My first real job out of high school was at the naval shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. For a while I was assigned to a dedicated computer facility specializing in spectroscopic analysis of metal samples taken from the reactors and missile tubes of the boats that came into the yard for service. This was ’75 or ’76. The computer was a wall of switches, needle gauges, tape and card readers that filled most of the room. It was a Univac, as I remember, Sperry Rand, with what we would call ‘reprogrammable gate arrays’. Meaning you could open panels and manually move switches around to change the way the refrigerator sized CPU dealt with instructions. Men would come and go with stacks of cards and reels of magnetic tape while I sat at a desk that looked out over the ferry dock toward Retsil, across Sinclair Inlet. My job was to position the metal sample in the test chamber, lower the carbon rod and push the button. Ten thousand volts would pass through the giant pencil lead, vaporizing the sample. A beam of light was passed through the resulting metallic cloud, splitting like a rainbow. The computer with its light sensors analyzed the rainbow and determined the chemical composition of the sample to ten thousandths of a part per million. I was also responsible for the accounting and activity logs.
Several samples would usually come in every day but the task was pretty straight forward and often there was no work. They wouldn’t let me run my school code on their multimillion dollar super computer so I had a lot of time on my hands. I would sit at my desk watching the ferries and seagulls, doing college homework and writing.
One day a group of engineers came in acting oddly, a little giddy. They huddled together and whispered until I asked them what job they were working on. I was supposed to put it into the log. I mean, I didn’t care, I was supposed to write it down—government, you know. It was immediately clear that whatever they were doing was unauthorized and that I was a problem. I held up both hands in surrender and pointed to the log. The computer would record the CPU time (there was a mechanical odometer just like a car’s on the main panel) and Arnie, our boss, was pretty diligent about the accounting. Budgets had to be charged. They huddled again and Randal walked over and wrote down a project code for me to transcribe. It was for development, internal. His hand actually shook a little as he wrote it down. His name went into the log next to the charge code and time. They returned to their project and I returned to reading my book.
Whatever they were doing took some time. They were inside the machine moving things around and checking notes, recording changes. You really wanted to be able to restore things when you were done. Finally one of the guys unloaded a card tray into the reader stack. Paul. They all stepped back. Randal called me over, he said “You want to see this.” Back then, the way the cards slipped into the slot and then flew out the other side seemed like prestidigitation, like a super fast card shark flipping a deck two feet tall. The first part to go in was the static instructions, writing down addresses for the panels of hand soldered chips. At that time microchips were just breaking into the one kilobyte per chip stage and this was a true Large Scale Integrated system, four thousand chips on a board. The next set was for the computer’s second generation microprocessors—if this, do that sort of stuff. Then the reader paused. Someone nodded to someone else and someone pushed the button to load the program. The reader flipped a hundred cards, paused again and then began tearing through the stack at impossible speed. Two of the guys jumped suddenly, one reached over and steadied the card reader while Bob picked up another card tray and held it so the cards fed onto the top of the stack. This was an extremely risky maneuver—think about a modern copier, you could get things out of alignment and something would catch or crumple and this was an ancient mechanical speed machine. It also meant this was a very large program.
Everyone stood and watched the reader. It got close to the end of the stack and paused again. The last cards went through more slowly, ticking and whirring, stopping and starting. Finally the last card went through, there was a pause and the computer beeped.
Bob reached up, pushed the Run button and the computer spun up like a helicopter, or a generator coming to life. He reached into a pocket, pulled out a small AM radio, turned it on and held it up to the computer, right over the CPU. The radio played Beethoven. It was coming from the machine.
They had arranged and programmed the processor circuits to operate in loops, throwing off EMF at different amplitudes depending on the size of the loop. There was popping static as the gates opened and closed but the music was there, correct and unmistakable. The program on the cards was the actual score of ‘Ode to Joy’ transposed to a sequence of numbers.
The music was a true epiphenomenon, a collateral product that could not physically effect the physical machine that caused it.
But what if. Speaking of consciousness, if the function of the machine is to produce the music, could not the music be sensible to the machine? What if the brain could listen to its own music? Might not the brain, then, alter the music by opening and closing gates and pathways through its neural circuitry? So the epiphenomenon becomes an integrated reflector in a feedback loop that alters both the music and the brain. This is what we experience as consciousness, the self and sensation that cannot be pinned to any one place in the body and is, yet, inextricably bound to the flesh and fluid from which it emanates.