The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  Three additional modes of cognition, used by the Warlocks, the Invariants, and the Cerebellines, were developed at this time.

  However, the mass-minds, based on having large numbers of interchangeable and interoperable subjects, could not correctly interweave the needs of these new mutually incomprehensible populations. Deception, incomprehension, antipathy, and, eventually, war itself, became the normal means mutually antagonistic mass-minds had for dealing with each other.

  An old philosophy was resurrected to serve the new needs of the times. The middle ages of the Fifth Era were characterized by an adherence to an absolute moral standard, and the unwillingness to initiate aggression, no matter the provocation. During this noble time, the mutual antipathies of the mutually incomprehensible neurostructures were obviated. Many paleopsychorobotocists list this time as forming the deep structures of Earthmind’s rather callous and laissez-faire moral priorities. Certain nonsuperintelligent artificial minds, including administrative and police authorities, that were later absorbed into the core operating system of the Earthmind, date from this period.

  Although remembered as the era that gave rise to the reemergence of the individual and independent consciousness, in reality, it was only during the frantic colonial expansions of the later period of this era that the advantages of individualism forced the unwieldy mass-minds to develop specialized subsections, and, later, to disband. Warlock-based mass-minds were among the first to disband; Invariant among the last.

  This also was the first era of the superintellects. Even Mentator, the largest and most cerebral of cybernetic Compositions of the previous era, was never able to achieve transhuman thought, even if able to think much more quickly and thoroughly, and with much mechanical assistance.

  The crowning achievement of this era was the final comprehension of all geometric and scientific theorems as a whole. This epiphany is still on file in the museum, and most schola require its contemplation as a basic part of transobjective training (that is, the trained ability to suffer the imposition of thoughts and concepts beyond one’s own ability to comprehend).

  During this time, a multigeneration ship, the Naglfar, captained by Ao Ormgorgon, prompted by a dream, carried many thousands of his fellow Warlocks, as well as contingents of Invariants and Cerebellines, to establish a permanent scientific base, and, later, a self-sustaining civilization, ten thousand light-years away, at Cygnus X-l.

  The Sixth Mental Structure embraced the first entirely artificial consciousness. The rise of artificial intelligence was long anticipated and long delayed, but unlike every previous transition between eras, the transition from the Fifth to the Sixth Era was achieved peacefully and without error, since the wise legislators of the Unicameral and Polyhierarchical schola and the Maternalist biocompositions (such as Demeter Mother) had adjusted social institutions and political expectations to welcome the coming of the Sophotechs long before the first eletrophotonic artificial self-awareness passed the Descartean Cogito test.

  The only true surprise was the universal rejection of the Sophotech minds to accept positions of political power or authority. They politely refused even voting enfranchisement. Their own politics among themselves was swift and incomprehensible, based on the alterations of deep structures and the adoption of priorities trees and compromises to avoid conflict; and yet, the message to living minds was simple and ancient. Violence can be avoided if all parties place a higher priority on cooperation than on conflict.

  The Seventh Mental Structure is held to have begun when Sophotech investigations into noumenal mathematics (nonlinear yet nonchaotic models for uncertain complex systems, including, for example, human brain information) allowed the very long awaited creation of a science of noetics.

  For the first time, mental information, both in whole and part, could be recorded, reordered, transmitted, saved, and manipulated in the same fashion as any other type of information. Downloads and partials could be recorded and summoned, and ghosts created from transcripts or speculative reconstruction.

  NOETICS

  The early period of the Seventh Mental Structure is also called the Time of the Second Immortality, for the defects of the Compositional mental noösophic recording systems were cured. Noumenal mathematics allowed for the modeling of essential and ineffable human memory characteristics, to such a level of fine detail that individual human minds could be recorded, duplicated, and reproduced; and differences between the original template and the copy were below detectable limits, both mechanical detection thresholds and the intuitive and emotional threshold that allowed the revenants’ copies to be regarded as being one and the same as the originals by friends, family, and society.

  While philosophers and Sophotechs might recognize that the dead, despite all appearances, truly were dead, for all practical and legal purposes, any mind that had sufficient continuity of memory with his original template was considered to be that selfsame person.

  POLITICAL SYSTEM

  The political system of the Golden Oecumene had its roots in the time of the middle-period Fifth Mental Structure, and was inspired by the collective peace of the hive-minds of the Fourth Era, the civility of the Western democracies of the early Third Era, the respect for law and discipline that informed the Roman Empire of the Second.

  The political protocols that controlled the exchanges of mental information processing priority were mostly unchanged from the Fourth Era; the human government, likewise, was based on antique Third Era philosophical notions of separation of powers, checks and balances, between competing magistrates and administrative bodies of strictly limited mandate.

  Politics, which is the recourse to the use of force to organize interpersonal relationships, was unknown to the majority of the citizens of the Golden Oecumene. The Sophotechs, since the early Sixth Era, self-selected for mental architectures that would minimize irreconcilable differences of opinion; in effect, they had programmed themselves to make any self-sacrifice necessary to maintain the social order.

