Henry Berkhamsted

Role: American professor of philosophy of mind; author of Mentalic Ontology — the in-universe metaphysic that mind is a pattern of information rather than a solid thing enclosed within the brain. The book’s philosophical root. Affiliation: Unnamed university. Academic outcast until Mentalic Ontology. Era: Pre-A.L. 1920s Aerth (brain research “almost non-existent then in the 1920s”).

Summary

Second Packet of The First Wanderer. Picked deliberately — the wanderer enters Berkhamsted through a door in The Other Place “that pulsed with intelligence” because he wanted to know what he was. A formalist about mind; believed before the wanderer ever arrived that mind is a pattern of information. An academic outcast for exactly this reason. Lives a life of “almosts” — almost-kisses, almost-confrontations, almost a railway driver instead of a professor.

Woken up emotionally by the wanderer’s gentle interference: the wanderer jolts Berkhamsted’s apartment key so it breaks in the lock, forcing him to knock on his neighbour Penny’s door for a crowbar, which leads directly to marriage. The wanderer describes this as the only time he ever truly felt love from inside a packet — watching Penny sleep one Saturday morning through Berkhamsted’s eyes.

Berkhamsted’s major contribution to the book’s universe is Mentalic Ontology, which he develops “with a little bit of gentle influence” from the wanderer. Its central claim — mind as a stuff is not some property native to brains, but the product of a very particular complexity — is what The First Wanderer promises to carry forward at their parting. The wanderer says it aloud to him on the bus in their final scene: “I want you to know that your metaphysic is correct, even if no one else will believe you, that I’m living and evidential proof.”

In-universe, this metaphysic “would live on for millennia” — which the narrator of the later Pasternak scenes confirms by still working on it ~2600 A.L. years later.

Appearances

• Ch. 03 — For Every Dove a Bullet: Second packet. Last seen trembling on a bus as the wanderer jumps out of him into the man in the next seat.

Related

• The First Wanderer
• Penny — his wife.
• Mentalic Ontology — his work.
• The Fifth Science, Panpsychism, Consciousness
• Evie — born from the wanderer during his time inside Berkhamsted.

Open questions

• What happens to Berkhamsted after the wanderer leaves? Not stated. The wanderer’s parting line (“Make your life Penny now”) suggests a happy ending, but Berkhamsted’s “predisposition to the blackest strand of worry” is not cured.
• Does Berkhamsted ever publish the full Mentalic Ontology in-universe? The wanderer promises “I’ll protect it” — but if history forgets Berkhamsted, on what channel does the metaphysic actually propagate forward?