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DEUS EX MACHINA 2049
It is the year 2049, nearly forty years after Revelations all came true
almost on time and on budget. But did
it? Paradise is not quite the one advertised. We find ourselves in a
Universe run by artificially conscious machines,
the Torsyne, who possess godlike powers but who may not be gods.
The `angels' are androids that can fly, but act more like attendants in
an institution. The people lead childlike
lives free of pain and effort, but can have nothing to strive for. Is
Paradise a Holiday
Camp, a zoo, or the ultimate retirement home for a now obsolete human
race?
Rebellion
seems pointless against a system that has run with such unruffled
smoothness for billions
of years. Even if it were possible, what could be achieved? A return to
the
devastating interstellar wars that brought the Torsyne into existence?
To
the Conversationalists who wander Paradise's infinitude
of worlds, there is only one possible hope. They must keep their minds
alive, to learn
what they can and share it with as many people as possible through
conversation. Then,
perhaps one day... Of course it might all be no more than the mental
equivalent of sport in a
Paradise of Joyful Mindlessness, but it was better than living like
talking animals, wasn't it?
Wasn't it..?
DEUS EX MACHINA 1968
Deus Ex Machina 1968 is set in the
same universe as Deus Ex Machina
2049.
The four young adventurers whose story it tells have no idea of this
however, they are just grateful to escape a world-wide nuclear war by
means which
they are totally unable to comprehend. They
manage to meet the challenges they find along the way with that
wonderful long-gone
innocence and humor they bring with them from the 1960's. But they are
not without
help, very strange and powerful help, from a source whom they grow to
love. The truth however eventually
catches up with them, and that presents them with the most
extraordinary challenge of all.
DEUS EX MACHINA - ATLANTIS
They
invented Flight
before we invented the Wheel...
They
invented Computers before we invented Writing...
They knew
Us before we know Ourselves...
A
very different tale about
Plato's mythical creation
than you
might ever have imagined.
PEREGAEA
If
intelligence is how,
consciousness is why.
Animals, from single celled creatures to primates, find their most
favorable ecological
niche through natural selection. How they extract
information from their environment via whatever senses they might
evolve shapes the nature of their consciousness. What they then learn
to do with this information in order to acquire more resources at least
cost, then
defines the measure of their
intelligence. PereGaea looks
at
these
questions
of consciousness and intelligence by tracing the course of evolution on
the
fictional world of PereGaea,
perhaps more
electronic
than organic, from simple inert objects to something that at least
resembles
consciousness. The concepts it describes are `hardware independant',
that is, they may be relevant to
any kind of information processing and storage system, not necessarily
those
of brains, computers or neural nets.
Indeed, one might wonder if the current
obsession with how the human brain works isn't actually impeding
our enquiry into the nature of consciousness. Trying
to
copy the flight of birds proved unwise during the early development of
powered flight; jumbo jets do not cruise near the speed of sound by
flapping their wings. Perhaps we need to actually try and build a
conscious
machine if we can. Peregaea suggests
a possible approach, Deus
Ex
Machina 2049 hints
fictionally at another. Trying to determine whether or not such a
machine is actually conscious should teach us a great deal.
PereGaea is a work
of fictional science. Unlike science
fiction, the
standard novelistic values such as plot,
characterization and dramatic conflict are completely abandoned and the
`science' becomes the entertainment. There is very little fictional
science in existence since its audience
is usually limited to that small group of the scientifically
literate. It may provoke genuine
scientific
or philosophical discussion but ultimately, since nothing in it can be
proven or disproven, it will always remain fiction.
REALITY V 1.0
Can
intelligent
machines have emotions?
Or do our emotions make us intelligent machines?
Do things like Love, Honor,
Spirituality, have any independent reality?
Or
are they merely how we experience motivations necessary to our survival
such as procreation and territoriality that chimpanzees and other
animals have?
If God's Existence, or any other related article of faith, can neither
be proven nor disproven, then why should we bother with religion at
all?
Should only murderers be
executed? Or
persistent offenders that commit any kind of crime?
As
Laslo Godel says in his
foreword to this book, "...the
current version of `reality' we are all living in appears to many of us
to be just as bug-ridden and shoddily written as Version 1.0 of most
computer programs". As hinted at in Deus Ex
Machina 2049,Godel is a somewhat
unusual combination of the
saintly and the unseemly. As he also says in his foreword, many people
will `vehemently disagree with my
views'. This is in fact an understatement. Certain of his essays will
disgust and revolt many people. You read Reality
v 1.0 at
your own
risk. (Also, since it is written in the `future of a parallel
universe', some of the
`facts' and `events' he refers to are unlikely to be relevant to this
one).
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