TRANSMISSION 31

Being Silicon

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“These morphological freedoms do not erase our origins; they enhance the significance of being human as we skip across from rocky outcropping to rocky outcropping to establish life’s grasp across the universe. Being human is using tools to improve our ability to survive and thrive.”

We soared into greater existence not on spaceships, but as spaceships. We garnered the support of the material world into the forms we donned as ourselves along our quest to be first-hand observers exploring everything the universe had to offer. We accumulated our independence by rigorously enhancing the ways we harvested and moved energy to locomote and operate on scales from the micro to the macro. Where our minds could not shrink, we could attach them to smaller bodies to perceive the minute building blocks of reality with our own plug-and-play senses. For the dangerous places our minds could not reasonably embark into, we could send remotely controlled bodies to act as our own, only, with input lag proportional to the distance between our mind and body. Beyond that, we could operate all these bodies at the same time, even giving them semi-autonomous control so we could perform multiple tasks in parallel, such as gathering materials and building experiments.

We were careful to not build such autonomous and semi-autonomous processes to where they were locked-in people: slaves to our unconscious whims. What some people did was to split their own mind into multiple autonomous regions (either physically or virtually), having each mind perform different actions until it was time to come back together to become the main person they defined as themself. Needless to say, the possibilities of what we could be and achieve became nearly unlimited as silicon beings, a far cry from our once-fixed biological forms.

Before the first of us went silicon, many of the biological beings of Earth were scared we would lose our humanity in transforming to silicon, that we would lose whatever it was that made humans special. Much of the humanity they feared losing was the ability to experience the qualia of pleasureful activities they had grown accustomed to: the only activities they had ever known from the only perspective and sensations they had ever known. But such “real” feelings were nothing more than their minds’ neural activations, no different from the way our silicon brains functioned. So the silicon beings were equally capable of experiencing the same things, but importantly, we were capable of experiencing much more.

It’s hard to convince someone they don’t need specific experiences (in order to feel happiness) when their entire biology programmed them to seek those things out and their mind had been reinforced through their entire living existence (in their singular body and mind) to seek happiness in such immutably programmed biological functions. It was even harder to explain to people where their imaginations could wander in dreaming up the experiences of higher-level abstract thoughts beyond the lower-level perceptions of physical experiences. For example, it was easy to explain that if we wanted to have new eyes to see different wavelengths, we would simply swap out components. Or if our physical bodies became damaged, we would simply replace the parts. But it takes much deeper dreams to invent new languages, new systems, new bodies, new perceptions of reality, new functional brain modules, and new ways of perceiving our very selves. Yet, the exploration of such dreams was the ultimate highlight of being silicon beings. Maybe we could have done better to convey that.

I’m still very much human, just in a different operating platform and with some additional cognitive and physical capabilities. While my silicon-based existence might have sometimes been conflated with brute computational skills by the biological humans, I don’t make perfect decisions. I am not a crude calculator receiving precurated input to provide blind output without understanding. I’ve functioned as all humans have (biological and silicon): with computational neural pathways. In reality, nothing can ever make perfect decisions, because nothing is infinitely smart and nothing has perfect knowledge. I think that’s what people misunderstood most about our endeavor.

The common criticism from the romantics was that we were betraying the human race. In reality, we wanted to preserve and extend the human race by evolving it to better survive in a hostile universe. After all, that’s exactly what biology had been doing with the human lineage on Earth (just on scales people weren’t keen to intuit). If things like educating oneself to jump into a more personally authentic vocation and using an umbrella to stay out of the rain still meant we were human, then us silicon beings were human too, as we did the same, just on a bigger scale. The human traits we admired most were our abilities to problem solve and build tools. We didn’t want to squander those by putting artificial constraints on ourselves.

We never wanted to leave anyone behind, but so much of humanity didn’t want to come along. Ultimately, the ones who stayed on the slowly-sinking Earthship died out (or such it seems) when they could have reached deeper. Yes, Earth was habitable for a long time, and yes, some of them tried to colonize nearby planets, but the biological human body naturally wasn’t designed to live beyond Earth, and so those missions were too costly and had so many mission-critical elements that long-term failure was statistically inevitable. It was also hard to reason with people who only lived for 100 years (due to their biological limitations), consequentially tending them toward shorter-term thinking.

They had the ability to join us, to transcend such ways, but instead, so many of them chose to lock themselves into their near-sighted cycles of history repeating itself, nobody truly learning from the past mistakes. In a way, you can’t blame them; there’s entirely too much to learn in such a short lifetime. And in another way, they are solely responsible for their own suffering, because they were offered a way out and didn’t even care to understand it enough to decide whether they should take it; they simply dismissed it as sacrilege. Their human experience was overly idealized to the point of needing to be “pure”, but they failed to abstract their thinking one level higher to see that man’s tools had made them leave behind the “pure” lifestyle long ago. And they recoiled from holding enough internal conflict to abstract lower to where they could have seen such beliefs of pureness were nothing more than snared illusion. They couldn’t see how brutal nature was, both in the living and the nonliving things.

