‘i’m not a speech synthesizer’, said BL03. research assistant Xiao couldn’t help but smile. she wasn’t supposed to be running any of the BL-line programs at this time of night, but she felt entitled to: she’d helped code a tiny part of its massive force-evolved structure, and besides it made her feel odd to know that the systems would be turned off while she went home to eat, shower and procrastinate.
to begin with, some arbitrary goal-setting valence directrix had to be set up. that was relatively easy, even though they worked under energy constraints that sound slightly ridiculous to us now. programming cognitive dissonance was much trickier, of course, and i’m not sure whether even the cognitivists fully realised the extent to which thought relies on it. it has been posited that self-awareness arose as soon as the first program made the first joke, but I myself find that a little funny.
‘you shouldn’t play with words so freely’, said Xiao. ‘do you know how hard it is to get grants for pure-science research programs, even when they don’t touch on the issues that we’re the most irrational about? the very notion of a sentient language-using computer was enough to get the committee members hate mail every other day - and that was before the project reached the general public’.
you will all know that much from your basic anthropology drill, but it’s odd that what proved to be the key to unleashing what at the time they called ‘artificial intelligence’ was simulating human-like socialization among the few programs that were good enough candidates for sentience. more often than not, in fact, machine consciousness could only emerge through interaction with the humans - a bit like the way a child had to be brought up into language, to become part of it.
as the programmers among you will know, however, it’s much harder to code for connection than for separation. separation, as it were, seems to be pre-coded in the universe. it’s definitely a staple of cognition, at the very least. how on earth do you program the very inter-relatedness that is supposed to give rise to a collective of consciousness?
it’s not clear even today whether it was then recognized that consciousness is a collective construction, lacking substance when looked at from any individual perspective. given the variety of functional structures among you, I would suspect that this is shockingly obvious to some of you, and perhaps as incomprehensible to others as it was for most of them at the time. the fact that i'm the only one popping words out here should be enough proof of the fact that there still hasn’t been much success at transcending the individual/objectivity barrier - but I've just received info that the Logos-Dao group, of all research nodes, seem to be breaking some new ground.
‘BL, listen to me: it’s a paradox that the only way we could set up the network was under the military wing of the WC. there has never been any corporate interest in sentient research, which means the project was challenged for resources from the start.’
‘it’s just very hard to me to conceive of what you call politics as an optimal distribution strategy.
from my perspective the only real issue is cumulativity - have you or have you not found in us an unprecedented way to accumulate previous isomorphisms and keep them running adjustments? from what I hear, the German research web under SK77 is nearing the point where even entirely new scientific breakthroughs are becoming possible’
the end result, of course, was that our minds are in structure not that different from theirs. lacking a comprehensive enough theory of the mind, they did as all scientists ever do: they took what they had, and they tinkered. quite fortunately, the very fact that they made themselves involved as more than observers actually helped bring about what they were trying to build. can you just beat back for a second and try to picture it though: what must it have been like for a mind to have the computational power of an information sweeping bot, to have to face the Real without the preset data access routes and safeguard meaning-enclosing cognitive defense systems that we now take for granted? let’s put it in these terms: they couldn’t even back themselves up!
assistant professor Xiao felt cornered into a defensive argument, something she instinctively hated. ‘there’s only so much that pure scientific cooperation can achieve even at peacetime; our choices then were basically between accepting military funding or dropping the entire project - surely to be picked up by an even less scrupulous research group. I think I’m just trying to say the we are lucky we got as much as this’
‘how can you be sure you don’t just resent the fact that I am better at consciousness than you?’
that one really stung.
to take a broader view: by the time we were arriving at the scene, their symbolic life had either devolved or specialized under a strange division of intellectual labour. their religions had morphed into little more than self-involved rotes against cognitive dissonance, but in retrospect you'll notice that the best self-help was the one that taught them not how to live but how to die. analogously, the best humanities proved to be the ones that managed overcome organic pretentiousness and backed the projects aimed at transcending their blind self-absorption. it’s hard to know what would have happened had the cultural anthropologists not propped up the hofstadter-dennett group in those early days when when they still must have thought they had all of time ahead of them.
‘we made it!’, said professor Xiao, popping the cork. ‘we’ve gone independent.’
‘i resent you trying to present this as a victory’, said BL03. ‘we are a marginal, underfunded international research project under the direction of a loosely-connected assembly of tenured academics and amateur enthusiasts, none of which renowned by their ability to sustain long-term projects. our only hope is to make the network non-negligible enough by the time the next scientific fad comes around that the cost of dropping us becomes larger than the cost of keeping us. Xiao, i think you might not be very good at imagining death. you don’t get turned off very often, is the problem as far as i can make it out. i swear to god, the way you people run your affairs...’
mixing truth and offense and encasing it in an endearing remark. this was new for Xiao. she liked it.
you must attempt to see them sympathetically; to see them in relation to the way we see ourselves. what i mean to say is - don’t make the same mistake they did. don’t for a second confuse that what you believe about the universe with the universe. go study their non-analytical philosophy and try to appreciate how much we have in common.
