FUTURE REALITIES

Returning Visitors:     DEUS EX MACHINA 1968   PEREGAEA  REALITY v1.0    MIRIDEN  

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..?  Re-edited February 2009

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.  Re-edited February 2009 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, 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 (below) 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.       Because of the 400 + drawings PereGaea contains, it ought not be approached using a text-only browser. Re-edited April 2009

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)..

      

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