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,
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, Laslo
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).
Because of
the extensive interlinking between each of its thirty-two essays, most
of which are very brief, the online version of Reality
v1.0 is
contained
within a single file and may therefore take a few moments to appear on
your screen.
PereGaea
If intelligence is how,
consciousness is why.
Animals, from single celled creatures to primates, find the ecological
niche they survive in best 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,
`by' Laslo Godel,
a character from Deus Ex
Machina 2049, 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
that
of `brains' or `computers'. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the current
obsession with how the human brain works isn't actually impeding
our enquiry into the nature of consciousness. Tryung
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 itself teach us a great deal.
PereGaea is really
however just as much
a work of `fictional science' as of philosophy. Fictional
science
is an uncommon form of science fiction in which any pretense
at 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 as yet since it can take
almost as long to produce as a piece of real science.
The
audience
is also usually limited to that small group of the scientifically
literate.
Sometimes it is intended as serious speculation to provoke genuine
scientific
or philosophical discussion but ultimately, since nothing in it can be
proven or disproven,
it can never be more
than a branch of science fiction.
Because
of the 400 + drawings PereGaea contains,
it ought not
be approached using a
text-only
browser.
