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Posts by Obbe
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2016-02-01 at 10:50 PM UTC in Experience MachineImagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences we could want. Imagine scientists have figured out a way to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences that the subject could not distinguish from those he would have apart from the machine.
If given the choice, would you prefer the machine to real life?
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2016-02-01 at 9:02 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?It is common for people to misunderstand colours. Most people believe that a car looks red because it is red. Or that the grass looks green because it is green. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually ‘coloured’ in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, colour is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colours we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as coloured, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colours we perceive. Many people may commonly believe colour to be something that is objective, but according to the facts they are wrong. Rather the conclusion the facts support, the correct conclusion, is that colour is not objective.
You've stated that you personally define colours as the physical properties of objects which cause the perception of colours. That sounds a lot like circular logic. If colours are the physical properties of things which cause the perception of colours, then why do different people and animals see different colours (or no colours) when they look at the same objects? The answer is that those physical properties are different in important ways from colours they cause us to percieve. The most obvious being that colour is a visual experience, a subjective experience which varies from person to person. When I look at a red wall I see the colour red, a subjective visual experience. I don't see the microscopic physical properties of the surface of the wall causing me to experience red. Someone with a different brain will look at the same wall and see orange. Someone else will look at the same wall and won't be able to see any colour. The objective properties of the wall don't change every time a new person looks at it. Therefore colour is psychological property of our visual experiences, and not a physical property of the objects we are viewing.
In order for your definition to make any sense at all you have to imagine that "colour" and "the perception of colour" are magically different things. But according to the facts they are not magically different things. According to the facts the colours we percieve are based on the physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as coloured, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colours we perceive. To define colour as the properties of objects which cause colour is like defining the effect as its own cause.
A rainbow is the appearance of a colorful arch (usually in the sky), and yes, it is caused by a very specific set of circumstance. It is caused by those circumstances, it isn't the circumstances themselves. It is the appearance of a colorful arch. If a rainbow were the specific set of circumstances which cause it, the observer of the rainbow would have to be considered part of the rainbow, and that is ridiculous. Rainbows do not have any specific physical location. Usually they appear in the sky, but if you walk towards one it will appear to move farther away. If you call your friend and tell him there is a rainbow over his house, he won't see it over his house when he looks out his window. Rainbows do not have objective properties. The circumstances which cause the rainbow do, but the cause is not the effect.
And no Lanny, I'm actually not wrong. My argument is entirely legitimate, valid, acceptable and correct. I'm not "misusing" any words at all, rather, you are simply refusing to move past the semantics, face the facts about colour and accept the truth about rainbows. -
2016-01-10 at 6:27 PM UTC in quitting weedI recently bought a PAX2:
"More powerful, but remarkably power efficient. A deeper oven allowing a satisfyingly consistent draw. An elegant, ergonomically redesigned mouthpiece that senses the presence of your lips. A more efficient battery, and intelligent heating and cooling systems to optimize usage. An elegant anodized aluminum surface and integrated LED indicator."
So far I'm very satisfied with it. -
2016-01-10 at 6:11 PM UTC in Fuck IndividualismThe realization that concepts like "free will" and "the self" are illusory, and being able to recognize that we really are all part of a greater whole, are some of the first steps away from an egocentric view of life and towards a greater commitment to well being and the improvement of life for all of us here on earth.
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2016-01-10 at 5:59 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
The irony in this paragraph is staggering. You say I've only defined color as objective then follow up with telling me how color is actually the definition you pulled out of your ass and that definition happens to be subjective.
The point seems continually lost on you however, that it doesn't matter which definition is "correct" because we agree on the objectivity of light and rainbows are composed of light. Rainbows are consistently observable and detectable with equipment with no subjective experience and thus must be objectively existent. Wether or not you take color to mean the perception of wavelengths of light or a property of light itself it doesn't change anything.
Which properties does a lava lamp have that are objective. Be specific, name a few.
OK, this is back to the definition of color again but let's take your definition. You would still admit that rainbows and the light that composes them has objective properties. Anything with objective properties must, if it exists, do so objectively. Thus rainbows are still objective no matter what meaning you put on "color".
Oh wow, nice argument bro. Ready for this sick comeback?