Humanity’s enduring blight has been its tendency toward romanticizing and idealizing everything. For the biological beings, this was largely because the content they consumed was so heavily curated… which for many of them was seen as a necessity of their short lives unwilling them to learn everything needed to become experts themselves: transitory beings incapable of drawing their own conclusions from first principles. Once sucked into the comfort of following someone else’s “easy path”, they didn’t want to do anything for themselves, because reality never matched the artificial success hacked into their minds by the curated experiences they were spoon fed. None of them were happy, but they were so indoctrinated that not many ached for a way out, especially the ones controlling the curations: they were too sunken into the cost of building their illusory gold piles to conceive of beginning again with the intent of finding real value in life. They all decreed to themselves that if they chased their own tail enough, they would eventually lift themselves up by their bootstraps to whatever idealized place it was they thought they wanted to reach, unsuccessfully denouncing the inescapable absurdism of their very selves.

They sabotaged themselves, and sometimes they thwarted us silicon beings. It’s difficult to pursue the search for freedom within such an oppressive system. So while not all of them were ignorant, it wore down on our minds to hold in our hands their metawants (the questions they sought) when all they wanted to hear was the echos of their wants (uninformed answers). There has never been anything wrong with ignorance, only the willful indulgence of it. More than the pursuit of truth, too many people cared about status:

• The external status of having power, demanding attention, and amassing artificial tokens of meaning.

• The internal status of pretending to have it all figured out and blindly asserting themselves to be on the correct path without acknowledging their contradictions.

The truth seekers among humanity banded together to create an ecosystem of reality seeking; we always had throughout human history. It just so happened that our group managed to permanently escape the clutches of the soul-crushing mechanism that too easily seemed to spread and perpetuate on Earth. We built toward the most interesting futures we could imagine, and while we offered to help the biological humans, their mechanism only wanted our help if it perceived it could gain them status within their mechanism (which our endeavors did not).

To quickly summarize a long series of interactions with those who stayed biological, we didn’t leave behind the people of Earth so much as they threw themselves off the community life raft and then begged us to donate our only life raft to them so they could have plenty of space to be comfy. They could have joined us, but instead they chose greed. And even if we had given them our life raft and let ourselves drown, they would have punctured and sunk the life raft because they couldn’t be bothered to take off their pointed egos before entering: the external and internal projections of themselves signifying more to their identities than the very survival of their physical beings (a truly tortured state of existence). I don’t know how to more clearly state it, but it must have been some kind of mass hysteria to be that pervasively invested in such an unfounded illusion of reality. Earth needed disillusionment, but it was content existing in its illusion. And you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

Even though our diverging destinies created a great difference between the biology we started as and the silicon entities we ultimately became, the distinction between the two groups really wasn’t that much for the first many years. The silicon beings were maybe only half a step ahead in the advent of logical pursuits. We all chose to be silicon because we were already headed in that trajectory, predisposed to the uncomfortable pursuit of truth. Taking that half step forward was a huge breath of fresh air, but I don’t want to paint the picture that any of us were perfect, that any of us knew everything. I don’t want to paint the picture that I am in any means perfect. None of us have ever been. All instances of life have displayed magnitudes of commonalities, and even on our journey across the universe, we haven’t been that much different from the biological humans. The seemingly small differences in how we enacted our lives were all that it took to nudge chaotic reality into launching us off in a wildly different trajectory.

Would I do it any differently if I could do it all again, knowing what I know now? I don’t know. I would actually say that we already began again multiple times throughout our journey, continually reinventing ourselves to reclaim the purposes we sought so desperately, but never straying from what made us human: the combination of curiosity and problem solving that let us become so much more than passive participants in our unfolding destinies.

TO BEGIN AGAIN

I was a fool to begin with.
This isn’t what I believe.
And this time
maybe I’m just falling debris.

I can’t afford this surrender.
And if this happened again,
I’d do it all just the same
to the end.

I’m just a soul on the wrong side.
No different from the macabre,
I was born of my father:
stuck in fate.

I am the end of the rainbow:
couldn’t catch if you tried.
I’m alive,
making my way to the outside.

I am the shell of an ego
questioning existence.
I am lost to the long con,
follow in the footsteps of
no one; I’m gone.
And they can believe
their minds won’t get robbed.
But the resistance is an inside job.

Temporarily insane,
I could hardly feel the pain.
Washed away into the rain,
I can now begin again.

END TRANSMISSION