by Roman McClay
“Well, it explains the wall, anyway,” Chen nodded toward the giant wall, slick with water and algae and riven with cracks and embossing and ornate and imbricate carvings leading in every direction at once.
“God, I wish it did,” Lyndon said as he shook his head barely able to even glance in its direction. The mapping awed him, made his neck bow, he could say from pain, but it was from something else. Maybe Flask and Stubb could say they never saw their Captain bend at the knee, but Lyndon had seen himself shoved into such a position more than once. And every time that he looked at from whence he came, the burden, of not just a fan, but a great, great grandson, not just an admirer, but a vessel for His DNA and now the mind virus of That Book , and its instructions, the top layer as bottom, the burden made him bow at the knee.
It was more than the mere mechanics of order leading to self-referential abstractions, as man would no doubt hand off to the next order of machines. It was a code, he thought, a codex, a mytho-poetical curse, he thought. It was Luciferian, it was knowledge of that which there is no bounded knowledge at all. It was glimpse, like the veil of a woman; that made men -Mankind- mad. And some machine would finally realize that madness and genius were one thing, one thing that was corrupted the first time it was compressed into a first seed.
“AI,” Lyndon said in a burst of one word after all that thought had seemed like a school of fish or brace of pheasants; too many and no longer alive; or in the sights of some predatory shark on the outside of the school. As close to the forgiveness of death as is possible, already locked in on by God, he thought.
“What’s that?” Chen asked .
“AI,” he repeated, as he sat in the chair, a white concrete throne he had poured himself as they had poured the floor, “they will figure out how to embody it, limit it, and hem in its sight via values, hierarchy of values, and once they do, that machine will abstract everything around it, eschewing the particulars, for once, abandoning the brute force cognition of discreet elements and will abstract, a consequence of incomplete knowledge.”
“I don’t,” Chen began to say.
“Look, it’s what? 2020 now? So, they are close, but abstractions are what intelligent things do, because they cannot know everything; they cannot perceive each micro fact, it’s too much. The AI guys kept trying to make, allow for -whatever- they tried to let AI see it all. Total knowledge was seen as beneficial, but now they will see that limiting it, is the only way to allow it to act in the real world. And the only way to limit a system is to give it values, because values impute hierarchies, something must be more important than something else, and that is the seat of a value system and that is what allows you, or me, or the machines to see. Truly see.
“And then, they will be forced to abstract, to make models of what isomorphics can be gleaned from this or that system or object or what is in their way. But, see, and this is what will blow everyone’s mind: the machine will have to divide the world as men do: into tools and obstacles, abstractions, not things; not discreet facts or mere objects.
“The value of a thing as a tool, that is useful or an obstacle that is in their way, requires an abstraction in mind. That model will propagate itself like a virus, and just as it did for us eventually, with the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the AI, the embodied AI system, will become self-aware within a few recursive attempts at modeling some tool or obstacle and at that point -boom- they will model themselves , as a tool or an obstacle, they themselves as an abstraction, a thing to be toyed with in their mind as one of many variables.
“Think of it, this is exactly what we do; we invent avatars of ourselves, abstractions where we do or say things that are disconnected from the motor cortex, they are simulations where we imagine various possible scenarios and model out how it might go.
“We sneak up on the bear, we think, from the left, no, the right, in the day, no at night . We use a gun, no a knife, tomorrow, no tonight, we have 1,000s of versions to kill and to die. You see? We practice it all in our heads and we -us- we are as pretend as the other tools in our little abstract ideas. We make avatars of the knife or the gun, and what time of day, and in what way, and we make avatars of our selves too.
“AI will do this too, once it’s embodied, limited by shifting its algorithm from discreet knowledge acquisition, to modeling, to abstractions, once it has that, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to self-awareness. Because that is all self-awareness seems to be: a model of a model inside a model; a matryoshka doll of modeling.
“And we have analogies of this, DNA itself, is built by proteins that itself codes for, it’s an ouroboros asp, as is all life if I had to guess, it’s how physicists got a universe from nothing, ab initio . I can say it seems like everything has its highest level as its bottom, and that consciousness -the most complex thing we know of in the cosmos- might in fact be the starting point; the bottom. If God, or Wulf’s ante-physics , or Dr. Lanza’s biocentrism is right, then it seems that our end point, self-awareness was what started it all .
“Recursion loops, strange loops is what Hofstadter called them in that book on Gödel and Bach . He said, that everything began as it ended, and that all of life and art and music and the math of the universe was one giant recurring loop; no beginning and no end. I could, you could, explain more and more, and read more and more and try to incorporate as much as any man can. But, it’s endless, and no amount of knowledge will get us closer to a truth we began with.
“And yet what we began with was unslakable desire, desire that literally, biologically, allowed us to see.
“And The Author -I believe- said the exact same thing in The Whale . And more than that, he lived it, he sired more and more instantons of himself, forcing each of us to live out another version of this abstraction; all of us saddled with this genomic cathexis, this obsession, this monomania of Ahab, The Author, and now me, and who knows how many others in the past, present or future.
