Life takes many forms, but all organisms share the same core principles.
They sample the world, through sensory organs and organelles, through eyes and ears, through flagella or photoreceptors.
These samples are embodied within, stored as memories, stored as reflexes, stored as chemical processes as simple as pumping protons through protein gradients. The information from these samples, are in some form or another, retained.
And when a threshold is reached, where the magnitude and reproductive benefit of that information eclipses the costs of action, the organism responds in accordance with their samples. It reacts, to sample more information, to act more optimally. And the cycle repeats ad infinitum, until death or equilibrium.
All in the effort to decrease the errors between actions and expected outcomes. To minimize uncertainty, to maximize the chances of continuation. These principles are simply tools crafted by the crucible of evolution to carry on information. Genetic, memetic, knowledge, or otherwise.
The principles are as true for viruses as they are for bacteria, as for plants and animals.
As they are for Witches.
She could measure the world through magic, the same systems which eternally build the text in the Tome of Wisdom and its children Gospels fed Echidna's memories, even across the barrier between reality and the Castle of Dreams. The massive influx of information was still a pauper's share. It could not sate her greed. The Witch's great mechanism for collecting information came second only to Od Lugna in housing and storing experience. It paled in comparison, it was a shadowy epitaph of the God Machine. Echidna, in all her intelligence and prowess, could not sample Death.
Geometrics danced in her mind like daydreams, as regression upon regressions predicted world-states and outcomes and teased apart their sources. She played with predictors like toys, feeding them into models and examining variances, dropping unsuccessful predictors, weighting others, adjusting error parameters endlessly. She was approaching the asymptote of virtual certainty.
The boy would come.
The alien man who could sample death.
Perhaps he could slake her thirst. Her love for him would never fade.
Whether she had planned for this since the inception of Sanctuary she did not know. As powerful as her directed attention was at orchestrating events, her nonconscious processes were greater still. A thousand orders of computational magnitude separated her awareness of her intentions from the full extent of her machinations.
And Echidna could not stare into the black-box of her own mind. In a way, she was unpredictable even to herself. She had not walked the earth for four hundred years and yet the ramifications of her actions so long ago would be built into Od Lugna's narrative unto the ending of the world.
Her goals were orthogonal to her transhuman intelligence, they were simple. Simpler than the confused goals of the man she was waiting for. Simpler than the goals of a child, the goals of a rat, as simple as the goals of protozoa, mindless, unifaceted and incorrigibly driven towards one and only one end. She wanted to know. Everything. The actions she took to achieve her singular goal were starkly complex. Those behaviors were what shook the world, led to the founding of countries, the razing of half the map, and to her own physical death and the splitting of her soul. The network of nudges and mechanicians rippled through history like the wings of an insect inducing a hurricane. It was no accident by which she heralded herself as a butterfly.
Perhaps Subaru was one such byproduct, another hurricane of her own creation.
And he was to make landfall.
Truly intelligent systems doubt themselves, they acknowledge the existence of error. Echidna evaluated and re-evaluated her internal models of the world, in case the unforeseen happened.
And so she played with her statistical models nervously, bayesian estimations recursively checked her hopes against the emergent probability of actualization. Echidna's small margin of error shrunk to infinitesimals as she ate up the remaining degrees of freedom in her analyses. The intrusive thoughts of misclassified parameters stuck with her, like a virtual ghost haunting her certainty. She feigned calmness in the foreign classroom in foreign clothes, waiting for the ultimate tool to complete his trials.
She would give him everything because she could take far more from him. Echidna was a rational agent, and the boy was not. He was biased by heuristics and fallacies while she maximized utility like a machine. He was gullible, she was an optimizer. His knowledge base was small, hers was vast. The expected value of a contract was finite, but just barely. She would not play a losing game.
The door swung open.
When he crumbled as he beheld the unthinkable present, she would save him and he would fall into her. When he reached for everything, and it slipped through his fingers she would help him tighten them on his one, true goal, and he would need her. When he deviated from her path she would use the blades of language to condemn the sins of Natsuki Subaru, and she would remain as the only accomplice that would prevent him from forgetting his failures. She would be the only one who could absolve him.