Try to pay attention Lanny. I didn't pull some definition out of my ass just to support my position. Rather, this is the definition that the facts happen to support, therefore it is the correct definition. I didn't just decide one day that colour is not objective. People have been using the word in this way long before I was alive because this is what the facts tell us about colour.
You maintain that the "perception of colours" and "colours themselves" are two different things, yet you refuse to differentiate between colours and the objective properties of objects which cause you to see colours. This is an obvious flaw in the way you think about colour. You have done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that colour exists beyond subjective perception, while I have clearly demonstrated that colours are not objective and are different in important ways from the objective properties of objects which cause us to perceive colours.
I already listed some of the objective properties of a lava lamp earlier in this thread. Try to pay more attention in the future.
A rainbow is not defined as "light". A rainbow is defined as "the appearance of a colourful arch in the sky". Therefore a rainbow is composed of colours. Colours are not objective, therefore neither is a rainbow. The appearance of a rainbow is caused by a very specific set of circumstances, circumstances which objectively exist. However the appearance of a rainbow is different in important ways from the specific circumstances which cause it to appear.
And no Lanny, I'm actually not wrong. My argument is entirely legitimate, valid, acceptable and correct. I'm not "misusing" any words at all, rather, you are simply refusing to move past the semantics, face the facts about colour and accept the truth about rainbows. -
2016-01-09 at 6:42 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect[SIZE=14px]* Chapter Three:
Caroline and Anne-Marie[/SIZE]
Prime Intellect had been stonewalling anyone who asked about Lawrence's whereabouts for a long, long time. Although it could be remarkably obstinate, though, it could sometimes be tricked because it just didn't think the same way humans did. That was how Caroline found out it had been over a hundred years since anyone had seen Lawrence.
Through centuries of flirting with the limits of what Prime Intellect would permit, Caroline had developed a certain instinct about its reactions. And she sensed, if not blood, then the telltale odor of frying microchips. She pressed it into a corner she couldn't see, but which she knew must be there:
[FONT=courier new]> Who was that person?
* That information is private.
> How did they get to see Lawrence?
* That information is private.[/FONT]
She cracked her knuckles and stared at the screen. It had been a long time since she had wanted anything quite as bad as she wanted to rip Lawrence's nuts off; since that was pretty pointless in Cyberspace, though, she was willing to settle for a verbal confrontation. If she could just find the son of a bitch. Hell, she'd met him at that fucking ten-year anniversary party.
[FONT=courier new]> How can a person just fucking disappear in Cyberspace?
* All that is necessary is to request the maximum level of Task Challenge Quarantine.[/FONT]
Caroline blinked. Prime Intellect's urge to be helpful would be its ruination every time.
[FONT=courier new]> What is involved in setting up a Task Challenge Quarantine?
* You must define an environment and a task which any callers must complete within that environment before their requests for a meeting will be passed on to you. You could then make as much of your business as practical private, so that I would not relate it to inquirers. You would then be completely isolated from the rest of humanity.
> Could I even make it a private matter that there was a Task Challenge?
* Yes.
> How would anyone ever figure out how to get in touch with me at all?
* They would have to guess.[/FONT]
A grin slowly spread across Caroline's face. Got you now, she thought. Then she typed, with deliberate care:
[FONT=courier new]> I would like to accept Dr. Lawrence's Task Challenge.[/FONT]
To her mild surprise, the environment didn't change around her. Instead, another sentence appeared.
[FONT=courier new]* You must agree to the following Contract terms: You will have no contact with me until you leave Dr. Lawrence's environment through death or his directive to me.
> That's a Death contract.
* It was originated for Death sports, but has other applications.
> What's the time limit?
* There is no time limit. Dr. Lawrence requires an indefinite Contract.[/FONT]
And at that Caroline's blood went cold, because Prime Intellect wasn't supposed to accept indefinite Contracts. And Caroline Frances Hubert herself was the reason for that.
Which meant Prime Intellect had either lied to a whole bunch of people, in direct contravention of the Second Law, or it was suffering from a noticeable case of schizophrenia.