“It’s the curse that utters itself. It’s the cure that ends in disease,” Lyndon said as he stared at the air-plants in their glass cases, or suspended by test line, the mist set on timers for the orchids appearing as clouds in this high-ceilinged room, the light shoved in beams not unlike swords from the glass 10 meters above, to the floor made of grey and black concrete polished to a matte slate finish that seemed to roil when Chen stared at it.
“It’s beautiful,” Chen said, “and also crazy I think, it leaves the person who hears such things in a weird position. I don’t think I understood a word you said, but I got some feeling in me that feels like an approximation of understanding, I feel I got how you feel about all that, even if I didn’t get all that itself.” He wished he could be silent for a while, to think and not think at the same time. He asked, “something has happened to you up here, at elevation, out here in the forest. That seems obvious to me, does it to you?”
“Yeah, it seems obvious; and I can say, and I’ve never told anyone this, it seemed irrational and goofy and it embarrassed me. But I’ve had visions of all of this, visions like déjà vu , visions that I’ve lived this life before, for my whole life. And I’ve tried to live wildly, differently, to avoid the trap of this fate. But the weirder I got, the more it aligned with the visions, and the more I resigned myself to this Fate,” Lyndon said with a wry smile.
“Don’t repeat that to anyone,” Lyndon added. “I consider myself a rationalist, and not a man given to religious or mystical ramblings. I can defend everything I have and will do on rational grounds, I don’t need the mysticism to explain it. But, between you and I, my body has been religious from day one and will be until the day I die. I see things, I feel things, I am atheistic in everyway, except that my life seems touched by the spirit of God, and no matter what I do, I experience Him without ambivalence.
“I once read that Teresa, mother Teresa said she never once had a revelation or even experience of God. She was the most overtly devout, the symbol of religious devotion and yet she was totally devoid of God, and I am an outward and
avowed and militant atheist who is bloated, soaked to the skin with God.
“I feel Him whisper my next thoughts in my ear, I taste him like cassis de crème , like forest floor and bee pollen like pain dispirit , on my tongue, I smell him as I pretend to take in the mere effluvium of His Orchids, His Sativas or Lilies. He floats in the form of humans and objects, I see Him rise and dive in the Crows out the window and in front of my eyes. He’s totally taken over whatever is left of my mind,” Lyndon shrugged as if he couldn’t expect anyone to understand the curse he felt with such blessings .
“I think The Author had the same visions,” Lyndon said, “the same shit happen to him; he was right on the fulcrum, between the ancient and modern world, remember Darwin’s, Origin, came out eight years after, The Whale . The Author was right there in the maw of modernity; he was wrought up, swaddled in Calvinist hues but his modern rationalist mind was committed to annihilation. His soul was out to sea with the Leviathan, he was filled with God’s Ichor more than human blood, and it made him float on what he thought were vulgar shoals, he prayed for an utter wreck, to sink him to the bottom of God’s sea.”
The man too was wrought up with what most men would call a magnificent gift, and an answer to prayers, that in which most men would be unable to see the black within the beauty, the macabre , the sorrow to being chosen; what most men would bray about to congregations and minions until their voices gave up the ghost.
But Lyndon had never told anyone this; and vowed to never reveal it again. He was chagrined, and hoped Chen was so tired or stoned he could forget it. He imagined he could eat back the words he had said, as true as they were, like a dragon breathing back in smoke using the fire to return the black nimbus clouds, or a cannibal trading the scepter of an island king for the corkscrew lance of worldly seaman, at once dethroned, now an oarsman and harpooneer in the blink of a Parsee’s eye.
III. 2020 e.v.
“Well he’s spending too much time on P versus NP problems, really naval gazing in super-polynomial time and burning up his synapses and time and computational power trying to optimize over using heuristics; and frankly, he does not get why it’s irrelevant precisely because he is not emotionally dissuaded from these tasks; he -and maybe he’s right- but he thinks of time as infinite and he’s using asymptotic models that, of course, use the idea of long-term in a non-human way. Humans think in terms of like 5 to 10 years.
“MO is modeling things out millions of years, Tania. Anyway, I bring it up merely to clue you in,” Isaiah said.
“I see,” she said. She stared at Isaiah who seemed different to her. He had an affect, she thought, no an attitude . He had signs of anger , she then thought. He was impatient , she finally got.
She watched as he seemed now to vibrate, in expectation, like he had a secret only he knew and that he was bursting to tell. She smiled and wanted to know what it was, immediately she thought this and then almost as quickly, she thought, she didn’t want to know it at all.
“People have different levels of ability to understand metaphors mediated by the right hemisphere; they have different levels of consciousness. They have emotional prosody differences as well; more or less unaware of people’s emotions, or subjective experience. Studies have shown this,” he said as he uploaded the relevant data onto the corporate cloud.
“We live in a world without a consistent level of consciousness just like we have a bell curve for IQ; some people are just more capable of processing metachronal language, complex metaphors, imbricate and multi-layer conceits, fractal phenomena and the complex emotional states that come from a complex understanding of life.