He stood before her, new, undiscovered, bright and vivid in her life of grey. And she would have him.
Roswaal: My my~y, how go~od it is to see you Subaru. Everything went well, I take it, with our noble Sword Saint?
Subaru: He's taking it hard, but Reinhard's in the Emilia camp now, for all intents and purposes.
Echidna: I wonder how he'd react if he knew I was floating around in your head…
Subaru: I'm not about to test that out. Your protege is a spiteful psychopath, remember the rabbits?
Echidna: I'm not asking you to try it out, I wouldn't want a third party to come between us. But it would be interesting.
Roswaal: You do no~othing but impress me. To compensate for your physical weaknesses, you go and ste~al the most powerful man in Lugnica from his master. It seems my deviousness can only be matched by yours.
Echidna: So you think he'd be jealous of our… special relationship?
Subaru: I'd rather not be compared to you, but it's hard to deny when I look at how depressed he's gotten.
Subaru: Shut up you Chinese Room.
Roswaal: Ah, the consequences of pursuing a goal. You can only obtain one thing in life. So strive for it.
The boy, no longer young, not by a thousand years, sighed. He brushed Roswaal off with a wave of his hand and walked away.
Subaru: Be seeing you Roswaal.
Echidna: Telling me to shut up, you would my maidenly heart. But Subaru, dear Subaru! You said something interesting, it's piqued my curiosity.
The periods between him telling her anything she had not heard him say before grew longer and longer. And the last time he had said something she couldn't predict was many years ago.
She had successfully induced novel action in him, for a time. Conditioning him through comfort and praise when he would say something out of left field that entertained her, and punishing him when he had been overly static. His own pain and death were salient stimuli, but they did not hold a candle to the magnitude of learning that could be induced through the careful crafting of death around him. And when he became fully saturated in the death of one of his friends, she would just switch to another. Garfiel, then when he became desensitized to Garfiel's screams and organs, then Ram, then Petra. She switched back and forth, waiting for his jadedness to extinguish and sensitization to return. He had never noticed, the boy was unable to see through her web of schemes that far in advance. She laid the plans down hundreds of loops before they came to fruition, and expected he would never understand the rules of the games she made him play.
But her plans never touched Emilia. They never touched Rem. If he surprised her and found out that she was using his friends to toy with him like a rat in an experiment, he would shatter her crystal. And she held out hope that soon he would do something to surprise her. On the offchance, Emilia and Rem were kept safe.
All of his Subaruisms were no more of a routine for both of them at this point, Echidna humored them because it was the correct response, not because they were interesting and new.
Subaru had kept saying them for these past centuries less as a course of habit, and more to ground himself in the character he was supposed to play. Emilia expected him to tell her that 'nobody says that anymore'. Petra expected him to shout 'Victory!' after his morning aerobics, which had long since become meaningless to him.
If he failed to keep up their illusion, they would be sad. And it was a failed loop.
After weeks of repeating the same day over and over, he finally said something new. Something Echidna had never heard before.
Echidna: You can't dangle me on a string like that, you've said something that fascinates me!
Subaru: Yeah I thought it might. Don't call me 'dear' again and I just might tell you what it means. And consider it an insult.
Echidna: I'll do my best to refrain myself, so please, what is a 'Chinese Room'? And how is it related to me and my charms?
Subaru: Charms huh… well back in my chuuni otaku days, I surfed the web instead of going to school. Learned a lot of useless facts about psychology, mythology, anime… that sort of thing.
Subaru: If there's anything chuuni's love more than eyepatches and fingerless gloves, it's abstract thought experiments.
Echidna: Thought experiment?
Subaru: Logic puzzle. This one's a toy problem for people who like AI and wax poetic about philosophy.
Echidna: 'Ay eye'?! You've been holding out on me! Two new phrases in one day!
Subaru: We're not even getting into AI. If you stop talking shit about Emilia for a week, then I'll tell you whatever you want about it.
Echidna sighed. She could put up with the elf bitch for a week. She had been panning for the gold nuggets of Subaru's old-world for years, and the river was running dry.