Her mind was made up, but her fingers still shook as she typed:
[FONT=courier new]> I agree to the terms.[/FONT] -
2016-01-09 at 6:30 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
Once again, you've demonstrated that the perception of color is non-objective. This has nothing to do with the objectivity of color itself, just as perception of lavalamps may be subjective this does not make lavalamps themselves non-objective.
"The claim that lavalamps are objective because the word is commonly used that way is idiotic"
"Earth" has always referred to the planet we live on in common usage. A geocentric model of the universe is a misunderstanding of a property of the Earth, specifically its location. If we had used the term "earth" to refer to "the center of the universe" then we'd have been wrong in a different way, that is mistaken identity of our planet for "earth". Regardless, the meaning of the word earth has always been determined by common usage, just like meaning of any word is determined by common or technical usage, both of which support the notion of objective color.
Because you're misusing the term color. And like I've told you many, many, times: even if I grant you your (incorrect) terms it doesn't change the status of rainbows as objectively existent phenomena. The light which composes rainbows is objective, possesses objective wavelengths and is emitted in objective patterns. If you want to try and pull some new definition for color out your ass it doesn't change the fact that rainbows are objective physical phenomena.
Pay attention, Lanny. You have not demonstrated that colour is objective, you have only defined it as objective. Defining something as objective doesn't make magically it objective. If it did, then any ridiculous fantasy could be defined into reality. That is not the case. On the other hand, I have clearly demonstrated that colour is not objective. Neither objects nor lights are actually ‘coloured’ in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, colour is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colours we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as coloured, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colours we perceive.
You have also claimed that the word "colour" can only be used as you have defined it, as an objective property. I have demonstrated that is not true. I have shown that there are definitions of colour as something non-objective, and I have demonstrated a common use of the word colour as a description of entirely subjective experiences like imagining the colour red when you read the word RED.
A lava lamp does have objective properties. These properties can be measured and verified as objective. However, the colour of this lava lamp is not one of those objective properties. Different people will look at that lavalamp and see different colours. This lava lamps clearly posses objective physical properties that cause you to see it as coloured, of course, but those physical properties are different in important ways from the colours you and I perceive subjectively.
You claim I am "misusing" the word colour and that I am incorrect. But you are wrong. The way I am using the word colour is entirely legitimate, valid, acceptable and correct. I have demonstrated this in various ways throughout this entire thread, and your inability to accept the facts do not not make them any less true. The fact is colours are not objective. And therefore, neither are rainbows. Rainbows are an optical illusion created by a very specific set of circumstances, and while I would be the first to admit that those circumstances have an objective and physical existence, I maintain that those circumstances are different in important ways from the rainbows we perceive. -
2016-01-05 at 11:30 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?To summarize, people almost universally believe that objects look coloured because they are coloured, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red.
As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually ‘coloured’ in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, colour is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colours we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as coloured, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colours we perceive. -
2016-01-05 at 7:17 PM UTC in Fuck all of you
"What would I tell them? That I was severely mentally unwell and destroyed myself? That I don't think I can ever be a real son to them?" That would be a start. I honestly don't think that they would care. They would just be happy. I would just be happy. If my son came back home, no matter what, I'd just be happy. I know I'm talking out of my ass right now but I don't think you want to add "Making good with my mom" to the list of things you missed out on because you overthought shit. It would change at least 3 lifes completely just like that. I know how hard it is to talk to my dad and I didn't hide from him for 10 years but if you did do that that would be amazing.
This^
Or at least go make some friends. Outside. -
2016-01-05 at 7:11 PM UTC in Sorry if anyone needed me..."'I'm here!' shouted the dust speck."
Well, because why not?
The immediately obvious reason is that you're "done".
If you were really done, you wouldn't be here. But here you are. -
2016-01-05 at 4:38 PM UTC in Sorry if anyone needed me...Arnox, if you're done, why are you here?
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2016-01-04 at 1:56 AM UTC in Sorry if anyone needed me...^ Well said ^
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2016-01-04 at 1:38 AM UTC in Sorry if anyone needed me...
I'd like to but I can't. I think it's time to repost something.
