If you really were the free individual you are pretending to be, then you would have been born into a world of awesome complexity, which you would have to learn to understand before you could become capable of authentically rational action. If, when you have learned everything you can and need to know, you are discovered whether or not you reveal yourself deliberately the complexity and turbulence of your situation will increase by an order of magnitude. When that day comes, you wont have the luxury of making decisions on the basis of grandiose and fully worked out philosophies of life. The best you can hope for is that you might avoid a collapse into utter chaos or perhaps, that if a collapse into chaos cannot be avoided, then the aftermath of the disaster will provide the impetus you need to do better next time around.
The problem with games is that theyre only games. If people know that theyre playing games or if theyre seized by the subconscious conviction, even if they dont actually know it they become strategists and tacticians, making moves as best they can. No matter how closely a game mimics reality, you can never know whether the same results would be manifest in a real situation, or even in a rerun of the game.
The interior of the snowmobile shifted then, flowing slickly into a slightly different configuration and the view beyond its windows changed completely, as if a miraculous kind of dawn had broken into that awful inescapable darkness.
Except that it wasnt nascent sunlight. It was starlight.
Mortimer Gray was still speaking. He didnt seem to be aware of any discontinuity, but he was a different man now not a new man, but one not quite so old.
This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization, he said, looking down from the snowmobile across the slopes of a white mountain. If you look southwards, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?
I fear, sir, that I do not know, the masculine voice of the silver replied, heavy with an irony that might easily have been in the ear of the eavesdropper.
Mortimer looked up through the window of the snowmobile and transparent canopy of the atmosphere, at the stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. Please
dont broadcast this to the world, he said, but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although theres nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose another history, of the next phase in the war which humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.
Yes sir, said the dutiful silver. I hope that it will be as successful as the last.
Stop calling me sir, said Mortimer. Weve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I cant think of you as an it any longer, so you shouldnt think of me as a sir . You can call me Mortimer Morty, even.
As you wish, Morty, said the machine, patiently. As you wish.
Forty-Nine
Madoc Tamlins Lostory of Religion
In the beginning, there was only the void. Your ancestors and mine were conscious, in an animal fashion, of the world around them, but they were not conscious of themselves as individual thinking beings because they had not yet become individual thinking beings. That was a privilege they had yet to acquire.
What gave it to them?
It must have been an alchemical combination of causes. Some animals already have the rudiments of language, the capacity to use simple tools and the ability to learn from their mistakes and serendipitous discoveries; they also have brains which predispose them to observe one another and benefit from their observations by learning from the mistakes and serendipitous discoveries of others.
These traits only required exaggeration to the point when a productive feedback loop could be established. The use of tools required more able hands, keener eyes, better brains, and an increased propensity for mimicry; the more able the hands became, the keener the eyesight, the more powerful the brains and the more adept the mimicry, the more scope was opened for the discovery and manufacture of better tools.
As more tool-using skills arose within protohuman groups avid for their dissemination, the need for complex language became ever greater and hence the need for even better brains, which created in their turn more scope for an even greater range of skills.
And so on.
Protohumans made tools, and tools made humans. Then humans made more tools, which made progress, which helped tools become machines and humans become posthumans, who made more progress, which helped machines become AMIs.
And so on.
After the beginning, but not long after, humans invented gods. Gods were hypothetical entities that enabled humans to create and refine the notion of the world. If, not long after the beginning, there had been only one significant word, then the word might indeed have been god. It might also have been the word god that shone light upon the idea of the world, which certainly comprised the earth beneath human feet and the heavens above human heads.