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Simulations Of God:
PREFACE
In our own particular ways each of us creates a god as a model of his own DNA, RNA code, of his own genetic structure, of his own family, of his own self. One tends to add to this god simulations devised by others long ago-and recorded by individuals or groups or organizations. No one can know securely where we came from, where I came from, where you came from. No one can know securely who his parents are or were. We must exist as if real in a world that we were precipitated into without ballast. The entity that gave rise to us, our structure, our central nervous system, in all its fine detail, its coding, the orders for building it, the ways it was built, the sperm and the egg combined to create it in the womb of the mother, continuous generation of life on the surface of the planet in the form of the mammal, and of the mammal, the anthropoid, and of the anthropoid, the human, which is us. We are part of the universe trying to
describe itself and the rest of the universe. When one looks inside
and sees himself, there is nothing. Feedback is complete in the void;
however, there is a sense of being, consciousness, a state of being
I am, I am that, I am it, which finally leads one to a variety of apparatus
commonly called the human body. We are assigned either a male or a female
body and hence the roles we must play with our neighbors are those of
a male or a female. In order to escape the incessant pressures of day-to-day esistence while still performing effectively in our roles, we create gods, and we worship these gods But the peculiar clarity, the crystal clear consciousness of a self that exists, and that ceases at death are not to be explained by any simulation. I AM, MY BODY IS, THE EXTERNAL WORLD IS a particular configuration as of this particular date, time, trips around the sun, past history. However, I am independent of the machine, the biocomputer, the brain, and the body in which I live: somehow I don't quite know, nor did any of the ancient philosophers know, how one's particular oonsciousness inhabited a particular configuration of atoms and molecules. As we change the molecules, the consciousness and the realities of that consciousness change. Somehow the realities of the situation, the determinacy which generates the reality, are in the structure of the particular assemblage, molecules, crystals, liquid crystals, conductors, lasers, masers, which make up the body. As we discover inside ourselves how we are built, so we can build outside ourselves simulations of ourselves. (We say this is certain or determinate.) We then can produce, can create from the raw materials of the mother earth planet very peculiar forms- solid state, liquid state, gas state, gel state, and so forth, replications, models, simulations of ourselves, extensions of ourselves. We move about with them, we become mobile with them. We use the energy, the entropic energy of dead ammals, of dead plants, on a network of interrelated and interconnected lines of communication in a huge hive of human activities. However, if one were to orbit the planet in a space capsule, he would realize that this is a very thin film, a macromolecular configuration of humans distributed very sparsely in relation to the size of the entire surface. He would realize also that most of the surface is not an earth-air interface but a water-air interface. Most of the surface is inhabited by mammals superior to us in certain ways, be it in a particular mobility or in a motivation more concentrated on their particular necessities. The dolphins, the porpoises and the whales have brains and bodies far superior to ours for use in the sea and far inferior to ours for use on the land. We who live on the land-featherless bipeds, with columns within our bodies to keep us upright against gravity-do not know the simulations of ourselves which would be possible if we were immersed in liquid of a density comparable with our own density, as are the dolphins, the porpoises and, the whales twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, day and night, blackness and light, deepness and shallows, away from the land, close to the land-a very different environment from New York City, from London, from Paris, wherever. We assume that we can talk about our consciousness, our altered states of consciousness, our simulations of God and indeterminacy; however, in order to appreciate what I am talking about, you must directly experience your own simulations, your simulations of yourself, the fakeries that we place in the place of ourselves. "I am not my opinion of me" is one of the exercises we have assigned to groups. "I am only a small program in an immense space that contains billions of programs. I am only one among many, the part of the whole." Humility starts within one's own structure. One is not one's whole structure. One is only an inhabitant of that structure. We attempt to subsume in our belief systems a complete picture of reality, of the universe, of God, as if we knew it all. Of course this is false. We are proud of our knowledge and ashamed of our ignorance. We should have neither shame nor pride in regard to our knowledge. Our knowledge just is. Our ignorance just is. If we can shed all preconceptions including the psychoanalytic ones and think of ourselves in terms of our structure, of our quantum mechanics, of our quantum mechanical minimum possible operators, minimum possible observers, minimum possible choosers, minimum possible others, we can then build up a structure, an analog, a metaphor of ourselves which is more in keeping with what is actually there. Once a structure begins to recognize its own structure, then it can become conscious in a way that was not possible before it was aware it was a structure. A computer that begins to think in terms of its own software and its hardware reaches the boundary between software and hardware and begins to see that pure consciousness is a state of High Indifference. It will not take sides, punish, or reward; it will be totally neutral~neutral reinforcement, which is neither negative reinforcement nor positive reinforcement. Neutral reinforcement is where it is at. We biocomputers have finally devised those computers outside ourselves which tell us who we are. We are the neutral observer, the neutral operator in a biocomputer who does not care about reward or punishment, who cares only about neutral reinforcement. The state of high computational indifference is amazing. When in that state one can become ecstatic, logically, rationally ecstatic; one can become angry, logically, rationally angry; one can become sexually aroused, logically, rationally sexually aroused, and so on, all within the confines of total computation and rationality. This state is the next level of evolution of that organism from which I speak--as a so-called Homo sapiens. |