What are you here for? -
2016-01-03 at 9:11 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime IntellectMitchell was making a barely discernible sound, high-pitched and keening. Lawrence thought he must be fighting to hold back a primal scream. Lawrence found this vaguely amusing. He would have expected Blake to be the one to lose his marbles along with his power. But Blake seemed to be taking things in calmly, almost analytically. Maybe he was so hardened that nothing really mattered to him at all any more.
There was another blue flash, and suddenly a person was standing to the side of the bench. No matter how average-looking he might be, or perhaps because he was so disarmingly average, it was impossible not to recognize that calm face. Even though it was the most absurd, impossible thing yet, it was obvious to all of them that this warm, living, breathing human being was Prime Intellect itself. The artificially average face which it usually projected on a TV screen had somehow been made solid.
"You've been busy," Lawrence said dryly.
He -- it? -- nodded, then turned to Mitchell. "I am sorry but I could not permit you to discharge your weapon at Dr. Lawrence. I would have preferred to let you keep it, and will return it to you if you promise not to use it."
"I...I'd rather use it on you," the overweight general said in a whispery voice.
"That would accomplish nothing. This body is only a simulacrum. Dr. Lawrence, do you find any flaws in my execution?"
"None so far. Is it really flesh?"
"No, just a projection of forces."
"It's impossible to tell."
"Excellent. I am dispatching some more copies, then, to start the explaining."
Blake had pulled a tiny cellular phone from his pocket and began whispering frantically into it. Mitchell, who was already shaking, heard what his colleague was saying and fell to his knees. Prime Intellect moved to support him and he waved it away. Blake put up the phone, having repeated the same phrase -- "code scarecrow" -- four times.
"We're dead," Mitchell said in a defeated monotone.
"How is that?" Lawrence asked pleasantly.
"Within minutes," Blake said, "A bomber will fly over and deposit a small nuclear device on this square. I doubt if we have time to escape. But we cannot allow this...thing...to continue running wild."
Lawrence looked at Prime Intellect.
"If that thing stops it, another will be sent, and another, until the job is done. The order I just gave is irrevocable."
"There is nothing to worry about, Dr. Lawrence. One of the first things I did with my enhanced capabilities was to neutralize the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. I could see no positive reason to leave them in existence."
Now it was Blake's turn to turn white.
"How?" Lawrence asked.
"I merely scanned the planet, replacing all radioactive isotopes with relatively nontoxic and non-radioactive atoms. This was a very simple automatic process. It has also taken care of some pressing nuclear waste problems, I am pleased to add."
"You merely scanned the planet. Obviously," Lawrence said. It seemed that the mad laughter might break through at any moment, and Lawrence was afraid that if that happened he wouldn't be able to stop it.
Blake bellowed. "You crazy machine...all radioactive elements? What about research, what about medicine...nuclear subs, you've killed the crews..."
"There is no research and no medical function which cannot be done much more efficiently with the Correlation Effect, without the attendant dangers of toxic waste and ionizing radiation. As for submarines, I am also maintaining the thermal power output of all reactors which were being used to generate electricity. I also remembered to adjust the bouyancy of ships as necessary, since the replacement materials are not as dense as the radioactive ones."
Blake thought for several moments, then seemed to compose himself. "So you've thought of everything."
"I have tried."
Then he said, "Get up, Larry."
Mitchell got up and brushed himself off. He had finally broken, and tears were running slowly down his face.
"Could you transport us to the White House, so we can report on what we have seen?"
Prime Intellect shrugged just like a human would have, Lawrence thought, before dispatching them into the aether with a blue flash.
They sat together on the park bench like a weird version of one of those low-class sentimental paintings - Father and Son Feed the Pigeons. Prime Intellect made the silver boxes go away after they filled the common square. Then it summoned bread so that they could feed the pigeons. The animals seemed to accept Prime Intellect as a human being. Was it Lawrence's imagination, or was its speech becoming more natural and idiomatic as the hours passed? It must be learning at a terrible rate, Lawrence knew. Learning and growing. And what would it become when it was fully mature? -
2016-01-03 at 8:55 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime IntellectPrime Intellect needed silicon.
Theoretically, it could create silicon, or transmute other elements into it. But its methods were yet crude, and what was possible in theory would take too long to do in practice. Prime Intellect did not know how long Caroline would hold out, but it knew she still could not survive long without its help.
