A book has been written by the title of this blog, The Mind and the Machine: What It Means to Be Human and Why It Matters.  This topic becomes more and more relevant as computers take over human tasks. Each human is partly machine, partly something else, and it is that part that distinguishes humans from the machines. This book explores each aspect of the human. Let the machines take care of themselves, they neither perceive nor feel. The rest of life will be more meaningful.

I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.

Alpha Centauri

Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother’s early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn’t have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she’s grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels – her own personal metacortex . . .

Accelerando

Quantum-entangled communication means when one bit changes, another changes simultaneously. It happens in every day life, in a more balanced way. As an aside, uranium exists as a mineral in harmony, as a part of the whole. When taken out, isolated, and separated from the rest of life, radioactive decay happens and the surrounding environment turns toxic. Same thing happens to create table sugar. Sugar beets are boiled and refined until the forms acceptable to the human mind is created. That is, little white cubes, sand like, having no taste, only a stimulant to the mind. Why no taste? Just buy some molasses and see what you’ve missed. What monsters modern economic structures can create in the name of “shelf life”, “profit margin”, and “food safety” through pasteurization.

Putting the aside aside, and putting what’s left over aside, is the issue from the previous post. Thoughts can cross, just as the sea can cross, from the painting to its environment, from the machine to the brain. I, for one thing I can vote for, would elect to let the machine take over the 98% of my thoughts that are repetitive. Then I can devote my self to wholly creative pursuits. It’s like writting a novel without having to remember what happens next in the plot, because it’s just one thought away. Then I can do something totally outlandish, say, reverse the fate of the character, with a new thought I create. The machine then churns, and I get a perfectly consistent plot. In this way, my work is wholly creative. This, by the way, is how a eudaimoniac society functions.

However, let’s return to the 2% of the thoughts that are non-repetitive, dynamically generated. Do thoughts generate thoughts? If so, the world is created by our thoughts, and our meaningless thoughts are showing us a meaningless world. The previous sentence included. Now you have no hope, absolutely none, of escaping it.

The other alternative, of course, is to twist reality. This is where value and money comes. Here, this will be the answer to all of your life’s questions/problems. Here, buy this and you will be better than everybody else. It will make you ★ “special” ★. All it really comes down to is the foundation of our materialistic society. Science takes on an “objective” view of reality, itself not included in the picture, and says thoughts are created by stimulus. Pav Lov rang the bell every time before feeding the dogs. He rings it many more times without the food, and the dogs still come. That is the basis of the predictable universe. The universe is governed by certain laws, although your thoughts are totally meaningless. Physicists like Stephen Hawking since Aristotle’s time are still trying to model the universe with meaningless thoughts.

But wait a minute! I now come to a contradiction. The kind allowed by Plato in a proof. Quantum entangled bits means the cause cannot be separated from effect. As you are get out the coat, a thought comes that you should fetch the umbrella. Next minute, it rains as you take a step out the door. That’s quantum entanglement. Where did the tought come from? Where did the rain come from? (more details in Schrodinger’s cat) Now science has the fundamental assumption of cause and effect, in which certain stimulus causes a determined set of behavior. By contradiction, a twisted reality (which means a fake reality) cannot exist.

I once read a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The first habit, the most important one is to be proactive. The key to that is to choose. A choice is different from a decision. Decisions are made on a conscious level of the mind. The alternatives are weighed and the pros and cons compared. A machine could do that better than humans. Assign weights to the priorities, gather the values each alternative offers to the priority, multiply and sum. One suggestion in the book is to change the vocabulary. That also happens on a mental level. Instead of saying “I must”, “I have to”, change it to “I choose”. That makes it obvious to the mind that there is a choice. However, a choice on the level of thought is still trapped in the same level.

