A Note On Being

Thoughts on living things, dead things, and the subroutine that is life; from everyone's beloved machine-man Tycho Densmore.

To wit, what am I?

Mechanical, I assure you. But what exactly is that?

Mechanical. Cause and effect. A and B both have respective states and conditions, and are proportionally tied. Changes to the conditions of A will in turn result in changes to the condition of B. Tighten one wire and the other end must relax. Weights and counter-balances. Actions and reactions.

Thusly, here I stand before you, with my wires and pulleys, pistons, servomotors, cogs and wheels and springs and ratchets and all. No more, no less. Any semblance of self only serves insofar as to convenience for those that demand it.

I am mechanical, no more alive than your simple machines, your inanimate objects moving only because of artificially designed processes. As far as the "living" are concerned, I am dead.

But wait, oh egotistical and judgmental creatures! Why the scorn or even the pity? Aren't all biological bodies just the same?

Muscles tighten and relax no differently than wires on a pulley. All action is reaction, all cellular processes a carefully crafted program based on naturally discovered working chemistry. Even thoughts, the mind, are just neurons firing in coded order.

Your cells are the result of millions of years of chaotic and random survival of the fittest, or as you prefer to call it, "evolution." Your instinct to love, to care, to be curious, are all byproducts of greater survivability. The mind is a complex artificial intelligence, no more beyond simple inputs and outputs than a computer. To crave reward and stimulated pleasure are merely tools of an unconscious desperately trying to prolong the duration of the species. A self-replicating robot.

Take your eyes, if you will. What do you see? What is sight?

Light hits the retina, reacting chemically to produce other agents that irritate the nerves, producing more chemical reactions along the line up to the brain, where more chemicals set off neurons that formulate "thoughts" into comprehensible form for the local gray matter.

What is it when you see? Do you see a chair? No. You see an object, consisting of rectangles, loops, arcs, tubes, and colors. If that. "Chair" is comprehension, is interpretation; even to assign the Thing before your eyes into divisible segment such as colors and shapes is to compare the object to preconceived associations! In order to understand, the mind divides into rational fractions, but this rationale spreads only insofar as local knowledge and comprehension.

All that you can know is only what you can perceive, and I assure you there is far more to behold than that which is revealed by the mere color spectrum. Light exists in far greater, and lower, frequencies. Entire universes are born and collapsed in the time it takes for nerves to relay their signal.

What even of the range of smells, of sounds, far beyond the human's pitifully small range of capacity? Entire worlds abound out there, and you are all blind to it. No better than manatees unable to hear the boat coming.

What is your science, what is your fact? Nothing!

The world exists only insofar as you know it, and knowledge is wholly relative. Everything is true and factual...until it is proven not to be. Orthodoxys are no better than trends.

The mortal quest for knowledge is bound only by its imagination. And imagination is still finite, it cannot comprehend what it cannot imagine. It takes inspiration to smack imagination onto something it has never before encountered. But even at that point, it is glorified stealing.

There is but one story to tell, and all stand on the shoulders of giants.

There is no difference, then, between you and I.

What need have I of senses, when they can fool me? What need have I of mind, when it will only limit me? What have I of fact? Of Truth? I know it to be too simple to satisfy the quest to find it, and all attempts to make it more than that twist it into a monster. Let the gods be born!

Mortality and Self will always be denied All. And to be All is to shed oneSelf. Of what use is either?

For those who haven't damned themselves to either extreme, I say this conviction:

I am dead, and so are you.

Your erstwhile servant,
Tycho Densmore
on behalf of the Court of Tynwald

Author's Note

"The minute a machine thinks about how to make itself better, it has become sentient. The moment it goes beyond its own programming to make itself better, it has developed a soul." -Baron Seiden von Tynwald, the Maker, and vanguard of the forces of Hatteras