked at the patient. He was

(01:06):
thirty eight, single, medium build and had an MA and
pH d from an eastern university. I knew this and
more from the folder on my desk eight months ago,
he continued, I read about the sphere found in Peney Island.
He stopped, looking at me questioningly. Yes, I know, I said.
I opened my desk drawer, took out a clipping from

(01:26):
the newspaper and handed it to him. That's it, I
read the clipping before putting it back in the drawer. Manila,
September twenty fourth, I and US archaeologists from the University
of California have discovered an earth fault of recent quake,
a sphere of two feet in diameter of an unidentifiable material.
Doctor Carl Schwartz, head of the group, said sphere was

(01:47):
returned to the university for study. He declined to answer
questions on cultural origin of the sphere. There wasn't any
more in the newspaper about it, he said, I have
a friend in California who got me the photographs. He
looked at me intently. You won't believe any of this.
He pressed a coin into the palm of his hand,
and you won't be able to the photographs, he continued,

(02:07):
as if flecturing were of characters projected by the sphere.
When placed before focused light, the sphere was transparent, you see,
embedded with dark microscopic specks. By moving the sphere a
certain distance each time, there was a total projection of
three hundred and sixty different characters and eighteen different orderings,
or nineteen different orderings if you count one. That was
a list of all the characters. I made a mental

(02:29):
note of the numbers. I felt they were significant, As
I said, he continued, I obtained photographs of characters, very
strange shapes, totally unlike the characters of Oriental languages. But
yet that was the closest way to describe them. He
jerked forward in his chair, except, of course, ostensibly later,
I said, I want to get through the preliminaries first.

(02:49):
There would be time later to see the photographs. The
characters projected by the sphere, he said, weren't like the
characters of any known language. He paused dramatically. There was
reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture,
a culture more scientifically advanced than our own, and the
reason for the supposition, I asked, the material, the material

(03:10):
of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as ferroplastic,
totally unknown, amazing in perviousness, a synthetic material, hardily the
product of a former culture. For Mars, I said, smiling.
There were all kinds of conjectures, but of course the
important thing was to see if the projections of characters
was a message. The message, if any, would mean more

(03:32):
than any conjecture. You translated it. He polished coin on
his jacket. You won't dare believe it, he said, sharply.
He cleared his throat and stiffened it in a more
rigid posture. It wasn't exactly translation, you see. To us,
none of the characters had designation. They were just characters.
So it was a problem of decoding, I asked. As

(03:52):
it turned out, no, decoding is dependent on knowledge of
language characteristics, characteristics of known languages. Decoding was tried, but
without success. Now what we had to find was a
key to the language, you mean, like the room stones
more or less. In principle, we needed a picture of
a cow and a sign of meaning indicating one of

(04:14):
the characters. For me, there is no possibility of finding
similarities between the characters and characters of other languages that
would require tremendous linguistic knowledge and library facilities. Nor could
I use a decoding approach that would require special knowledge
of techniques and access to electronic computers and other mechanical aids. Now,
I had to work on the assumption that the key

(04:34):
to the sphere was implicit in the sphere. You hope
to find a key to the language in the language itself, exactly,
you know. Of course, some languages do have an implicit key,
for example hieroglyphics or picture language. The word for cow
is a picture of a cow. He looked at the
toes of his shoes. You won't be able to believe it.

(04:54):
It's impossible to believe. I used the word impossible in
its logical sense in most languages, He continued, looking up
from the shoes. The sound of some words themselves indicate
the meaning of the word automonic p at words like bow, wow, buzz,
and the key to the unknown language, I asked, how
did you find it? I watched him push the coin

(05:15):
against the back of his arm, then lifted and read
backwards letter pressed into his skin. He looked up at me,
and smiled. I built models of the characters, big material
ones exactly proportionate are the ones projected. Then, quite by
accident I viewed one of them through a glass globe
size of the original sphere. What do you think I saw?
What I noticed? He had a boyish look. Again, a

(05:37):
distortion of the model. But that's not what's important. The
distortions on study gave specific visual entities, like when looking
at one of those strict pictures and suddenly seeing the
line in the grass. The lines outlining the line are
there all the time, only the observer has to view
them as the outline of a line. It was the
same with models of the characters, except the shapes that

(05:58):
appeared were not lines and other recgizable things, but they
did suggest. He pressed a coin against his forehead, closed
his eyes, and appeared to be thinking deeply. Yes, impossible
to believe, No one can believe it. In addition to
the visual response, the distortions gave me definite feelings, not
mixtures of feelings, but one definite emotional experience. How do

(06:20):
you mean? One character, when viewed through the globe, gave
me a visual image and at the same time a
strong feeling of light hilarity. I take it, then, that
these distortions seemed to cunnote meanings rather than denote them.
You might say that their meaning was conveyed through a
gestalt experience on the part of the observer. Yes, each
character gave a definite gestalt, but the gestalt was the

(06:42):
same for each observer, or at least for thirty five observers.
There is an eighty percent correlation. I whistled softly, and
the translation, Doctor, What would you say if I told
you the translation was unbelievable, that it couldn't be seriously
entertained by any man. What if I said that it
would take the sanity of any man who believed it,

(07:04):
I would say it might well be incorrect. He took
some papers from his pocket and laughed excitedly, slumping down
in the chair. This is the complete translation in idiomatic English.
I'm going to let you read it, but first I
want you to consider a few things. He hid the
papers behind the back of his chair. His face became
even more boyish, almost as if he were deciding where

(07:25):
to put the tipped over outhouse. Consider first, doctor, that
there were a total projection of three hundred and sixty
different characters, the same number as a number of degrees
in a circle. Consider also that there are eighteen different
orderings of the characters, or nineteen counting the alphabetical list,
the square root of three hundred and sixty would lie
between eighteen and nineteen. Yes, I said, I remember there

(07:48):
was something significant about the numbers, but I wasn't sure
that it was this. Consider also, he continued, that the
communication was through the medium of a sphere. Moreover, keep
an mind that physics accepts the path of a beam
of light as its definition of a straight line. Yet
the path is a curve. If extended sufficiently, it would
be a circle the section of a sphere, all right,

(08:11):
I said. By now the patient was pounding the coin
against the sole of one shoe, and he said, keep
in mind that in some sense time can be thought
of as another dimension. He suddenly thrust papers at me
and sat back in the chair. I picked up the
translation and began reading. The patient sat stiffly in the
leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously,

(08:31):
he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand.
Just start anywhere, I said, and tell me about it
as before, without waiting for an answer. He continued, the
coin clutched tightly in one hand. I am Charles J. Fisher,
Professor of philosophy at Riser College. He looked at me quickly,
or at least I was until recently. For a second
his face was boyish professor philosophy. That is, I smiled

(08:55):
and found that I was staring at the coin in
his hand. He gave it to me. On one side.
I read the words the statement on the other side
of this coin is false. The patient watched me with
an expressionless face. End of As Long as You Wish
by John O'Keefe