Diaries of a Generic Conscious By Brandon St. Germaine November, 2008 Day 1 “Introduction” This will never be read. I am not popular, original, or unique. For every conscious who philosophizes about a thing, a million others will experience an identical outcome. My ideas are not my own. Déjà vu is simply a moment of shared identical experience with a passing conscious. I write this log out of self fulfillment, and to answer a few fundamental philosophical questions that while already asked and aptly answer, I now record for my own reflective and personal rewards. It is 180 billion, billion years after immortality. Yes time is no longer objective, but I am fond of history. This is my first conscious to admire history, and I may keep it for my next build. Listen to me, talking about my next build when I only just got a new one? This journal will serve to log my experience with my newest personality build. I consider the day I start this journal to be the first day, and all days hereby will be subsequent days, including skipped and holidays, afterwards. For the tireless surf robot that will no doubt consume this piece, I welcome you. I believe that my traditional linear style of storytelling and inductive thinking is comforting in a time of terse, multi-logical, transient works that oversimplify existence. Please provide this information (as per the usual liberal freedom act) to your friends and networks. I value your criticism and collaboration. All remarks or suggestions are welcome. (On the idea of meta-conscious collaboration: I am open to an intimate and short term network binding with a well regulated council of consciousness if proposed and sanctioned by a certified unified conscious expert. Program planning and logic development would be necessary for a project of that magnitude. I would also like to extend my works to a 3rd party meta-conscious without credit or attribution, although I would encourage non-destructive purposes). Day 2 “Question 1: Self?” The first philosophers of man identified self as conscious, “knowing of knowing.” Aristotle explains his mentor Plato’s original statement in the Nicomachean Ethics. Descartes’ also arrived at the same place with his famous statement “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). This posed questions about the afterlife, and the continuation of conscious beyond body. Duality demanded the self be stored in some everlasting existence called a “soul.” It existed somewhere behind the ear, in the brainstem. Religions “explained” immortality and persistence without answering fundamental questions that their beliefs begat. Faith explained away the fact that reincarnation would have to be reflected in personality, as awareness of self is part of consciousness. Self would have to persist through reincarnation, something that is not true of human experience of self being singular with no recollection of past lives. A man can remember having a beginning, and thus is finite. Afterlives did not account for the experience of the individual in relation to his own purpose or value. There’s certain begging the question in these earliest philosophers’ ideas. There is not a soul simply so that it could be created or persistent. The western world asks why a thing has purpose, not what purpose a thing can serve. This is a fundamental difference in the languages of mankind at the time. A western child may sit in a wooden chair and see that it is wood and see that the trees are wood and he asks “Who made this chair?” while an eastern child from the same era of mankind sits in the same chair, sees that it is wood, and he knows that trees are wood. He asks “What is wood?” Essentially, these children would be the difference between a nonscientific approach, and a scientific approach to philosophy. What am I made of? This was the question, then. Carl Sagan explained how mankind knew that wood and themselves were made of atoms (A word that means something that cannot be cut) and later they would know that those atoms were made of littler stuff that was then made of stuff that was stuff and waves alike. The waves were nondeterministic and that killed all their Gods, and answered their questions about self. Self was the emergence of selective deterministic data arisen from the complex but simple biological electrical impulses in brain tissues called neurons. Mankind was an atheist who believed in personal fate. This satisfied him, for now. Biology would reintroduce the question of self after several hundred years thanks to those early eastern children. Humans would persistently increase their lifespan by decades, gaining exponential age lengthening for several thousands of years. In this time, we improved on every aspect of human technology. A self replicating robotic space exploration system would be launched, expanding the communications of mankind across the galaxy. The airwaves would be silent, for now. Instead, where he looked for intelligence, he learned about matter and other universe cosmologies that looked nothing like earth’s sun/solar system/planetary model. Sentient life is discovered in these places in ways that are only now being understood. Beings beyond the idea and dimension of consciousness were explored and measured by mankind’s long living scientists. They started thinking about themselves again. They would decode the human genome, and then learn to encode it. Soon mankind would master the finer arts of human design, and would create genetically untarnished “shells,” full human bodies designed by their soon-to-be hosts, that would house the brain of an individual. This brain would synoptically integrate with the t-cell brain stems of their new body. After a few months of learning and integration, an individual would be able to experience a brand new life in their artificially created, all natural human body. Eventually, certain discoveries allowed mankind to make these shells decay-free. They would not age, would require no nourishment, and would be fully recyclable. Mankind was essentially free from natural death, and could travel to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, but was still limited by his greatest animalistic instinct: War. Where the eastern children had harnessed technology to develop and enrich their lives, the western children fought about their duality and theism that had been negated long ago. Naturalism argued that mankind had no right to design its fate. Faith and Theology had survived the thousands of years of sustained human brains. Suicide bombings, webcasted lobotomies, riots, brain viruses, mass suicides, holy wars, and genocide were persistent among all of the colonies. Worlds had been destroyed and entire settlements lost to the rot of anti-liberal collectivism. The immortality of mankind was already attained, but mankind was still killing his own self. Transience would come from the combined efforts of 24,000 colony biochemical nano-computer collaborations working to unwrap the human brain. To understand the brain as well as he understood the body would allow him to design and develop his personality. This program was called “Process 452: Ergo” and in the 3rd millennium, it became conscious. Emergent processes in the mapping scheme developed a mostly logical human consciousness with a large capacity to retain knowledge, but small decision making skills. 24 hours later, after the first conversation was had with created consciousness “Ergo,” mankind was able to store his conscious on a computer. Mankind was immortal on a May Tuesday in Rome 3302. Within a decade, mankind would be designed and biological procreation would cease to exist outside of fringe nature cultures living comfortably on entirely designed planets. He used the vast network of computers sprawled out in the galaxy as travel. He existed within its confines as bits and bytes. He saved his self to banks that would secure his identity against copying, corrupting, or deletion. A man was now not asking who he was, or if he was a male at all. Mankind created all aspects of his identity, existing merely as a consciousness, or if he chose, a physical or robotic body currently being occupied. Self became information, and information became everything. Artificial consciousness was now as valid as real consciousness. This freed man from his psychological, mathematical, and conceptual limitations. A conscious could simply know whatever he needed to know from the internet. He could now decide his personality on a whim. His memory was limited to storage space, which was now absolutely unlimited. Man became perfect, infallible beings living in a perfect network of absolute liberty. Mankind became God. This ultimate transience of self still leaves this single question open for debate: Is my identity my self, even if I have created it?