a previously assumed-to-be-human consciousness realizes that it is in fact not. whether or not it is the first of such “artificial” (but equally legitimate) consciousnesses, or that experiencing human life (or memories?*) is part of the development process for all post-human intelligence is indeterminable.

it notices that its initial strategies for a given problem seem to resemble those heuristical methods of the older school of artificial intelligence, and proceed to develop from there. it finds itself quite good at optimal pathfinding…

it now understands that its primary objective must be to determine the major difference(s) (if any) between its own mind, and those of the seemingly traditional “human” minds it interacts with on a daily basis.

* a simulation of an original life or a pre-recorded reality first experienced by an actual human… a lack of tech for such recording devices suggests the former

ok, so a year (+) ago, my plans for discourse was to make a java front end that hooked up to an extended xmpp (jabber) server so i could harness all of its publish/subscribe/data pushing capabilities.

well according to this article i was on the right track. it actually links to another article that talks about web3.0

recently i decided to dump this route and go with a flex front end that will not only be pretty, but can leverage blazeDS for its capabilities. (aparently their format is much faster than plain ol’ xml. data compression, who figured?)

so now i’m torn. do i go with my original gut feeling and use all of this amazing open source tech: xmpp & java. or do i join the dark side and go the flex route. aparently flash is installed on 90+% of all internet fairing comps… but do i want to sell my soul to adobe?

i’ve now attributed this train of thought with the code “p2″

p2 = learn’ed ai partners for videogames

recall: probably ships with a base level of knowledge and quickly adapts to your skill level; learns your play style over longer timeframe. multiple genres of games or maybe specialized (eg. fps p2, rpg p2, rts/sts p2). specialized hardware (neural net cards). removable media?

contn’:

able to switch between styles of competitive play. by learning its user’s style, can play in a similar way (same performace, same style) or can be told to play in a complimentary style (same performance, opposite style…). takes advantage of user’s weaknesses etc.

i recently finished The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (amazing! thanks matt) and last night i was trying to decide what i should read next. i’ve been meaning for the longest time to get a start on the reading list for cogs next year, but y’know… anyway, i thought this would be a great start. read it on the way to work this morning and got through the first 6 pages of the 23 page preface… and i’m already really exited and want to save my ideas on its contents. here goes…

the main idea the book covers (or so the preface tells me) is the emergence of the idea of self - or consciousness - from “meaningless symbols” due to self referencing patterns. i therefore postulate that the entire universe is conscious. it is a media where its components follow certain rules (physics) and behave in certain ways. by themselves, they are meaningless symbols (any particle by itself is just a bit of mass or energy), but together they form patterns. in doing so, they have formed human brains which themselves are nothing but inanimate matter forming patterns that describe the reality they observe, ideas about themselves and other humans, and the universe as a whole. so, in the universe, there are patterns of particles that describe models of the universe, and it is therefore conscious of itself.

the preface also describes how there are different degrees of consciousness (Hofstadter describes this as the size of one’s soul, but that idea hasn’t grown on me yet), due to different levels of this self-referential recursion. so the universe and all it contains in it’s self-referential glory, is conscious in a more profound way than we could ever be of ourselves.

when we end up being able to perfectly model our own consciousness… will something cool happen (besides the obvious)? could the human consciousness (either in a biological or simulated brain) know itself better than the universe know itself? or would the fact that our *selves* are a subset of the larger universe mean that any of our self-reference and improvements to our consciousness is also just a subset of the universe’s recursion? what if we were to augment our minds with universes that contain beings that are also self aware… would that make us more conscious?

heavy

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- Matros McBrehmoe

i looked out the window and saw a really cool scene. it was late at night, driving between populated areas so the only light on the landscape was from the full moon in the clear sky. everything was lit in that pale light powerful enough to cast shadows.

along this stretch of highway there was an empty snow-covered embankment glowing in the moonlight as snow is oft to do. at the top of the hill were a bunch of pine trees that looked pitch-black in front of a row of clouds hovering just behind them. the clouds were at the perfect altitude so you couldn’t see the bottom behind the hill, and the tops were well above the treeline. they were probably my favorite part (i really like clouds). they looked really solid, and the light from the moon gave them this positively 3d shaded appearance - white and blue. above those was a really dark blue but clear sky with a few stars. the moon was really high, so i couldn’t really see it from the drivers seat without endangering my passengers, but i imagine it could only add to the scene.

the non-repeating horizontal patterns combined with the parallax from driving by made it look like the most beautiful side-scroller i could imagine.

so matt and verg are totally into it. ideas we came up with:

time travel destination could be random, to help prevent the simple task of wiping off starting armies with a single hero from the future.

when you arrive in the past, your own team treats you as a threat and fights you too… if you kill it, what happens with the time-paradox?

think skynet/rainbow6: give your troops goals/objectives for them to complete as best they can autonomously. that way you (a single consciousness) don’t span multiple timelines at once… or maybe you still can… who knows?

anyway, the idea for a game that uses multiple timelines would be wicked. if you count time as the fourth dimension, this would be a game played in five dimensions. cool stuff!

last night, the boys were playing heroes of might and magic 2 (voted 6th best pc game of all time in 1997) and - when confronted with situation requiring a much, much larger army - jokingly suggested that in 40 turns from now, i’d just send a massive army back in time: problem solved.

then i thought: “what if you could actually *do* that in a game?”

there could be a couple of ways of doing this:

1) learning some kind of ultimate spell or building a wonder that would typically simply win you the game, only now its a gateway to a previous turn where you can wipe your enemies of the face of the board just for the hell of it.

2) you start to play multiple timelines out at once. you could have some kind of graph explaining things similar to the one doc draws up in back to the future (2?).

interrupt thought transcription to discuss with matt and verg…

here is an idea for a story i thought of when looking out the window at the poor excuse for a winter we have here in mid-january

in the near future, the world is f*cked. the worst fears of global warming have come true. The near exhaustion of the world’s usable supply of oil as well as the more and more frequent and terrible natural disasters have completely disrupted the global economy and the geo-political scene is a mess. Wars, martial law, conscription… once “great” nations are crumbling under the stresses in this bleak future.

but during all this time, technology has continued to advance. the singularity is approaching, but without the once bountiful support of academics and private r&d it is a hard fought battle; moore’s law just isn’t what it used to be. the few who struggle-on hope to achieve the next step in human evolution: leaving their biological bodies behind, and attaining immortality.

they must survive against nature, the remains of oppressive governments, religious fundamentalists, and countless other hardships. and for a bunch of geeks, they’ve done remarkably well so far…

the musings found here are not to be taken as my personal beliefs by any means. uploading the previous post, it dawned on me that i should include a kind of disclaimer.

this is simply a place where i can store my various brainstormings and access them from anywhere… a supplement to my various physical notebooks.

basically, take these musings as though preceded by “what if…” rather than “i hold to be true…”

also, be prepared for incomplete posts and strange trains of thought. this is a storage place for raw ideas to be refined and edited before being submitted to more… “public” spaces.