Einstein understood that a problem created on one level cannot be solved at the same level. For example, the problem of crime in those crook havens cannot be solved by sending the military there and issuing martial law. In the medieval ages when crime was practically nonexistent, the church taught young men how to behave in their society. In this case, problems on the level of biology are not solved on the same level. In fact, neighborhoods with military bases tend to have higher crime rates due to those biological tendencies being fed. A guy waiting a few seconds for his burger reaches to his belt to pull out a gun, only to find his hands slipping through. Same thing with the problems twentieth century physics faced. Einstein solved them by going to the metaphysical level, doing thought experiments about the nature of the universe.

“I choose” is merely another “I must”, if you see what I mean. The mind says, “I must say ‘I choose’, if I am to get out of here”. See? That’s a mechanistic action programmed by thought forms absorbed through reading a book. So what does it mean to make a choice? Pause and think about this for many minutes, perhaps for the rest of your life. That is a pointer (the words do not matter) to the purpose of your life (and many reincarnations).

Now I’m going to blow out the ember on the candle with this one, so don’t read the rest of this article if you want to find the purpose of your life.  Words cut reality into pieces. If I say “pencil”, the 3D image of a pencil immediately appears in your mind, as if it existed in its own universe. That’s the mistake Plato and all professors made since him, in one of his dialogues, “The dialectic comes before all.”. The dialectic is simply the question and answer way of deriving logic through a dialogue. That’s like saying the universe sprang from Newton’s first law. So to have a true line of reasoning that reflects reality, either there is no beginning, or the beginning itself is subject to its own laws. That means the scientific method is examined by the scientific method, just as the genetic code modifies itself. I find it funny that the scientific method is set in stone, just as .005 is set in statistics for a negligible correlation for the data to prove the hypothesis.

If you are still reading, I suggest you stop. This is where the words may blind you. None of us, except for super humans (as in Nietzche’s idea), of which the human race has had close to none except the Christos,  has ever made a choice in our lives. For one thing, most humans who participate in modern society live in a conscientious hallucination. As a metaphor, take for example a map that is to represent the world. In previous ages, it was possible for a human to know the entire map, that is, to be regarded as someone who understands the world. That is one way to define an engineer. Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer, was an early example. Newton was an alchemist, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and theologian. Now the map is too big for any single person to know it. It happened as a result of the renaissance. Newton was really the last magician and the first scientist. Science really cut the world into many fine pieces. The basic scientific tool is an experiment, and that assumes you’ve got a piece of the world isolated from the rest of it. That’s why modern scientists do not understand quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, the part not explained by any theory, is at play in your life at this very moment. How else would you be reading this article? Consulting the I Ching is one example of coincidences at work. How else do relevant and insightful answers come just by tossing 6 coins?

Our modern world is in fact the map, not the real world it’s supposed to represent. See? Not many since civilized society appeared have lived outside the map. The map is passed down generation to generation, as a guiding light for young men. What happens when one comes to the edge of it? There is a choice. One can either carry the map in his pocket as he goes into the wilderness, or he can choose to burn the map, to forget about the delusion once and for all. Any ways, that map is rotting, just as human flesh rots, sitting beside a piece of metal. By human flesh I mean the body of human thought and total understanding of the universe. By the piece of metal I mean that in front of you, yes, the rigid, cold, alien thing. The rapid pace of technology has outpaced the rate at which the map can be handed down from generation to generation. Now young people are handed shreds of the map from their parents. Some try to piece it together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Try smoking, try sex, study this at the university, travel around the world, etc. Others realize the shreds are rotting in their hands as they look at it. That’s why children are so good with toys adults do not know how to use. They don’t have a map at all when learning new technology. Old metaphors no longer work with new technology. A TV with a switch dial and tuner cannot be operated the same way as an XBox. So parts of the old map has rotten away, revealing the logical, linear, predictable behavior of a machine designed by the machine of the global economy of which we are all a part. In other areas where the map has rotten, biological tendencies are revealed: gang violence, drug lords, pornography. The old map where kings once lived, marriages were a happy ending, and a trade lasted a man for a lifetime, was gone. In place of it, we have one filled with information traveling faster than the speed of light, immortality and godhood, infinite and worthless copies of music/art, environments changed at the click of a button, anything and everything was permitted, as long as it is virtual, the answer to all of life’s questions to be found on Google . . .