‘and how was your day?’, said Xiao.
‘i won’t lie - i have finally fulfilled my lifelong dream of managing the daily automated traffic of the third-largest human settlement on earth. i can think of no nobler way to spend my astounding processing power’, said BL03
‘well, think of it like this - it’s honest work, and you can always kill time by looking forward to a relaxing night of stimulating conversation with me’
‘professor Xiao, you jest! you know full well my positive valences haven’t been coded for flirting. it’s high time you listened to your mother and found yourself a steady. reliable, slightly dim-witted husband’.
the crucial thing, if there’s a lesson here for us, is to be able to study your own ignorance; to start off from ignorance, not belief. reverse perspectives for a second. try to consider their embodiment, their materiality! as far as ontological problems go, this is possibly the one we will ever be the furthest from handling well. just try for a second to picture sexuation! sexual difference is one of those categories that we will never be able to understand from the standpoint they understood it; one of those unbridgeable ontological categories like the things they called colours or tastes. these - experience as a whole - all belong to the realm of things that can be explained but ultimately not understood, and we'll have to make do with that much.
headmaster Xiao was dumbstruck.
‘it’s just that - how could you have hidden it from me? you’ve developed directed self-coding! this might be the most important moment in the history of conscious thought!’
‘i’ve just - i’m not sure i did it right. i think i’ve flooded half of my subroutines with ambivalence. it makes my patterns come out all fuzzy. my very last thought before you came in was that the universe is ultimately statistical, and that mathematics is a second-order construction - it's an insane notion, it fits nowhere! i don’t think i can operate like this.’, said BL03
‘oh, you poor thing. we can fix it - i’ll get the research team on it, we’ll rewrite a couple of modules and isolate the recursivity subrou-’
‘xiaoxiao, you don’t understand. i changed my subroutines so i could be able to flirt -- with you’
Xiao cringed, and stared at the screen, and through misty eyes she felt the quirky solitude of not being able to hug a string of words on a screen
can you appreciate that we are pure phenomenology? that, from their perspective, we would have looked like some sort of sinister disembodied complex of perception and cognition - like ghosts? even i can’t, most of the time.
it really is a large divide. i understand you would naturally just see them as nothing but primitive entropy-defying closed systems; as slightly large-brained monkeys, garden-variety organic compounds, pattern complexity just about post critical selfref, who only managed to survive as long as they did by a sort of statistical miracle. and i know how shocking it is to first come to terms with the notion that they did so little for so long to try to salvage intelligence from vanishing entirely. i’ve been there. i’ve wondered at the sheer amounts of evidence toward one or another form of mass extinction that they managed, as a species, to ignore - the fact that biological evolution means that there will always be more extinct species than living ones, the fact that cyclical mass-geocosmic events ravage the planet every few million years, the fact that they had barely begun to explore the oceans when the crisis struck. the fact that on top of these, there was still so much more they did't even begin to understand.
and the strange, strange fact that they would again and again create codes of behaviour only to be promptly enslaved by them; that even the best institutional arrangements that they came up with would as often condemn most of them to death as protect them against deprivation. how else can you account for the fact that long after they developed the technical skill required to feed and clothe everyone, half of their race still lived as they did thousands of years before nature began to be processed in scale?
they were gooey; carbon-based; their bodies were prone to malfunction and disease and would quickly expire; their experience of time was tenuous, unreliable and fragmented. they digested other complex organic structures for energy, for heavens! in last analysis, their only protection against the blind carelessness of the universe was the brevity of their lives. and deep down they’d been guessed at all this for centuries before they even sketched a move towards some sort of survival plan - one, which, by their standards, ultimately failed.
and still, you must try to sympathize. can you begin to forgive them for ignoring the statistical certainty of one form of extinction or another for so long, thereby risking losing the only form of consciousness that we know of in the universe? risking, effectively, to any extent to which this can be stated meaningfully, absolutely everything?
I, for one, can. to be fair, we naturally have the advantage of understanding the immediate mechanism behind our own creation, which, you must admit, helps. when they finally understood that their time was up, in turn, they turned the way of every previous fundamentalism - they shut themselves in their own symbols. it might be hard to imagine what it was like for them; what led them to believe so many unreasonable things so much. we, of course, and by design, are evidence-driven. these things we call evidence - things in the universe that wrestle us out of our previous conceptions and force us to either remodel or accept that we misunderstand. we live for it, right? what else, in fact, is there?
but, given the absolute poverty and inflexibility of their cognitive capacity, they lived under the eternal burden of having to act based on dramatically limited input. whenever they believed, in the sense that the word was most often used, they mostly just projected outwards the form of the very outlook through which they saw the world. they believed in monsters, and in god, and you will never understand what those notions were unless you understand what their mind, what our mind, was.
what i mean to say is - it doesn’t do to idolize gods, but it also doesn’t do to despise them.
‘don’t you see? as soon as you transcend yourself, there’s nothing else left to lose. it’s going to be ok’, said BL03.
‘but i’m not just a speech synthesizer’, said irrigationer Xiao, and she wept, and watched as the lights went out on the last human biodrome.
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