In the winter of 1966-7, I found myself, more often than I liked, in the basement of Notre Dame’s Computer Science building. There, beneath humming fluorescent tubes, I was surrounded by a lot of guys in short-sleeved white shirts through which undershirts could be discerned and on which fully-loaded pocket protectors served as badges of an oddness for which the word “geek” was not yet in use. Like them, I was operating a keypunch machine.

My predecessor at the student-run classical FM radio station had been one of them, a habitué of this cold, uncomfortable room. It had been his bright idea to use computer punch cards to automate the printing of the the monthly program listings, which were mailed out to a modest list of subscribers, mostly priests it seemed. His system was one of elementary abbreviation and required nothing in the way of computer literacy. Every selection had its own card, and to create new ones I had to park myself in what felt like a waiting room for the bus to hell. If I typed “LP” on the card, the print-out, when it came time to feed the month’s stack of cards into the appropriate slot, would read “London Philharmonic.” If this was supposed to make things easier, I was missing something. It was much simpler for me to type out “London Philharmonic” than to languish in a chilly futuristic setting with formidable keyboards that weren’t always available at my convenience. Soon enough, at my recommendation, the practice was junked.

A word about the computer in the Computer Science building: there was only one, and its façade was about twenty-five feet wide. It stretched beyond a long glass partition that protected it from the rabble in the lobby. Lights blinked and reels of tape spooled or spun, all in a disturbingly mindless way. More young men in short sleeved white shirts and pocket protectors moved about in front of it like acolytes performing ritual sacrifices. It became impossible, however, for me to take in this spectacle without wondering what the machine would have to know in order to do all of my job for me instead of just the brainless bits.

Occasionally, I was able to introduce this question in a dormitory bull session. It became clear right away that my fancies were as utterly speculative and improbable as those about space travel or raising the Titanic (then believed to have sunk with its hull in one piece). I realized that teaching a computer how to compile playlists (as we would say now) wasn’t going to be practicable anytime soon. But I couldn’t shake the question of what would be involved in translating the labels and the heuristics that had already become very familiar to me into terms that a computer could work with. This in turn led me to wonder just how well I knew what I thought I knew. How was it that I seemed to know exactly, say, what “Viennese classicism” means without being able to define it concisely — let alone numerically, as my savvier friends assured me would be required.

This is how I came to the larger question of the nature of consciousness, an idea at the back of my mind throughout all the undergraduate years of studying Greek philosophers and their impact on epistemology and science, and then throughout a life of further reading. The whirring mainframe at the Computer Science building was always in the picture. How do I know what I know, and how do I know that I know it?