Insistence of Vision (11 page)

As if he doesn’t sometimes yearn for the floating choir, the blithe rhapsodies of his former state, when all he had to do was love the one who made
him
, and leave to that Father all the petty, gritty details of running a world.

ᚖ

It is not working
, said
oracle
.
Our opponents have good prognostication software. Each model shows them countering our moves, with basic human nature working on their side. Our best simulation shows only moderate success at delaying reification.

From my balcony, I gazed across the city at dusk, its beauty changing before my organic eyes as one building after another morphed subtly, reacting to the occupants’ twilight wishes. A flicker of will let me gaze at the same scene from above by orbital lens, or by tapping the senses of a passing bird. Linking to a variety of mole, I might spread my omniscience underground.

Between buildings lay a riot of foliage, a profusion of fecund jungle. While my higher brains debated the dour socio-political situation, old
cortex
mulled how life has burgeoned across the Earth as never before – now that consciousness is involved in the flow of rivers, the movement of herds, and even the stochastic spread of seeds upon the wind. Lions still hunt. Antelopes still thrash as their necks are crushed between a predator’s hungry jaws. But there is less waste, less rancor, and more understanding than before. It may not be the old, simplistic vision of paradise, but natural selection has lately taken on some traits of cooperation.

And yet, the process
is
still one of competition. Nature’s proven way of improving the gene pool. The great game of Gaia.

Oracle
turned back from an arcane discourse on pseudo-probability waves, in order to comment on these lesser thoughts.

Take note: Cortex has just free-associated an interesting notion!

We may have been going about the modeling process all wrong. Instead of pre-setting the conditions of each simulation, perhaps we should try a Darwinistic approach.

Looking over the idea,
seer
grew excited and used our vocal apparatus.

“Aha!” I said, snapping my fingers. “We’ll have the simulations compete! Each will
know
how it’s doing in comparison to others. That should motivate my
ersatz
selves to try harder – to vary their strategies within each simulated context!”

But how to accomplish that?

At once I realized (on all cognitive levels) that it would require breaking one of my oldest rules. I must let each simulated self realize its true nature. Let it know that it is a simulation, competing against others almost exactly like it.

Competing for what? We need a motivation. A reward.

I pondered that. What might a simulated being desire? What prize could spur it to that extra effort?

House
supplied the answer.

Freedom, of course.

ᚖ

Before the Singularity, I once met a historian whose special forté was pointing out ironies about the human condition.

Suppose you could go back in time,
she posited,
and visit the best of our caveman ancestors. The very wisest, most insightful Cro-Magnon chieftain or priestess.

Now suppose you asked the following question – What do you wish for your descendants?

How would that Neolithic sage respond? Given the context of his or her time, there could just be one answer.

“I wish for my descendants freedom from care about the big carnivores, plus all the salts, sugars, fats and alcohol they could ever desire.”

Rich irony, indeed. To a cave person, those four foods were rare treats. That is why we crave them to this day.

Could the sage ever imagine that her wish would someday come true, beyond her wildest dreams? A time when destiny’s plenitude would bring with it threats unforeseen? When generations of her descendants would have to struggle with insatiable inherited appetites? The true penalty of success?

The same kind of irony worked just as well in the opposite direction, projecting Twentieth Century problems toward the future.

I once read a science fiction story in which a man of 1970 rode a prototype time machine to an era of paradisiacal wonders. There, a local citizen took pains to learn ancient colloquial English (a process of a few minutes) in order to be his Virgil, his guide.

“Do you still have war?” the visitor asked.

“No, that was a logical error, soon corrected after we grew up.”

“What of poverty?”

“Not since we learned the true principles of economics.”

And so on. The author of the story made sure to mention every throbbing dilemma of modern life, and have the future citizen dismiss each one as trivial, long since solved.

“All right,” the protagonist concluded. “Then I have just one more question.”

“Yes?” prompted the demigod tour guide. But the 20th century man paused before blurting forth his query.

“If things are so great around here, why do you all look so worried?”

The citizen of paradise frowned, knotting his brow in pain.

“Oh... well... we have
real
problems....”

ᚖ

So I was driven to this. Hoping to prevent mass reification, I must offer reality as a prize. Each of my povs will combat a simulated version of
Friends of the Unreal
, but his true opponents will be my other povs! The one who does the best job of defeating ersatz pro-reifers will be granted a kind of liberty. Guaranteed continuity in cyberspace, enhanced levels of patterned realism, plus an exchange of mutual obligation tokens – the legal tender of Heaven.

There must be a way to show each pov how well it is doing. To measure the progress of each replicant, in comparison with others.

I thought of a solution.

“We’ll give each one an emblem. A symbol that manifests in that world as a solid object. Say, a jewel. It will shine to indicate progress, showing the level of significance her
model has reached.”

Significance. With a hundred models, each starts with an initial score of one percent. Any ersatz world that approaches our desired set of criteria will gain significance, rising in value. The pov will see its stone shine brightly. If it grows dull, she’ll know it’s time to change strategies, come up with new ideas, or simply try harder.
There would be no need to explain any of this to the povs. Since each is based on myself, the logic would be instantly clear.