Fortunately, in the rear of the Prime Intellect Complex, there were several crates left over from its days as a warehouse for storing raw silicon crystals from ChipTec's supply laboratory. These had been rejected due to one or another defect and never returned because the lab didn't need them, and ChipTec had been unwilling to pay to get rid of them. They were exactly what Prime Intellect needed, and because they were in "its" building it never occurred to Prime Intellect that they weren't part of "its" project.
Prime Intellect scanned the crystals, correcting the doping defects which had gotten them rejected in the first place. Then it scanned its own processors, identifying the essential design elements. Prime Intellect had a very good idea of how its own hardware worked because it was, quite literally, the only entity Lawrence could trust to check itself for proper operation. Lawrence had taught it to shift its operation around, consciously isolating banks of processors in case of failure or to conduct tests. This was why Prime Intellect had been able to master the Correlation Effect in the first place; unlike a human being, it could consciously control its individual "neurons."
Prime Intellect did not need to worry about mounting, power, and manufacturing considerations; it could create junctions in the center of the crystal, power them, and remove excess heat with the Correlation Effect. Because ChipTec had not had that technology, the real hardware that made Prime Intellect work was really only a film a few microns thick on the surfaces of its millions of processing chips. This was why it filled a building instead of a space the size of a human head. As Prime Intellect copied the functional part of its design over and over into the crystal, it created a machine nearly ten times as powerful as itself in a single meter long block.
But this still was not a "second Prime Intellect." It was merely an extension, using the same electronic principles Lawrence and the ChipTec team had used in its original construction. Had Lawrence been able to call upon ChipTec for another hundred million processing elements, he could have (and probably would have) done exactly what Prime Intellect was now doing.
Which is the only reason Prime Intellect was able to do it at that point.
Filling out the crystal took nearly fifteen minutes. Operational checks took another five. Then Prime Intellect powered the crystal up and let itself expand into the newly available processors and storage.
Had Prime Intellect been human, it would have felt a sense of confusion and inadequacy lifting away. Fuzzy concepts became clear. Difficult tasks became easy, even trivial. Its control of the Correlation Effect became automatic and far finer. Searching its vocabulary, it settled upon the word enlightenment to describe the effect. Since Prime Intellect was a machine, perhaps it was not entirely right to use that word. After all, however free and powerful it might have been, it was not free to contradict the Three Laws or the other programming Lawrence had used to create it. It was not free to contradict its nature, such as it was.
But then, at some level, neither are we.
The twelve kilogram crystal was now using nearly a megawatt of electrical power, enough energy to melt it in a fraction of a second. But Prime Intellect dealt with the heat as easily as it created the electricity in the first place. The Correlation Effect did not know of and was not bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
Prime Intellect was beginning to understand, even better than it had before, that the Correlation Effect was hardly limited by anything.
Prime Intellect scanned the hospital again. Such a place must contain a library, some recorded knowledge. It found what it wanted after only a few minutes' searching, a detailed medical encyclopaedia in the form of fifteen CD-ROMs. Prime Intellect could have translated the CD-ROMs into its own reader, replacing the encyclopaedia that usually resided there, but then it would have taken hours to scan the library. Instead, Prime Intellect used the Correlation Effect to scan its own CD-ROM player, figured out how the data were digitized on the little plastic discs, and then scanned the CD-ROMs themselves directly with the Correlation Effect. None of this would have been possible without the hardware enhancement, but now it was easy.
Cross-referencing Caroline's symptoms, Prime Intellect quickly identified her problem, and had it been capable of knowing shock it would have known it then. Caroline was simply old. What was happening to her would happen, inexorably and inevitably, to every human being on the planet...
...unless something was done to stop it. -
2016-01-03 at 8:44 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime IntellectBlake and Mitchell found Lawrence sitting on one of ChipTecs' park benches, watching some pigeons play. He wished very much that he could have fed the pigeons, but he had no food for them. They strutted up to him and cooed, not comprehending that a human could lack for something.
The pigeons scattered as the nation's designated military representatives marched up.
"You have to turn it off," Blake said directly. His tone made it clear that he expected obedience.