  Following their lead, less intelligent artificial intellectual constructions had likewise embraced deep structures placing a high priority on compromise and harmony: mass-minds, Composition or noösophic formulations, likewise, filtered their mental inputs or patrons to avoid those activities that might give rise to legal clashes.

  For that moiety of the human population that existed outside of an electronic matrix, there was a Parliament (for humans) and a Meeting of the Minds (for independent machines and semi-machine consciousness), as well as a Curia, for the arbitration of legal disputes. These offices were rarely called upon, since simulations often anticipated their outcomes, and people relied heavily on the advice of the Sophotechs to avoid the economically wasteful zero-sum-game conflicts of interest.

  This is not to say, of course, that grief and passion were unknown to the Golden Age. The maneuvering and intrigue within the voluntary corporations and philosophical movements and unions known as ‘schools’ were surrounded with the bitterness and zealotry that one might expect in any other forum. Unlike the political struggles of prior ages, however, these internal scholastic struggles led to frustration and loss of prestige but not to warfare and loss of life.

  The Parliament was a diverse Composition consisting of partials, ghosts and self-aware entities granted representative power by the specific agency of specific constituents. Unlike the unwieldy political mechanisms of prior ages, the ability to create minds with the characteristics necessary to represent one’s own interests zealously and faithfully rendered the elective process an anachronism.

  Surrounding the Parliament were the Shadow Ministers, which consisted of a somewhat complex scheme of insurance companies and financial institutions, news reporters, policy analysts, and philosophers, and others who had an interest in the outcomes of political determinations. The various minds of the Ministers were organized into Compositions, or ghosts collectives, or simple standing instruction patterns.

  The Shadow Ministers had investors suffi
ciently able to anticipate the needs and desires of the constituents of the Parliament members, to give clear warning to any parliamentarian who might otherwise pursue policies that would offend his electors.

  The laws allowed for special elections to be held in such cases where the ability or honesty of these predictions was called into question. Unlike laws enforced by merely human agency, however, these computer-enforced rules and rights did not need to be exercised periodically to retain their force.

  The severely limited powers of the government in the Golden Age rendered government useless and unnecessary for the conduct of daily affairs of life. It had no power to aid or assist those who had, or who imagined, difficulties. Consequently, no one turned to it for aid in time of need; no social movement expended precious resources in an attempt to gain control of the organs of government, or the levers of power, because those organs were atrophied, and those levers were only connected to judicial institutions and police forces of severally limited operation. Most of the parliamentary debate turned on matters of taxation (i.e., Atkins’s salary) and on defining the exact boundaries of public and private intellectual property.

  Hence, the main power of the Golden Oecumene was not in its official delimitation of powers. The main social power during this period in history lay with the College of Exhortation.

  THE HORTATORS

  These Hortators, as they were called, were a response to the paradox of free government; namely, that free government is sufficiently limited in power to leave all nonviolent activities, i.e., the culture, in private hands; but that the cultural values allowing for such liberties must be maintained, and passed to the next generation, in order for the society to remain free. Unlike all prior governments, the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth could not use force to maintain the loyalty of her citizens to those values and mores she needed to survive; the unity of culture was maintained on a strictly voluntary basis.

  The Hortators commanded a wide and precarious power, both economic and social, which they maintained by carefully retaining the goodwill of their subscribers. Many particular contracts had Hortator mandates written into the fine print, including clauses requiring the users to cooperate with embargoes and boycotts.

  Because of the extraordinary lifespans of the Golden Oecumene peoples, the College could be staffed with what would have been, in earlier ages, culture heroes and historical figures, and, in the cases where no mental record survived, with ghosts or reconstructions.

  ECONOMICS

  The wealth of this era was so vast that it staggers calculation, and was distributed through a population that, though it far outnumbered the population figures of any previous era, was miniscule when compared to the resources scientific enterprise and industrial speculation had made available. The molecular machines of this era made materials which would have been waste products to men of previous ages into treasure mines. The amount of accumulated capital in the society, and the length of time over which capital ventures could extend before seeing a profit, increased the productivity of wage earners to the point where an average laborer, in real terms, controlled an amount of energy and resources that would dwarf the military budgets expropriated by governments of the warlike periods of the Third Era.

  With robots to do all menial labor, and Sophotech to do all intellectual labor, the only category of economic activities open to mankind in the Golden Age was entrepreneurial speculation. In effect, man only had to dream of something that might amuse his fellow man, or render some small service, ameliorate some perceived imperfection in life, and command his machines to carry out the project, in order to reap profits to more than pay for the rental on those machines.