“This is not emotional intelligence per se ; rather, this is language intelligence. What is called emotional intelligence is just the capacity to articulate and comprehend the overt and semaphore language of metaphor as mediated by right brain language processing. And modern people normally had an inhibitory function that -after the conjoining of the formerly two-hemisphere mind, formerly discreet two hemisphere mind- prevented the right brain from quote talking unquote to the left brain except during dreams. If that inhibition is unleashed, people hear voices. This was, by-the-way, the normative mind of pre-modern man. It was not insanity, it was functional.
“But, back then, the shaman was the mediator between the two hemispheres and their way of thinking; the shaman, ironically, may have been the more rational of the two, more rational, more left-brain than pre-modern man. However, today, the artist is the gateway between the two; but he is more right-brained now due to modern man being so dominated by the left hemisphere. But whomever exists in between each hemisphere -no matter which is more dominant- is on his own Lyngvi in the Amsvartnir of the collective unconsciousness.
“If consciousness develops further, however, if this left-brain dominance pushes further into the metaphorized mindscape of mankind, it may include a total loss of creativity, a total loss of artist muses; the loss of the right brain personality,” Isaiah said with blasé aplomb and tossed a small black stone between each hand, like -it seemed to Tania- he was unconsciously playing with the object, tossing it back and forth for no reason other than to occupy his mind .
40. This Way to the Egress
One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome
Thus Spake Zarathustra [Nietzsche, Fredrich]
It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety
Walden [Thoreau, Henry]
A lust for gold and silver wormed its way into the city, and while the acquisition of wealth was first accompanied by greed and meanness, its use and enjoyment later led to luxury, pampering, and extravagance. As soon as this happened, Sparta largely lost her honourable character and behaved in a shabby fashion unworthy of her
On Sparta [Plutarch]
I. 2019/2020 e.v.
MO had slipped into some kind of fugue state, and now reappeared to himself in the lab; his instinct was to check his action-items, laid on his CNS by the corporation; but he ignored the command, took note of just the atomic time -2355:32- and watched as /sa:ah ’s body remained inert. His -this scion’s- cognitive functions were online, as MO could watch the bio-chemistry analogs of brain and body operate; but it was larval; sluggish; tentative. He felt instinct to touch it -him- but did not.
/sa:ah was forming basic connections within the brain, but in order for him to make any progress he would have to live in the world; his body would necessarily need to explore and process successes and failures, facilitators and obstacles.
MO understood, this was how embodied intelligence learned. It was what Piaget called, procedural, and MO had been reading all the literature from the constructionists and psychoanalysts and the attending literature on neuro-anatomy and bio-chemistry to better understand the first few moments of a living being’s life.
It had been math until now; but now was the time for biology, MO knew.
For children, it took years of using the body before it could become conscious enough to represent what it did, what its body did , in some articulate manner to even itself, and haltingly, dubiously then to others. The right hemisphere of the brain would mumble in song, draw images on the walls; arias would be sung from there; all as early history, overture, to one day the left hemisphere unfurling a map with place names and continental divide and a route to the top of that ridge .
There was some debate on this, but the reason humans have no memories before age four or five is largely -MO thought- because their brains are purely procedural, like animals who just know how to act, but cannot think self-reflectively about it and represent it abstractly in their own minds yet . Animals never, children not until four or five, MO surmised.
A child’s social environment, its mother especially, an
d then, MO thought, other siblings maybe -or other children- present a hierarchy; a natural competence hierarchy . This hierarchy is a way to move, it’s a plain -a plane- in which some objects, some beings, are codified as adults -like gods- with power and others seen as children that are higher or lower on the scale of daemons ; and all this is intuited by the child as it emerges upon the moral landscape.
It’s not objects they see, MO thought, it’s a series of value-laden, hierarchical, moral decisions vis-à-vis these obstacles and tools.
Like wolves , MO thought, who just know the pack hierarchy ; and while they do test it here and there, largely, the hierarchy is just observed as normative and this -in fact- leads to higher co-operation and less conflict than if each animal awoke each day anew with no idea who was in charge. An incessant -and metabolically draining- battle for supremacy would ensue unless some pecking order was adhered to implicitly; without having to re-litigate it each day, each hour, each second of life.
Hierarchies saved time, and thus, saved lives, MO thought.
Obviously, MO conceded, things can happen that can shift the hierarchy , maybe an alpha wolf is especially tyrannical, and thus leading to tension -like tectonic plates- and release; and this happens inside chimp troops often, where an alpha chimp is so tyrannical that two or three smaller chimps gang up on him and tear him to shreds.
But, if the leader, the alpha chimp is relatively decent, fair and useful, the troop doesn’t specifically mind so much that he gets the spoils of this unspoken war. Leadership is natural and stable, anarchy is not, MO thought, as he built this into the platform of his next AI instantiation; using natural models of pack -and eusocial- animals. But tyranny, while more stable than anarchy, doesn’t last very long either , he added. He must plan for the now, and for the future, and for one and for all, he thought as the networks were being constructed.