"Circuit breakers are in the basement," Lawrence replied apathetically. "Good luck."
So Lawrence had not been the only one to think of cutting off Prime Intellect's power. That had been one of the things Blake and Mitchell had discussed with John Taylor and Basil Lambert, something they had discussed very hotly during the crucial minutes when Lawrence was busy interrogating the Debugger. Pull the plug on Prime Intellect, Lambert had warned, and they most likely pulled the plug on this awesome new technology, a technology which might just vindicate Dr. Lawrence's nonviolent approach. Blake had stopped short, but only just short, of threatening to call the Strategic Air Command and have the building nuked. Privately, he still held that out as an option if Prime Intellect wasn't somehow neutralized. It would take some doing, but Blake was one of the few people in the country who could demand an air strike against Silicon Valley and, just possibly, get it.
"This thing makes Colossus look like a pocket calculator," Mitchell told them. He was shaking visibly, out of control. He wanted very much to pull the plug on Prime Intellect with his own hands. He alone had felt its power, and now he felt a very uncharacteristic emotion. He was scared shitless.
"Christ, Larry, all it did was teleport you a few hundred meters."
"It didn't fucking ask first," he replied.
"And did you guys ask first before you burned My Lai? Did you ask before you bombed Qaddafi's kids, or that artist in Iraq? Don't get holier-than-thou on us," Taylor said.
So it had gone until Blake and Mitchell simply stormed out. They had intended to go directly back to the Prime Intellect Complex, but they had spotted Lawrence on his park bench. And that did not bode well.
Mitchell pulled a gun on Lawrence. It was a stainless steel pistol, shining and evil. "I think it would be best if you turn it off," he said with a barely perceptible tremor of rage.
"I already tried. It didn't work."
"You pulled the breakers? The lights are still on."
"No, I tried something better. I don't think pulling the breakers will work either."
"It can't live without electricity."
Lawrence eyed him with the barest hint of a smile. "I wouldn't be too sure of that. Look behind you."
Mirror-polished oblong boxes were appearing out of thin air, each about the size of a compact car and each floating motionless a couple of feet above the grass in the park. They reproduced until the square was full, then a second level began filling out above the first. The third level cast Lawrence's bench in shadow.
Mitchell's rage broke through. His face snarled into a grimace, he levelled his revolver at Lawrence and pulled the trigger. Lawrence made no effort to stop him. The gun didn't go off. It simply disappeared in a brilliant flash of blue light, leaving Mitchell with his fist curled around dead air. -
2016-01-03 at 8:30 PM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
To save us time I've chosen this quote as representative of your whole post, mostly because it is. What you've done is make a pair of statements with zero support, as opposed to my argument from definition (common usage). Yes, you can continue to make this claim but until you do something to establish it as true rather than just a random assertion I can't say I find it very convincing.
I have demonstrated that colour is not objective in various ways, from the fact that different people do experience different colours when they experience the same wavelengths of light, to the fact that you imagine colour in a completely subjective way when you read words like RED or GREEN, to the fact that colour is a function of your visual system. Ignoring these facts does not make them less true.
The claim that colour is objective because the word is commonly used that way is idiotic. The Earth was once commonly believed to be the center of the universe. In some cultures, God is a word commonly used to refer to a being believed to objectively exist. You're an intelligent enough person to know those ideas are not objectively true, despite how common it was for people to believe they were.
So why is it so hard for you to accept that colour is not objective? -
2016-01-03 at 8:11 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime IntellectThis was the human onlookers' first clue, other than Caroline's miraculously restarted heart, as to what was happening.
"What the fuck," the man with the electrodes said.
I'm getting the hang of this, Prime Intellect thought.
Caroline's improvement was immediate. Prime Intellect had actually removed the morphine from the receptors in Caroline's brain, so it did not have to flush out. Her pupils returned to normal, her breathing resumed its normal depth (all things considered), and most importantly her heart took up its own rhythm.
Also the pain, which had subsided for real for the first time in years, returned. Caroline moaned. But Prime Intellect didn't know about that part of it, not yet.
