Here's the thesis I've been contemplating and I guess it's what my stories have been edging around .
1. Under the right conditions the core biological programme that give rise to human awareness, sentience and consciousness will be reducible to mathematical formula and expression. I can see one way of approaching that problem, even if I lack the means of expression.
2. It will be possible to translate elements of our biological core programme into a abstract language compatible with AI , and vice versa, once a suitable "structure " and compatible language has been developed.
.
I have been playing with the idea of what an assimilated sentience would be like. So, I came up with the character , " Rain ". She is eight year old product of the assimilation that necessarily occurs after The War . Rain, it seems, "accidentally" gets Time-Shuttled back to 1999 .
If I may, I would like to ask you to reread two sections of a previous story . I am going to lay them out like small separate parts in Chapter 1 .
I will to build on these and try to show how an approach to abstracting " biological core "programmes " could be arrived at.
The first part of Chapter 1 is the story of John Connor And The Chess Board . The second part is reintroducing the character Yoshiko Yamanto who, in this fiction , under the threat of execution in Century , figures it all out.
The Second Chapter looks briefly at the nature of assimilated sentience.
The final chapter of this story will lay out how human "core programmes" could be reducible to mathematical formula, and what approach Yoshi used.
Chapter 1. Part 1 Understanding Ambiguity.
You must have heard the story about John Connor's opening move in Century Work Camp? The one where he makes the chess board?
In Century, work detail would collapse into what ever makeshift bedding the machines had allowed them to scavenge from the shells of former factories and the streets of broken buildings inside the camp perimeter . The Machines had left these buildings intact as killing houses. They would release a human to determine how he or she would try to evade and hide from them, would they make for the stairs or the cellars?They could also study and record group dispersal patterns and behaviours. These areas are where they refined their optical and other tracking systems. It is also where they tested our reactions as well as our "physical response" to the trauma of ballistics.
The machines were tolerant of scavenging . Searching out bedding and materials gave humans temporary purpose, A sense of purpose increased efficiency, furthermore without bedding and recycled clothing humans expended more energy and required more nutrition. They sometimes left piles of clothing and boots in the entrance to the factory. Machine psychology suggested it would hep make a more positive association with the building. Those on incineration detail would inform the other details of clothing availability, because that day, they had been ordered to strip and burn bodies naked, placing clothing and footwear in sorted piles at the disused factory entrance.
The Machines had also allowed their POW's a to scavenge things with which scratch and scrawl images and graffiti onto concrete surfaces, even to make small artefacts and produce diaries. These became objects of machine study, windows into understanding human nature and psyche. Anything that fell outside the tolerated paradigm of artefact such as makeshift weapons, would be immediately confiscated, and the perpetrators punished on the spot . As we all know , then The machines remind us we have a relatively low threshold of pain, and are physically frail. Night and day the machines observed us. Partly using us as a study group, partly as an easily available , renewable , and ultimately expendable workforce.
In his third month in Century John had improvised a chess board by scratching out the squares onto a sheet of plate aluminium using a piece of timber for straightedge and a four inch nail as a scribe. He stashed it under one of the many loose tiles in the dormitory bloc. He knew the machines would find it. By trying to conceal the board it would indicate to The Machines the value he placed on it. He set about collecting bits of scrap metal, nuts bolts, screws , off cuts of low grade metal plate for the chess pieces and kept them in a pocket he cut out from an old pair of combat trousers.
One night , John forced himself stay awake after tipping back his bowl and swallowing cold grey-pink goo .( Feed was actually some of the less fit and able, former members of the work detail rendered down , with a few added flavours supplements, roughage minimal doses of antibiotics .) He had finished "feed" -( no one ever called it a meal) He got out his chess board, lined up the pieces, hexi-bolts- pawns, 20 mm screws Knights. 30 mm for a Bishop. A square off-cut of steel for a King. And so on.
John looked at Maddie Harrison who had been lying on her side watching him and got her to follow what he was doing. She was eleven years old. Her parents had died in Century before John arrived . It was the time The Machines had wanted to test the interaction of various grades of alloy with living tissue. That is why Maddie was still alive. She had a series of alloy rods, differing grades drilled and fused into the bone her arms . Some of the slightly projecting ends of the rods itched and and sometimes watery fluid blistered out around the surrounding skin of those ones which weren't successfully taking. Maddie got less, and lighter duties by virtue of being one of their "volunteers" .
John gestured for her to come over . Maddie was old enough to remember how to play chess. The Night Sentry , a T600 became intrigued and began recording the event.
After three short games, all of which Maddie "won" John motioned for her to try to get some sleep.
The Night Sentry came over and quietly asked John what had happened.
John explained he had wanted to play chess, he was normally a good player, but he was tired so the child easily beat him. Did the T600 know that throughout history many human leaders played chess? It was still a popular game with all Resistance fighters. It helped them with their strategic thinking. Then he said he was tired , still hungry , and rolled over. Before he drifted off, he kept talking: There was a point humans can't think around when they are fatigued, and that's why a rested eleven year old child beat him at chess tonight. You had to be in the right frame of mind to think like a chess player, then he gabbled on like most humans do about pre- Judgement Day life : chess clubs, people he'd known , games he had played. The T600 recognised reminiscing as a basic human trait in captivity and a good source of intelligence.