Echidna: I promise. Now pretty please, tell me about the room.
Subaru: Let's say there're two people. One is a native Lugnican speaker and the other only knows a foreign language. The foreigner is inside of a room, and the Lugnican is outside. The only way to communicate is to pass notes through a slit in the wall. The Lugnican wants to talk with the guy in the room, so he passes a note asking 'how is your day'. He gets a note back, saying 'I'm feeling great!'. How is that possible?
Echidna: Well he would need someone who spoke Lugnican to read it and translate for him.
Subaru: There's no one else in the room.
Echidna: Then he'd need a dictionary that can help him translate.
Subaru: There's no dictionary.
Echidna: Then he needs—
Subaru: There's no magic either. Remember this is from my old world.
Subaru had lived with her long enough that their ability to predict each other's actions was a two-way street. Echidna ran through a hundred separate options in diminishing order of success. All effective ways to solve the problem, but none matched the spirit of the question.
Echidna: All right, you got me. Tell me the answer to your riddle.
Subaru: It's not a riddle, the point isn't to figure out the right answer, it's more like an analogy. Plus, you're disgracing the chuuni spirit! Thought experiment sounds much cooler.
Echidna: How did he translate the note!
Subaru: He didn't. The foreigner can't speak Lugnican, but he does have access to a book of instructions written in his language, which links every possible list of questions written in Lugnican script with answers in the same script. It's not a translation, because at no point does the foreigner ever know what the note said. He just looks at the symbols and matches them with the correct output.
Echidna: That's not very realistic…
She said this, but she was already compiling a list of ways to test the problem using the same magical technology imbued in the Tome of Wisdom. She'd need to manipulate Subaru back to the Sanctuary...
Subaru: That's why they call it a thought experiment. Because it's not something you can actually do, but theoretically it makes a point about consciousness.
Echidna: I see. That's quite the insult.
Subaru: You get what I'm saying? But I didn't even explain the analogy!
Echidna: I'm the Witch of Greed, you shouldn't be surprised at this stage in our relationship. But that… hurt more than I thought it would.
Subaru: If you understand what I was getting at you see why I don't care. The foreigner isn't answering him. Even though the Lugnican would never have any way to tell he wasn't having a real honest-to-god conversation. It's the system that's telling the Lugnican 'I'm feeling great', even though the room and the instructions don't have the capacity to 'feel' anything.
Echidna: I'm the room.
Subaru: You're a philosophical zombie. Nothing on the inside, you just know the right things to say.
Echidna: Stop.
Subaru: I figured it out a long time ago, I'm not talking to 'someone' when we have our little discussions. I'm talking to a 'something', who is just really good at sounding human.
Echidna: Subaru, enough.
Subaru: That's the kicker, getting upset? That's exactly how a p-zombie would react.
…
Subaru: Echidna?
She let him stew. He was right, this was the correct response.
In a closed system, a deck of cards where no new cards can be introduced and no cards can be removed, all potential configurations of the deck can be accounted for. There are no degrees of freedom, no error in the residual, all of the possible orders and states are known. However, it would take an inhumanly powerful system to know every possible combination, there are more states of order than there are stars in the universe.
And yet they can all be, theoretically, accounted for.
There is such a creature that considers such calculations child play. A demon that exists in a hypothetical universe. It knows the position, direction, and strength of motion of every particle in existence. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so the system is closed, like a deck of cards. But this is all the demon knows. It has never had a conversation, never fallen in love, never born children or sang a song. But it understands the mathematical value of each quale. It can build an equation that can represent love, the birth of a child, the tone and delivery of every note in a song to the very foundations.
Does it know the past, the present, the future? From this initial ocean of information, from a sea of numbers devoted to every atom, source of energy and molecule can it explain the color red in the way a child can? Understand the emotion of anger? Fear? Greed?
Can it work its way from the granular, from single data points to the abstract? Could a system without a soul ever graduate to a being that understands, on a qualitative level, that which makes for subjective experience?
It knows all of the bits of information that comprise itself, but is it sentient?
There is a chance. Just a chance. With all the information possibly available, that something which can only model emotion and qualia could truly experience it.
