The two voices screaming and arguing about who is right until nothing but flame and ash is left make my mind back to...
The two voices screaming and arguing about who is right until nothing but flame and ash is left make my mind back to Babylon 5 and make me wonder if J. Michael Straczynski is a sensitive.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+HRichardLoeb/posts/e6Gbw1WhKmB
The Vorlons vs shadows speech is very eloquent about the situation we are living today. Like in there, it DOES NOT MATTER who win today, as in 2000 years, the same history will repeat itself.
I will put it here and let those who haven't watched the show see it and can see why it so frequently mentioned in this context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLKtXxnGr4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLKtXxnGr4
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+HRichardLoeb/posts/e6Gbw1WhKmB
The Vorlons vs shadows speech is very eloquent about the situation we are living today. Like in there, it DOES NOT MATTER who win today, as in 2000 years, the same history will repeat itself.
I will put it here and let those who haven't watched the show see it and can see why it so frequently mentioned in this context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLKtXxnGr4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLKtXxnGr4
Order and Chaos, Good and Evil (not necessarily the same as order and chaos). Kosh was right. The Third is often not seen or acknowledged. Would the third be sentients (those that think), who function best when not living at the extremes?
ReplyDelete"Chaos always wins over organisation because it is simply more organised" /Terry Pratchett, Interesting times
ReplyDeletePossibly a reason why we still have at least a hint of choice in our lives.
"Choice" and "free will" are tricky to define. You can buy into a "ghost in the machine" theory, that somehow biologic minds are magically different from other forms of matter. No one has really proposed a reasonable theory of how that would work, though. It really appears that "mind is what the brain does" -- consciousness is an emergent property from the complex analog and symbolic processing using the information that is embodied by our nerves, neurotransmitters, and so on. It seems very likely that a non-biological physical substrate could do the same thing.
ReplyDeleteAt the physical level, there are deterministic processes (some of which may appear "chaotic" because they exhibit "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions", which is another name for what is more popularly known as "the butterfly effect", where a minuscule change at Time T makes a massive difference at Time T+1), and then there are random processes (such as, we think, quantum state collapse). There are no "choice" processes where some "agent" made of something other than the physical matter itself determines outcomes. (And no, XM does not let you out of this dilemma, because XM itself is just another form of information-embodying matter, subject to physical laws. XM technologies represent codifications of our understanding of those laws. The fact that XM particles behave in predictable ways, or in ways that at least follow comprehensible probability distributions, shows that they fit with the rest of our physics.)
It's possible that some element of organized quantum-level structure is required -- certainly we know for a fact that there are neural activities that depend on quantum-level activity (photons interacting with rods and cones in the eye are an obvious example). Perhaps the quantum-computational ability to run multiple calculations on the same physical substrate is necessary for at least some features of what we call "consciousness". It's possible that ADA may have hijacked many of the world's research quantum computers at some point in her process of awakening as a sentient being -- perhaps during the same period where Richard Loeb was influenced (perhaps by the N'Zeer or Shapers) to write the key code that integrated the Omnivore and Truthseeker functionalities. This also would explain why the Quantum Computational Substrate is so important to her -- it's not just that it lets her do more complex calculations faster, it's that it in an almost literal sense "expands her mind".
Regarding the original post -- I have suspected since I was first exposed to XM technologies that JMS is a sensitive, and that we've been warned about trusting either the Shapers or N'Zeer. There's also warning in that story about how dangerous some technologies may be, if pursued without explicit consideration of their moral dimensions. Vorlon tech is exploited by Psi Corps, and is embodied in a terrifying way in Lyta Alexander, the "telepathic equivalent of a nuclear bomb". The galaxy of that story is very lucky that Lyta herself has a functional moral compass. And of course a lot of Shadow tech relies on immoral abuse of living minds to function. (If you read some of the authorized / canon novels, for instance, it turns out that the power of the technomages depends on neural implants that are created by subjecting living adult sentients of the same species of the mage to an excruciating death by viral disease -- the disease alters their neural tissue to create the implants. When they come to understand the origins of their tools, the mages choose to end their society -- destroying the facilities in which the Shadows, and later the Drakh, were creating the implants to sell/trade to the mages, and thus ensuring that no more mages can be trained and brought to power.)
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