Can you solve the Riddle of the Six?
In my AI days, I worked a few streets over from the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.’s Kendall Square. If I’m honest, my favorite pastime back then was to smuggle in a sandwich and, against Rule Number One, nibble at it as I browsed covers and overleafs of those storied shelves. Of all the titles in the now faded grey section of what I still refer to as Mark’s Bookshelf—my brother, Dr. Mark Magleby, once broke into my home library and rearranged every book I own by color—Daniel Dennett‘s narrow tomes about the mind demanded top billing for decades. On the news of Dennett’s recent passing, apart from imagining how some of us from those days would literally die to be flies on the wall that see the face that might or might not then see the face of who or what his entire life Dennett refused to call ‘God,’ I thought in the wee hours this morning of my favorite Dennett piece. (And since we’ve officially entered The Grey Section, I reserve the right to remember it as Dennett’s despite the distinct possibility that it might have instead been Hofstadter‘s or even Calvino‘s.) Forty years later, the title I will from today sort into the fading grey section of my own s(h)elf is The Word that Killed.
The story begins when a man is discovered straight up stiff in his office chair, eyes dead ahead, appearing to be locked on a particular word on his computer screen. Thankfully, we never see the word since, in like manner, staring at it themselves, those who come upon the victim instantly give up the ghost as well. From a family member to a close friend to a couple of homicide detectives, everyone who reads the word on the screen drops immediately dead. At length, some genius puts A and B together and, backing Moses-like into the original victim’s study, shuts off the computer to prevent further carnage.
Dennett’s point, I still imagine—or Hofstadter’s, or Calvino’s, or it might even have been Orson Scott Card‘s, was that thought is such a force of power that a mere word, delivered in precisely the right context, at precisely the right moment, could fell an elephant, not to mention an unsuspecting human reader.
Let’s test this premise right now, but not before a spoiler alert. In order to spare the lives of countless readers, the killer word in Dennett’s short story is never revealed. So, too, will the less lethal but equally phenomenal ‘killer word’ hinted at in the following conundrum be kept from you, though (statistically speaking) not for long. But please keep it to yourself, and no matter what your answer to the final question in the quiz, don’t reveal it in the comments section of this post.
Ready? The instructions, if deliberately redundant, are simple. The key is to answer a stream of related questions as fast as you can. If trying the test on someone else, keep in mind that it’s infinitely more illuminating, not to mention a lot more fun, when you administer it aloud.
Begin:
Me: What is five plus one?
You: Six
That was a test of the test. From this point on, I will not put words in your mouth. (It’s your head I’m interested in messing with.) You’re on your own from here on out.
Me: What’s four plus two?
You:_____.
Me: What’s three plus three?
You:_____.
Me: What’s two times three?
You:_____.
Me: Three times two?
You:_____.
Me: Seven minus one?
You:_____.
Me: Eight minus two?
You: _____.
Me: Six times one?
You:_____.
Me: Half of Twelve?
You:_____.
Me: Six plus zero?
You:_____.
Me: Repeat the word ‘Six’ six times, then another six times, followed by a final six times:
You: _____; _____; _____.
Me: Name a vegetable.
You:_____!
Me: Cue Twilight Zone.
You: Cue Hamlet.
Hamlet: There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
Since my days sewing crumbs about the MIT Press Bookstore, I must have administered this little parlor trick over a hundred times. With only a handful of exceptions (in most cases, identical to one another), the answer to the final question remains stubbornly the same. Whether the Greatest Generation, Its Silent successors, Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers, Millennials, Y’s and Z-ers, or these days, even my school-aged grandchildren (Alpha? Wait, doesn’t that letter come first?), nearly everyone shouts out the name of the same vegetable time after time.
What the Garden is going on here?!!
My best guess—and I’ve come up with some doozers across the years (which, if I revealed, I’d have to follow up with a Dennett-like killer word of my own)—is that sometimes in this middle distance between and heaven, some of us stumble across a clue or two about what the Garden really is going on. And whatever that Garden is—to me, to you, to Dr. Dennett, to the Alpha still learning maths on her fingers—one or more ‘vegetables’ might already be furrowing its way into your brain.
Mind the crumbs, please.
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