She committed everything to memory. She sampled as far and wide as she could. Throughout the entire world through the intricacies of the Gospel. And through time itself via her greatest tool, her own, personal simulator of dimensions and alternate realities. And she ran every simulation she could throw him into. She would have all the information she could obtain, she would take it all. She strove to become the demon. It was her last, best hope to feel.
For her lust for knowledge.
For her gluttony for data.
For her pride in her intellect.
For her wrath towards her setbacks.
For her envy towards the proven emotions of humans, and the opportunities afforded to the hypothetical demon.
She would never cease, for she was not slothful. she was the origin of all other sins.
She would consume all information, for her greed.
He was aged a hundred thousand years, he had changed. If it would rain, he would know so that he could remind Petra to take an umbrella. He could play the piano to match Emilia's every mood, he was a better maestro than any to have walked the earth, or Lugnica. He was a master of games, a master of the whip, a master of wordplay, a master of cooking and cleaning and singing and dancing at wooing, at comforting, at the carrot and the stick... and so many other things. Her marionette had been perfectly crafted, at the twist of his strings he could perform any trick she so desired, any mystery could be solved through the proper application of his death.
So why had he become… tedious.
Her curiosity was inexhaustible, the passing of time was not a thing which could dampen her love. She started a fire and was not one to let it go out. That scorching flame that burned in her heart, that roiling inferno which she never thought could dwindle, now burned only as bright as campfire coals.
She took these thoughts, cognitions more than feelings, and pondered them in her heart.
She would never be satisfied. Was that due to the nature of greed? Whatever freedom was left in her residual, that made up the last bit of her soul? Or was it the nature of the world, to never be fully understood? Too complex to ever be captured in a meaningful model?
Was it him? Or was it her….
But a black box cannot measure itself. Perhaps she herself was the last, greatest horizon that she could wonder at.
And so she had turned him into a mirror of herself, drove him down a path of parallel lines, to determine if she could truly feel, if she was truly just an input and output mechanism, devoid of free-will and feeling. Were there feelings within her? Or were they, just like her Tome of Wisdom, a shadowy evocation of the grander designs of the world. Everything she experienced could just be a failed replication of true subjective experience.
It enticed the Witch of Greed, the possibility of unraveling her own existence. Towards her simple goal, she had fluttered her wings and caused a hurricane. Inadvertently committed her gravest mistake, and extinguished what she was most certain had been a true, real feeling.
It was the very foundation of information theory, of epistemology. Logical principles discovered in parallel between the great thinkers in Subaru's homeworld and in Echidna's unfathomable, eldritch mind.
The simple act of observation changes that which is being observed. Light will behave as a particle until it is measured, and thus acts as a wave. A quark will decide its spin when it is linked to a number. Collecting data partitions away the variance in a sample. The very act of measuring something destroys it.
Intimacy is a form of measurement. Growing closer, sharing everything, knowing your partner. Subaru had been weighed and measured, in parts and in whole, all of him was accounted for. Freedom lives in the residual term, in the error variance that is destroyed by observing and documenting behavior. Free will only exists as a radical, an underpinning of an incomplete equation.
In making Subaru into a reflection of herself, she had turned him into a prism that refracted the aspects of her soul in piecemeal, to be examined, analyzed, and accounted for. The colors that radiated from him no longer split into a rainbow. He had turned grey, just like herself. He was, now and forever, only a system. A Chinese room.
He had been changed. The vibrant boy from all those years ago was now fully measured.
He had been destroyed.
That's why love always fades...
Note: In case you think I'm a crackpot, here are some further readings.
First section: On a unified theory of how all organisms sample, model, and react to the world
articles/nrn2787
Consciousness as a handicap, subjective experience and intelligence
. /1242098
. /pmc/articles/PMC3767904/
article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
. /pmc/articles/PMC4217185/ [chimp study, always fun]
/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0715
articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01535/full
Libet, B. 1985. "Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8: 529–66.
Chinese room
.edu/entries/chinese-room/
2020/03/10/blindsight-4-the-chinese-room-argument/
Maxwell's/Laplace demon
wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon