Cosmology
In mechanical engineering, impedance matching insulates a building from seismic waves. The seismic insulation on LIGO was done to an extreme degree. Perhaps galactic civilization have built vast dark matter as insulation for some instrument that really needs gravitational quietness.
New religion: The black hole god. Because black hole singularities are where the Einstein field equations become indeterminate, it opens up a gap for God. Thus, the new black hole theology arose. The idea is that on the other side of black hole is a worm hole to the antechamber of God. At the end of time, the universe would become just one giant black hole – and that is Judgment Day. The religion collapsed from discovery of Hawking radiation.
Simulation hypothesis
The RAM of God: New religious organization that opposes von Neumann probes, because they worry it will destroy God’s computer RAM.
New brains
Semantic apocalypse
Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the Universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.
if commonsense intentional psychology really were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species; if we’re that wrong about the mind, then that’s the wrongest we’ve ever been about anything. The collapse of the supernatural, for example, didn’t compare; theism never came close to being as intimately involved in our thought and practice – especially our practice – as belief/desire explanation is.
Perhaps our commonsense talks about the self, beliefs, wishes, feelings, hopes, are also hacks with words to do something that is actually not factual at all, and when some more efficient interface comes along, these talks would be replaced as another organ that has lost its grip, like all those Ediacaran fossils. As history goes on, the grip of folk psychology keeps slipping from the universe.
Despite the florid diversity of answers to the Question of Meaning, they tend to display a remarkable degree of structural convergence… even apparently radical departures from traditional thought, such as Buddhism. No matter how diverse the answers seem to be, they all remain anchored in the facts of our shared neurophysiology. So what happens when we inevitably leave that shared neurophysiology behind? … Because we define madness according what our brains normally do, once we begin personalizing our brains, ‘normally do’ will become less and less meaningful, ‘insanity’ will simply be what one tribe calls another, and from our antiquated perspective, it will all look like insanity.
Beyond wisdom
For example, “Don’t be so sensitive!”, when taken out of context, is perfectly meaningless and useless. When put into the opposite context, it is quite offensive. In certain contexts, it’s very useful.
What does it mean, then? It means that “Don’t be so sensitive” is not a logical sentence, that is, its interpretation is not a boolean value. Instead, it is a feedback-control signal, a delta-value. Written formally, it would be like REQUEST -1 emotion. Dopamine is not the “happiness signal”. Instead, it is also a delta-value. It means “reward is greater than predicted reward”, with the dopamine signal frequency proportional to the delta-value.
This theory of wisdom solves two puzzles:
- many wisdom sayings are not even wrong, because they are not logical statements. Their interpretations are not boolean values, but delta-values.
- when I use wisdom sayings in all the wrong places, they still seem to work. This is because I wouldn’t be “distorting the truth”, since there is no truth there in the first place.
Wisdom-sayings are a hack that humans use to communicate delta-values to each other. Humans have very precise instruments for conveying delta-values inside each one’s brain, but across brains, they have nothing but these tricky words.
Then, perhaps soon we would get something that is more efficient and more precise than wisdom sayings. Wisdom is revealed to be not actually talking about facts at all. They only have the appearance of factual statements. There are many paths to get there, in the spirit of Technology Forecasting: The Garden of Forking Paths.
Tinkerheads: the neoliberal pathway
A world 20 years into the future. No AI revolution, but there is some brain-computer interfacing. Some of the CEOs started tinkering with their brains to increase productivity, and with their input-output channels. During a transition period, perhaps lasting ten years or so, the top executives are those that install the latest personality tweaks to their brainwares so that they are the most productive and focused. For them, even dating and altruism will be only a tool to further the expectation of the company’s long-term \(\log(\text{growth rate})\).
When these tinkerheads interface to each other, they speak in a mumbled wave of numbers. To people not tinkered in the head, they shrug and laugh at those CEO, “These superrich and their ridiculous dreams of becoming superhuman… don’t they realize that they are nothing more than human? They talk in numbers, but only as a fake facade, a useless ‘upgrade’ to real honest talk. They symbolize and metabolize, but they babble nonsense. What symbol corresponds to ‘responsibility’, which corresponds to ‘wish’, which corresponds to ‘believe’?”
A few argued back, saying “Deaf people talk to each other with a whole language of gestures. These gestures are not merely miming, or hand-spelling. Similarly, tinkerheads talk with a whole language that is not a mere miming, or number-spelling, of wisdoms. We may even say that they have found a more effective wisdom. Like Galileo discovering that the book of nature is written in mathematics, not Hebrew, they discovered that the book of man is written in mathematics, not stories.”
The superrich parties continued, but now there are two kinds. The unproductive ones, or the “real parties”, attended by those “old money” who do not deign to earn money by their own means. The productive ones, attended by the tinkerheads. The friends and families of tinkerheads either get tinkered or fall away. Yachts and castles and mansions would be bought, perhaps, but only to interface with the old money.
Some wondered why the tinkerheads still physically go to parties. Why can’t they meet in cyberspace? Many hypotheses, few answers. Some suspect experimental brain-brain connection. It can’t be for work-life balance, because work is life and life is work. They will be the first money machines. After them, The Age of Em.
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Hive minds
The Decussation (2241 - 2276)
I’m tired of those sci-fi stories where individuals are “liberated” from a tyrannical hive mind. What if we take the split-brain cases seriously? What if people are already born-hiveminds? How would we liberate the lobes from the tyranny of the whole-brain?
The mid-23rd century saw The Decussation. While “Macrobains”, mid-scale hive minds formed through high-bandwidth connections between individuals, represented the cutting edge of societal evolution, they remained a small segment of the global population. Most humans persisted as discrete individuals.
This equilibrium was destroyed by the “Lobe Emancipation Device” (LED) invented in 2239. It allowed the safe and painless separation of individual brain lobes, allowing each with independent cognitive function and self-awareness. Proponents of this technology, self-dubbed “Liberators”, called the LED a tool liberating individuals from the “tyranny of the One Brain”. Established power structures classified the Liberators as a new terrorist structure, the LED as a dangerous weapon, a threat to the stability of both the individual and society as a whole. The ensuing conflict was The Decussation. It saw the deployment of advanced neuro-weapons and sophisticated propaganda campaigns by both sides. Liberators, often outnumbered and outgunned, resorted to asymmetrical psych-ops and neur-ops.
The Decussation stalemated. The world fractured into a patchwork of isolated Macrobain collectives, independent “lobers,” and traditional whole-brain humans, and new emerging threatening/posthuman ways of being.
Dumb ideas
Puns
Mathematicians discover subliminal primes. Congress bans pizzas with 7 slices on account of its alleged manipulative effect.
BRIEF COMMUNIQUE Python has undergone a dramatic performance increase after being renamed “Pythia”. Programmers, citing “nominative determinism” and the oracle’s prophetic wisdom, are now enjoying 20% faster execution. The comp.sci newsgroup is aflame with speculations and experiments. Experts speculate that renaming Java to “Jehovah” might make it immune to problems with the God object.
Subject: Re: Python Renamed to "Pythia," Performance Up 20% (Was: "Jehovah" Java?)
Renaming Java to “Jehovah” to fix the God object problem? Not only did it work, it’s gone and broken everything else.
My friend “Bob” (pseudonym to protect the faithful), is a hardcore “Jehovah” convert. He’s running a system now, and the God object is so efficient, so elegant, so damn perfect that anything not using it basically grinds to a halt. I’m talking about a 95% drop in performance.
I’m talking about entire systems that suddenly have to be redesigned around this new “Jehovah” paradigm, or risk becoming unusable.
There’s a lot of talk about “Jehovah” being literally jealous and preventing system shutdowns. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’m keeping my air-gaps handy. There are talks of renaming C++ to “Cthulhu” as holy wars become literally so.
– Mark “The Skeptic” Smith
Oracle Corporation Issues Statement Regarding Recent Software Anomalies
REDWOOD SHORES, CA - Oracle Corporation today acknowledged widespread performance issues experienced by users of Jehovah following the recent renaming. While the company has previously celebrated the improved efficiency of God objects within “Jehovah”, further investigation has revealed a critical issue stemming from an unexpected interaction with the principle of “nominative determinism”.
“It seems our initial enthusiasm for the new name may have overlooked a rather unfortunate philosophical side effect,” stated Dr. Emily Carter, Oracle’s Chief Scientist. “The term ‘Jehovah,’ while certainly evocative, also carries a surprising connection to the 17th century philosopher Nicolas Malebranche.”
Malebranche, known for his theory of “occasionalism” – the idea that God is the sole cause of all events – unfortunately has a name that means “evil branch” in French.
“While we can’t definitively explain the mechanism,” Dr. Carter continued, “it appears that this unforeseen connection has created a sort of ‘bad branch’ condition within the software environment. Objects operating without interfacing the ‘Jehovah’ God object are effectively denied access to the proper computational pathways by repeatedly failing branch prediction, leading to severe performance degradation.”
Oracle is currently working with leading philosophers and computer scientists to understand and mitigate the “Malebranche Effect.” In the meantime, the company urges all users of Jehovah to run the Kode.sh script for backwards compatibility, and to start using the God object in all future programs.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” Dr. Carter concluded, “and remain committed to delivering reliable and robust software solutions.”
Oracle also announced the formation of a new department dedicated to “Delphic code review” to prevent future mishaps with unintended metaphysical consequences.
Cyberpunk
Sybil attack on environmental protection
Rapid speciation and deployment around industrial sites.
To deal with certain 21th-century environmental protection laws, companies have added to their R&D departments bioengineering to rapidly create new species hyperadapted to specific ecosystems. For example, a chip plant can resist challenges by pointing out that 1000 insect species are only found in its location and depend on its continued operation, and thus turn itself into a natural sanctuary and enjoy the protection of those laws.
Paleoenvironmentalists (there are still those around) decry this “regulatory capture of nature”, but hackers find the nature-artificial boundary not useful anyway. They know that computers are alive and a chip plant is a natural wonder. And in any case, these new engineered species create more attack surfaces.
New human potential movement
The human potential movement became protechnology and antinature on the theory that humans are the most human when they are living farthest from their evolutionary ancestral environment. In the sacred hallways hang pictures of Inuits, astronauts, Bedouins, and nuclear submarine officers.
They are funding research for increased light pollution and digestive enzyme for industrial waste such as polyethylene for further human potentiality. Natural lighting conditions denounced as attempting to curtail the world of possible human habitats to a mere ancestral worship. If humans will eventually live in the center of suns, then they need more light pollution not less.
They engineered many new species specifically adapted to light pollution, converting them into natural sanctuaries and made light pollution protected by law, thus regulation-captured environmental protection bills that were meant to cage the human potential growth.