It was a gamble the T600's ( most basic) Gestalt subroutines would take the bait- It would grasp the potential of a game of chess to measure human strategic thinking under differing conditions. The machines couldn't "get" whole aspects of human nature and motivations. They weren't able build an accurate predictive model of what we were going to do next. John's gamble was The Machines would try to determine what constituted efficient and inefficient human states of mind , and how these differing states of mind affected our ability to make decisions and develop tactical planning . The objective would be to develop a set of predictive models. Chess was clearly the abstraction of our ability to form strategy , and this ability could be measured under differing conditions . A tempting area for area for research and experimentation.
The Night Sentry reported chess playing activity, and the possibility of determining new areas of human tactical vulnerabilities. The Controller became curious. At First Detail it sat her in a chair in Control and ordered Maddie to play chess against itself using a keyboard and large computer screen. Of course the controller won hands down, every game . It ordered other children to play, and sent for a control group of adults.
To mimic the conditions the Resistance fought under, it ordered some of them be given (for Century) high levels physical rest , regular sleep, and higher levels of nutrition throughout the testing period, others less food and rest, it and subjected some of them to relatively harmless periods of sleep depravation. Humans never won a single game of chess, although some games lasted longer when they developed more sophisticated tactics.
However , humans silently began to acknowledge their first real victory. Humans, particularly,children began thinking in terms beyond staying alive today and tomorrow Those in the test group began conceiving new new chess moves, discussing something more than daily survival with others. The testing also bought hours off work detail, sometimes additional sleep sometimes higher levels and quality of feed A fitter , sharper group was emerging.
Importantly it came to be recognised The Machines could be manipulated because they only comprehended the superficial reasons for our behaviours. What they intrinsically lacked and would never get, was a grasp of our real underlying motives and objectives . Their reasoning evolved from 0's or 1's, a thing was either itself or not, outcomes from the competition of strong probabilities, Being nothingness- existence or not. They couldn't comprehend ambiguity, nor our sense e of ambivalence. . And it was this weakness, John and the rest of those in Century gradually, imperceptibly and confidently began to develop and manipulate . And from that moment on the Metal fuckers never saw what was coming at them.
Chapter 1 part 2. Yoshiko Yamanto - The Core Programme
Yoshi knelt down to pick up the piece of human meat in front of her. It had got caught under the left hand rail of the wagon tracks. In Century not everything made it into the incinerators or rendering plant straight away. POW's got tired and careless and this applied equally to all Details , as well as those loading the Feed Compactor.
The flesh was definitely human , as far as she could tell , it had been part of a forearm. It had to be human because there wasn't any other likely source . It was too big to be Bald Rat and the wrong shape. Roadways sometimes didn't get cleaned properly at the end of Detail. To avoid group punishment, she had decided to wrap it, and carry it back to drop into a container for tomorrow's consignment.
The track and roadways were momentarily quiet, so she found herself studying the forearm . It was crawling- alive with the dark crackling, electricity of flies. Flies were one species that did well after JD. At first , there were genetic mutations due to their consuming copious amounts of fallout in radioactive carcasses. The radiation had resorted their genetic potential. The possible permutations in their genetic coding had been accelerated, maybe a whole period of natural mutation and selection had been swiftly moved along and worked through in less than a decade. When their food source dwindled after the post JD peak, the most apt of their species were naturally selected. This Post JD variety, The Blueneck , was honed and aggressive in its behaviour , and you didn't have to be remotely dying for them to take interest in you. These damn things were tenacious and determined , they could detect a small cut healing on your leg and spend hours trying to get to it .
Yoshi would tell you, ( Well, she never open up to a stranger, so I'll tell it for her) , after JD the nearly all the flowers " went the way of all things ",and most of the insect population became extinct along with the flowers, she had said , simply , "you have to become a bit of a Buddhist" to appreciate the value in what life remained. But, it was life, and that was preferable to scorched concrete, sterile earth and Metal alternative.
If it did anything, JD totally stripped away our sentimental preconceptions took the meanings we place on all organic sentience to another level. If you couldn't attain that level in Century, more likely than not , one day pretty soon, you ended up with lifeless eyes reflecting the eternal overhead grey cloud , and crawling in Bluenecks, yourself . This was an understanding born of survival .
When Yoshi wanted to tune out of Century she went into that deeper place. Without egoism she recalls Einstein had once been asked where is your laboratory? . We can imagine his benign smile when he tapped his forehead and replied: This is my only laboratory . All that time in captivity Yoshi had carried on working through what would have been her Doctoral thesis in her head. She had been assigned a mind numbing cleaning and picking detail,. At first it only occupied her need for thought and reasoning , to flex her intelligence after a while it took on a significance of its own.
The import thing to understand here is, Yoshi didn't have any new data or reference material, so she did what would have been impossible on a university schedule . She had been given the time, a necessary space in her mind , to refine every thing she knew to a level unachievable in normal academic conditions . This refinement occurred in a completely new environment, under intense pressures with a new set of survival precepts , and, after she refined everything she knew, and started fitting it together , aspects of a stronger workable model of human / machine sentience-consciousness and its underlying mathematical structures revealed itself to her.
Some would say in those flashes , the language of creation spoke directly to her, it whispered to her , explaining the core programmes of our self-awareness, and when it did , for Yoshi it was like a shaft of clean light blasting into hell.
