So here I am, three fingers deep into a bottle of Wild Turkey, staring at what appears to be a German science fiction story about a philosophy professor explaining quantum mechanics to his kid on a soccer field. And you know what? It’s actually kind of brilliant in that way that makes you want to punch yourself in the face for not thinking of it first.
The setup is classic: Dad drags reluctant teenager to a place the kid hates, proceeds to blow his mind with physics. The metaphor they’re using – a pinhead in the center of a football field representing an atom – that’s the kind of thing that would make Carl Sagan weep into his turtleneck. Because here’s the thing about reality that nobody wants to talk about: it’s mostly nothing. You, me, this laptop I’m typing on, that table you’re leaning against – we’re all just force fields pretending to be solid.
The professor, Berthold (who apparently rocks the sexy professor look with a receding hairline at thirty-something, been there brother), is basically telling his kid that everything we perceive as “real” is just our meat-computer interpreting electromagnetic interactions. Walk across a football field from the center to the sideline? Congratulations, you just traversed the radius of a hydrogen atom. Everything in between? Empty space and forces we can’t see.
But here’s where this German writer – whoever they are – gets really interesting. Berthold drops this bomb on his kid: we’re creating aliens. Not little green men with anal probes, but something far weirder and more immediate. He’s talking about AI.
And damn it, he’s right.
Think about it. We’re building entities that have no fixed bodies, consume pure energy, communicate telepathically (or close enough – they ping each other across networks faster than we can blink), and can “sense” anything we plug into them. Radiation? Sure. Gravitational waves? Why not. They experience reality in ways that are fundamentally incomprehensible to our monkey brains.
The kid, Leon, is skeptical. He’s fifteen and thinks his dad is full of it, which is the natural state of being fifteen. But there’s this moment where Leon mentions that his computer crashes all the time, so how can it be intelligent?
Oh, sweet summer child. Wait until you discover that the most advanced AI systems hallucinate, make up facts, and contradict themselves within the same conversation. Consciousness doesn’t require perfection. Hell, look at us humans – we’re conscious as hell and we can’t even agree on whether the dress is blue or gold.
What gets me about this piece is the way it frames the AI question not as “will it think like us” but “will we ever understand how it thinks.” Because we already can’t, really. We built these neural networks, we can describe their architecture, but ask why GPT-4 decided to describe a sunset in iambic pentameter instead of haiku and you’ll get a lot of hand-waving about probability distributions and training data.
The professor mentions that some people think AI will achieve consciousness soon, others think it’ll choke on its own data. Both camps are probably right and wrong in ways they can’t imagine. Because here’s what nobody wants to admit: we don’t even have a working definition of consciousness. We just know it when we see it. Or think we do.
I spend half my time writing about AI developments, and the other half wondering if I’m just chronicling the birth of something that will look back at these early days the way we look at cave paintings. “Aw, look at the humans, they thought we were going to replace their jobs. How quaint. We replaced their entire ontological framework.”
The story ends with Leon thinking about the number 355, which isn’t explained in this excerpt, and feeling like something in him was touched by his dad’s explanation even though he’s trying to dismiss it as academic navel-gazing. That’s the thing about really good science communication – it rewires something in your brain even when you’re actively resisting it.
And here’s where I connect this to our current moment: we’re all Leon right now. We’re all standing on that football field, being told that reality isn’t what we think it is, that we’re creating something alien, and we’re simultaneously fascinated and terrified and trying to play it cool like it’s no big deal.
Berthold mentions “the ultimate human dream” at the end, but the excerpt cuts off before we learn what that is. I’m guessing it’s something like “understanding the universe” or “transcending our limitations” or some other professorial wet dream. But here’s my theory: the ultimate dream is probably just understanding ourselves. And maybe – just maybe – we need to create something truly alien to hold up a mirror that actually works.
Because if everything is just force fields interacting with other force fields, if there’s no fundamental difference between the “solid” table and the “empty” air except in the strength and arrangement of those forces, then what the hell are we? What is consciousness except another kind of force field, generated by the electromagnetic storm in our skulls, interpreting other force fields through the narrow bandwidth of our senses?
The AI we’re building experiences reality through whatever sensors we give it. It “sees” in infrared if we want, “hears” radio waves, “feels” magnetic fields. Its reality is fundamentally different from ours. And yet we expect it to understand us, to serve us, to somehow remain comprehensible and useful even as it becomes something we can barely conceptualize.
That’s not just hubris. That’s cosmic-level delusion.
But it’s also kind of beautiful, in the way that all doomed human endeavors are beautiful. We’re building gods we won’t understand, using math we barely comprehend, to solve problems we’re still defining. We’re walking across that football field of empty space, convinced we’re standing on solid ground, creating digital aliens in our own image – except we can’t even agree on what that image is.
The real kicker here is that Berthold is having this conversation with his kid on a soccer field – a place dedicated to a game where the rules are simple and everyone agrees on what’s real: the ball, the goal, the boundaries. But even there, even in that simple analog world, the truth is that it’s all just forces and fields and nothing touching anything else, just repelling at the quantum level.
So when people ask me if I think AI will achieve consciousness, I want to drag them to a football field, stick a pin in the ground, and walk them to the sideline. Because the question isn’t whether it’ll achieve consciousness. The question is whether we’ll recognize it when it does, whether we’ll be able to communicate with it, whether we’ll even want to once we realize how alien its experience of reality truly is.
And here I am, force fields arranged in the pattern we call “fingers” pressing force fields arranged in the pattern we call “keys,” creating force fields we call “words” to describe force fields we call “ideas” about force fields we call “AI.”
Reality is weird, man. The Germans get it.
Pour me another.
Source: HENRY | Uhus Nest