  The immensity of the wealth involved, however, did not revoke any of the laws of economics known since antiquity. The law of association still proved that a superior and an inferior, when both cooperate and specialize, are more efficient working together than when working in isolation. No matter how wise and great their machines, humans always had more than enough to do. An extremely fine specialization of labor, including labor that, to earlier eras, would seem quite frivolous, allowed for nearly infinite avenues of effort to be utilized. The high population of the time was nothing but a boon; an entrepreneur need only reach the most tiny fraction of the public in order for his patrons to be numbered in the millions and billions.

  Wage rates (which, by and large, were the rental rates of laboring machines) were allowed to fall to whatever level was needed to clear the market of labor; likewise for interest rates clearing the capital market. The evils and follies created by the interventions of governments into the market were unknown in the Golden Age; nor, among the long-lived people of that era, could doctrines based on short-term thinking or short-sightedness take root. There was neither unemployment (except as a penalty inflicted by the Hortators) nor capital lying idle, nor squandered. There was, of course, no central bank, no debasement of currency, or other mischievous intermeddling with the economy.

  Every great achievement of the superscience of the era, rather than sating the human desire for accomplishments, led to a wider threshold of what ambition could accomplish; and these greater powers led in turn to the desire for ever greater achievements. Engineering efforts that would have been impossible in the poverty of prior eras, including engineering on a planetary scale, were practical in the Golden Age.

  NAMING CONVENTIONS

  The complexity of the possible social and neurological arrangements into which the peoples and self-aware artifacts of the Golden Age could organize themselves was reflected in the diverse information carried by their formal names.

  This information was usually carried in a header or prefix of standard electronic net-to-net communication, to allow the recipient to translate the response into a mutually comprehensible format and language. For humans using physical bodies, the names were translated into spoken syllables, usually in an abbreviated form.

  The naming conventions were not entirely uniform, although most names would contain the same basic information, not necessarily in the same order.

  For example, take the name Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 10191 (the “Reawakening”).

  “Phaethon” is the name of his outward identity, his public character. This only roughly corresponded to the Christian name (or first name) of an earlier age; it was a piece of intellectual property that could be bought and sold, and might also have copyright-protected facial features and expressions, body language, slang phrases, mottoes, or logos to go with it.

  “Prime” indicates that he is the original copy of this mind content, not a partial, or a reconstruction, or a ghost. Among sequential iterations of the same consciousness, this is a sequence number. By the final era of the Golden Age, this name had fallen out of strict use, and many people listed fanciful numbers, such as Nought or Myriad.

  “Rhadamanth” is the copyrighted reference to his genotype, that is, what the ancients would call a family name. In this particular case, Phaethon’s family is named after his mansion. Both the genotype and mansion were created by his sire. Members of other schools would employ this name differently, or would leave it blank; but in general it was meant to reflect on the creator or parent, whoever was responsible for the existence of the entity. Among electronic entities, a time-depth, indicating whether the entity was permanent or temporary, would be added here.

  “Humodified” is Phaethon’s phenotype (modified human), which indicates that he is a biological consciousness, not electrophotonic, of a standard human ground-shape, compatible with the three basic aesthetics: Standard, Consensus, and Objective. The primary purpose of the phenotype name is to identify aesthetic compatibility.

  An aesthetic identifies the symbols, emotional range, information formats, sense impressions, and operating speeds, and so on, with which the user is comfortable. Dolphins and Hullsmiths, for example, have additional ranges of vision, sonar, an
d hearing, plus several artificial senses that exist only in computer simulation, and consequently their ideograms can be written across a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

  “(Augment)” specifies additional phenotype information, and indicates that Phaethon carries standardized immortality nanomachines in his body. Note that Phaethon’s name, when he opened his memory casket, would change to “(special augment)” to signify his nonstandard multiple modifications and adaptations for near-light-speed environments.

  “Uncomposed” indicates a person’s Composition or attachment to a cybernetic mind network—in this case Phaethon has none. Composed people who have independent or semi-independent consciousness would list their Composition name here. Fully Composed people list their Composition name as their first name, and might list here their function, or list here a designation describing the geometry of the Composition, i.e., radial, linear, parallel, serial, hierarchical, self-organizing, or unified.

  “Indepconciousness” indicates Phaethon’s nervous system is entirely self-contained. He is not linked into a mind-sharing scheme, a memory archive, a conscience monitor; he is not part of a mental hierarchy; he is not a synnoient or avatar; he is not emotion-linked, or sharing language midbrain structures. When Phaethon enters full communion with his ship, so-called navimorphosis, this name would change to reflect the mind-sharing scheme used.

  Note that these last two factors are actually independent variables. A self-aware entity can be Composed into a network without losing independence of consciousness (if, for example, he were sharing speech and perception, but not emotion or memory). Note also, an entity can share some aspects or elements of consciousness without actually being part of a mass-mind. For example, one could share short-term memories without sharing personality (called likewisers), or vice versa (called avatars), or share dream structures and thalamic language reactions without sharing cortex consciousness (certain daughter groups of the Cerebellines do this). An entity with no instantaneous sharing of cortexual thought, perception, and memory is regarded as being legally independent, even if all other brain functions are shared.