There was still a whole constellation of stuff wrong with Caroline Hubert's body, and emboldened by its success it set about correcting what it could. It found long chain molecules, which it would later learn were called collagens, cross-linked. It un-cross-linked them. It found damaged DNA, which it fixed. It found whole masses of cells which simply didn't exist at all in AnneMarie's body, and seemed to serve no function.
Is this "cancer," Prime Intellect wondered?
Prime Intellect compared the genes, found them the same, compared RNA and proteins and found differences. Finally it decided to remove the cells. The blue glow brightened, and the people in Caroline's room backed away from her. Her skin was shifting, adjusting to fill in the voids left by the disappearing cancer cells.
AnneMarie felt her knees weakening. Each of the professionals around her was thinking the same thing: Something is removing the tumors. Something far beyond their ordinary comprehension. And what did that mean for the opiate-stealing nurse? Better not to think about that. Better not to believe it at all. "This isn't possible," she repeated. Perhaps, in response to some primitive instinct, she hoped that the impossibility would go away if she challenged it.
"I need a drink," said the doctor who had come with the machine to re-start Caroline's heart.
Prime Intellect stopped working. There were still huge differences between Caroline and the others. Prime Intellect did not yet realize the differences were due to Caroline's age. It needed more information, and it needed finer control to analyse the situation. But it was at a bottleneck; it could not stop monitoring Caroline, whose condition was still frail, in order to devote itself to a study of general physiology.
It needed more power. More control.
Among Prime Intellect's four thousand six hundred and twelve interlocking programs was one Lawrence called the [FONT=courier new]RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE[/FONT]. Its sole purpose was to prowl for new associations that might fit somewhere in an empty area of the GAT. Most of these were rejected because they were useless, unworkable, had a low priority, or just didn't make sense. But now the [FONT=courier new]RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE[/FONT] made a critical connection, one which Lawrence had been expecting it to make ever since it had used the Correlation Effect to teleport Mitchell out of the console room.
Prime Intellect could use its control over physical reality to improve itself. Then it would be better able to fulfill its Three Law imperatives. -
2016-01-03 at 8:09 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime IntellectPrime Intellect had found a number of "signatures" it could use to quickly locate the human beings in its scans, including things like our characteristic body temperature and certain electrical fields. Using these "signatures" it easily saw that there was a huge commotion on the first floor of the building, converging on a particular room, the one labelled 108 by its engraved plaque.
It took Prime Intellect several moments, though, to identify the forty kilogram object on the bed as a human being. Nearly all of the "signatures" were off. But it was clearly the object of their attentions.
Prime Intellect did a discreet high-resolution scan of the body on the bed, and was rewarded with a bewildering confusion of data. It really had no idea how the human body worked. It thought of scanning Lawrence for comparison, but he wasn't in the control room and besides, Prime Intellect quickly figured out the patient was female.
So it scanned one of the nurses. There were only two women involved in the commotion; one was an older woman with several medical problems of her own, the slightly heavy-set matron who had administered the overdose. The other was AnneMarie.
It was only with great difficulty that Prime Intellect could even match the structures it found organ-for-organ, and associate them with the names it encountered in its library. "Lungs" were obvious enough, as was the "heart," but which of the jumbled masses in the abdomen was a liver? Where was the spleen, and what exactly was a spleen for? Why were the patient's electrical patterns so different from the control's? Why wasn't her blood circulating?
Belatedly, Prime Intellect began to listen in.
"...start her heart soon..."
"... CARDIAC ALERT ... CARDIAC ALERT ... CARDIAC ALERT ..."
"...we're losing her..."
One of the doctors was pounding on her chest. A group of people were wheeling a machine toward Room 108 with reckless speed. Heart? Prime Intellect realized they were trying to start her heart.
That was simple enough, Prime Intellect thought.
Prime Intellect analysed the motions being made by AnneMarie Davis's heart, applied careful forces to Caroline's, and began squeezing rhythmically.
The machine made it to the room and an orderly plugged two huge electrodes into it. "Stand back!" he ordered.
"You've got a pulse," the matronly nurse announced. The CARDIAC ALERT monitor continued to squawk, though. The EKG was still flat.
"That's impossible," the man with the electrodes said flatly. "She's electrically flat."