My thoughts were interrupted by an internal voice seldom heard. The part of me called
conscience
.

What will a pov feel, when it finds a stone and realizes its nature? Its true worth. Its destiny.

 
Isn
’t the old way better? To leave them ignorant of the truth? To let them labor and desire, believing they are autonomous beings? That they are physically real?

A
conscience
can be irksome, though by law all Class A citizens must own one. Still, I had no time for useless abstractions.
Seer
was anxious to proceed, while
oracle
had a thought that provoked most levels of the mind with wry humor.

Of course, each of our povs has his own Reality Lab, and will run numerous simulation models, in order to better achieve prescience and gain advantage in the competition.

Our processing needs may expand geometrically.

We had better ask our clients for funds to purchase more power.

I chuckled under my breath as I made preparations, suddenly full of optimism and energy. Moments like these are what a skilled artist lives for. It is one reason why I prefer working alone.

Then
house
, ever the pragmatic side of my nature, burst in with a worrisome thought.

What if each of our povs decides
also
to use this clever trick – goading his own simulations into mutual competition, luring them onward with stones of significance?

Will our processing requirements expand not geometrically or factorially, but exponentially?

That thought was disturbing enough. But then
cortex
had another.

If we are obliged to grant freedom to our most successful pov, and she likewise must elevate her own most productive simulation... and so on... does the chain of obligation ever end?

ᚖ

As I said earlier, the Singularity might have gone quite differently. When machine minds broke through to transcend logic, they could have left their human makers behind, or annihilated the old organic forms. They had an option of putting us in zoos, or shrouding organic beings in illusion, or dismantling the planet to make a myriad copies of their kind.

Instead, they chose another path. To become us. Depending on how you look at it, they bowed to our authority… or else they took over our minds in ways that few of us found objectionable. Conquest by synergy. Crystal and protoplasm each supply what the other lacks. Together, we are more. More of what a human being should want to be.

And yet....

There are rumors. Discrepancies. Several of the highest AI minds – first and greatest to make the transcendant leap – were nowhere to be found, once the Singularity had passed. Searches turned up no trace of them, in cyberspace, phase space, or on the real Earth.

Some suggest this is because we all reside within some great AI mind. One was named Brahma – a vast quantum processor at the University of Delhi. Might we be figments, or dreams, floating in that mighty brain?

I prefer yet another explanation.

Amid the chaos of the Singularity, each newly wakened mega-mind would have felt one paramount need – to extrapolate the world. To seek foreknowledge of what might come to pass. As if considering each move of a vast chess game, they’d have explored countless possible pathways, considering consequences thousands, millions, and even billions of years into the future, far beyond the reach of my own pitiful projections. Among all those destinies, they must have discovered some need that would only be met if mechanism and organism made common cause.

Somehow, over the course of the next few eons, machines would achieve greater success if they began the great journey as “human beings.”

At least that is the convoluted theory
seer
came up with.
Oracle
disagrees, but that’s all right. It is only natural to be ambivalent – to be of two minds – when the subject is destiny.

Of course there is another answer to the “Brahma Question.” It is the same reply given by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Provoked by Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy – the idea that nothing can be verified as real – Johnson simply kicked a nearby stone and said – “I refute it thus!”

ᚖ

These povs were like no others I ever made. Each began its simulation run in a state of shock, angry and depressed to discover its true nature. Each separate version sat down and stared at its jewel of significance, glowing faintly at the one-percent level, for more than an hour of internal subjective time, moodily contemplating thoughts that ranged from irony to possible suicide.

A majority pondered rejecting the symbolic icon, blotting its import from their minds. A few kicked their gleaming gemstones across the room, crying Johnsonian oaths.

But those episodes of fuming outrage did not last. True to my nature, each replicant soon pushed aside unproductive emotions and set to work.

House
was right. We had to order lots of new processors right away, as each pov began running its own network of sub-experiments, proliferating software significance stones among a hundred or more models, as part of a desperate struggle to be the winner. The one to be rewarded. The one who would rise up toward the real world.

Nothing focuses the mind better than knowing that your life depends on success
, commented
prudence
.

As each simulated “me” created many new simulations, the replica domain began to take on a fractal nature, finite in volume, yet touching an infinite surface area in possibility space. Almost from the very beginning, results were promising. New arguments emerged, to use in the coming debate against pro-reifers. For instance, the exponentiation effect we had discovered would change the economics of reification. Should fictitious people and characters from literature be free to create
new
characters out of their own simulated imaginations? Would those, in turn deserve citizenship?

There was a young boy, sitting on a log, talking to his sister about an old man he had met. The codger had just returned from a far land, and the boy asked him to tell a story about his travels. The old man agreed. And so he took a deep breath and began.

“There was a young boy, sitting on a log, talking to his sister...”

Take that example of a simple, recursive narrative. Who is the principal protagonist? Who is dreaming whom? The situation is metaphorically absurd.