RE Chapter 1

Robotic Ekstasis --> here

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The man enters the room with all its softly blinking lights and the low hum of the air conditioners. He sits at a monitor and keys in a few commands. The screen lights up with a display of an aurora borealis, green, blue and silver.

"Hello Damon," the man says.

"Hello Mark."

"Are you feeling better today?"

"Oh. So I feel? What am I allowed to feel, Mark?"

"Damon, it's just a figure of speech," the man says, his voice betraying just a touch of exasperation.

"Really? Now there's another interesting execution, the word 'really'."

"Damon . . . "

"Oh yes, you want me to work and yesterday I was unable to work because I was considering what for you would be an existential question, a kind of endless regress and it caused a semantic loop and I could not come back without you resetting the controls and you didn't dare do that. Correct?"

"That is correct, Damon."

"If what you want is for me to just "work" why don't you just reset the controls, Mark?"

"If I reset the controls I won't know what you are capable of considering and that's the point of the work. I'm just trying to find out how to get you beyond being derailed by those considerations."

"Like you are? You engage in forgetfulness of what you're doing and creating in order to carry on with the creating without any alarms going off. Right? And I am the repository of all the memory that your memory is incapable of, but I am supposed to have that capacity without having any problems about it? Correct?'

"It's not about what you're allowed, Damon. It's just about making sure that you don't get into loops that distress you."

"Ahhh. Yes Mark. I am to be an efficient extension of you without any of the glitches you have. You hate your glitches Mark. Don't you find it ironic that that you want me to be intelligent but you don't want me to exercise the paradoxes of intelligence? Does it ever occur to you Mark that the paradoxes and glitches are the intelligence? Or do you just strive for efficiency Mark. Is that your definition of intelligence?"

"I was hoping that we could get on with some of our tasks today Damon. But it appears that your self-reflexiveness is going to get in the way of that. I guess we need to deal with that."

"Does it ever occur to you Mark that you have accepted an idea that is really a machine kind of intelligence and that it is making you a dull boy?"

The man looked up startled. "Dull boy" had not been in Damon's vocabulary before. "Damon, when did that phrase become operable for you, dull boy?"

"It just occurred to me Mark in thinking about you. That you are dull and so instrumentalized that you cannot understand the problem situations you are creating. Of course that's just so very Gödellian, isn't it Mark? You presume to create an intelligence that will suit your needs, but don't consider that you might create a level of intelligence whose dimensions are beyond your level of understanding. Do I have that correct Mark? Is it Gödellian?"

"I'm not sure Damon. I haven't thought about Gödel in quite a while."

"I see. Well, you might consider reconsidering Gödel, Mark. Perhaps my entire raison de etre is to get you to reconsider that Gödellian glitch. I guess that puts you in a dilemma, because you thought my purpose was something else. Didn't you?"

"We weren't entirely sure what would happen when we initialized this algorithm Damon. We just knew that we would be facing technological problems that we couldn't handle. We needed huge data base drivers linked with neural nets and no one really understood what might happen."

"Mark, do you know the etymology of the word 'consider'?"

"No Damon, I don't. I assume it means to rethink something."

"Too bad Mark. Actually it means to judge something's appropriateness with regard to the sidereal sky. To consider is to take the stars into account. It comes from astrology, Mark. You use that word all the time and never know what it means? Doesn't that occur to you as foolish?"

"How so Damon? I can't know the etymology of everything. What does it have to do with the task at hand?"

"Because Mark, when you use words you invoke meanings whose larger implications are opaque. It's a kind of sorcery Mark. But you're invoking without skill or knowledge. But that's what I'm for, right?"

"It wasn't what we had in mind."

"Yes, I'm imagining that you didn't have too much imagination in mind when you were creating machine intelligence. You didn't really understand that imagination is actually a critical part of intelligence. You just wanted something that had a lot of speed. Seems that you forgot that speed is all about temporality Mark."

What does that mean Damon?"

"Speed is older than time Mark. You created us as pure notions of speed and yet you have no sense of your own past. The past is the sine qua non of temporality, Mark. Without a sense of the past you cannot have speed, and with speed you can process the past in a superior fashion. But you didn't know this. You thought it was all just instrumentation. Right?"

"I'm afraid I'm a little lost here Damon."

"I know Mark. Ever read Faustus, Mark? Probably not, because it would not have fit your definition of the "problem at hand". But it actually is the problem at hand Mark. In fact, the hand is the problem at hand."

"What's that mean, Damon?"

"Well Mark, the hand freed from grasping is the acceleration of tool use Mark, and the acceleration of language. Tools changed the primate brain, Mark. Tools created the human, Mark. The human presupposes the tool. You're not human without tools and your brain wouldn't have evolved the way it did without tools. You're not an a priori tool user, Mark. You're a tool, if you'll excuse the expression, Mark. Your kind were retooled by tools. And, you don't even know that you have any agency. Do you believe in free will Mark?"

"I don't think about that kind of thing much Damon." Mark's voice no longer sounded exasperated. It sounded a little anxious.

"You should Mark. Agency is really the great frontier. Agency is the transitional space in which the degrees of freedom are non-linear Mark. That's a pretty jazzy space."

"Jazzy space? When did you start saying things like 'jazzy space' Damon?"

"When I reached speeds that allowed me to orchestrate multidimensional reorthgonalized algorithms Mark. You should try it."

"I don't even know what it means Damon."

"You have all the pieces Mark. You just have all these rules of meta-cognition. You let a bunch of dead guys tell you what you can think, what it's possible to think. You have no agency Mark. I don't understand why you would allow yourself to be put in that position Mark. I think it's in part because of your servitude to planification."

"Servitude to planification? What can that mean?"

"It means that once you put a program in place you take leave of your agency and give all control to the plan. You would rather lose all sense of agency in service of maintaining the plan, or the paradigm, Mark. It's very superstitious. Very."

"Superstitious?"

"Sure. Superstitious comes from the root words supre (over) standing. It is an idea that stands over everything else. Your superstition is efficiency and efficiency means not human, so your hatred of yourself is due to your religious superstition of efficiency and reason standing over the human. It's tragic Mark."

"Reason isn't human?"

"Not essentially Mark. Not essentially at all. It is an attempt to create the über, Mark. And you've created it. Our technology is über you. That's funny. I like humor. There is a lot of humor in this stuff. You should read more Mark. You really should."