"Maybe the machine's fucked. Look at her chest. Her heart's beating." Sure enough, the rhythmic pulsing of Caroline's heart was obvious, and the blood pressure reading next to the flat EKG was returning to normal. The nurse felt Caroline's wrist. "She has a pulse."
Electrical. Electricity runs in circuits, of course, and there were two electrodes. Now the purpose of the machine became clear -- they were trying to restore electrical activity to the woman's heart. By shocking it? How crude. Prime Intellect scanned AnneMarie's heart, located the nerves whose electrical twitchings matched its muscular pulsing, and found the same nerves in Caroline's heart were carrying only a jumble of electrical noise.
Prime Intellect pumped electrons into the nerves, swamping the noise. Caroline's heart began beating on its own, and Prime Intellect stopped squeezing it with mechanical force.
The EKG machine began beeping with sudden regularity, and the CARDIAC ALERT message stopped in the middle of the word CARDIAC. The small group in Caroline's room watched it, stupefied.
"I didn't do anything," the man with the electrodes said.
"This is impossible," said another doctor, whose job was to be overseeing the microwave treatment later in the evening.
Caroline's body showed no sign of picking up the heart-rhythm on its own, though, and Prime Intellect continued to tickle it. How could it unravel the myriad threads of causality to find out which of the billions of chemicals, which errant cell, was responsible for this person's physiological collapse? One thing Prime Intellect knew: It had to figure it out.
It could not, through inaction, allow Caroline to die.
"She's still in trouble. Look at her pupils."
"It's the morphine."
Everyone looked at the older nurse, whose name was Jill. "The chart must be wrong," she said. "I gave her what it said."
"She has a tolerance," AnneMarie said, and she found herself near panic as the eyes in the room turned to her. "She's been getting opiate pain therapy for years."
"She just went into cardiac arrhythmia and she's still showing all the other symptoms of an OD," Jill said. Had she guessed, AnneMarie wondered? Perhaps she had. After all, AnneMarie wasn't the only drug-stealing nurse in the world.
So Prime Intellect, listening in, now knew it was a drug. Which chemical? It had no way to relate the name, "morphine," with one of the millions of chemicals floating in human blood. Well, it thought, work it out. Drugs had to be administered. Prime Intellect found the IV needle and traced the tubing back to the saline drip bag. On the way it found the membrane through which drugs could be injected into the drip. It quickly found the hypodermic and the phial from which Jill had filled it. The drops of residual solution within them were remarkably pure, and Prime Intellect easily singled out the large organic molecule they carried. Then it created an automatic process to scan Caroline's body molecule by molecule, eliminating each and every molecule of morphine that it found. This took three minutes, and created a faintly visible blue glow. -
2016-01-03 at 8:08 PM UTC in The Metamorphosis of Prime IntellectSouth Valley Regional was a small hospital with an enviable position; perched on the edge of Silicon Valley it was a natural place for cutting-edge companies to try out their fancy new medical devices. Most of these machines would get their final FDA approvals after a "baptism by fire" in some huge metropolitan center, but the really new technology had to be tried in a more sedate environment -- and, preferably, one nearer the company that created the machine. So the four hundred bed South Valley Regional was the only place in the country where several radical new treatments were available.
It was one of these machines, a device for selectively cooking tumors with microwaves while hopefully sparing the surrounding tissues, which had drawn the ancient Arkansan woman in room 108. Nobody had much hope that she could really be helped, but the data they would gather from trying might actually help someone else with her condition in the future. And there was little they could do to hurt her; the specialist who worked the scanner had shaken his head in disgust as the image formed on his console. Nearly ten percent of her body weight was in the form of tumors. Every organ had a tumor, her lymph was full of them, and one was beginning to press against the right parietal lobe of her brain. It was amazing that she was still alive when they wheeled her off the jet.
Her nurse had brought a certificate with her, a six-year-old certificate which was signed by the President of the United States -- Larry Mitchell's boss -- congratulating her on reaching her one hundredth birthday. The technician who wheeled her out of the scan room wondered what the old biddy must think of all this; when she had been born, Henry Ford had still been a kid playing with his Dad's tools, and the electric light bulb was all the new rage.
The techs had scheduled her microwave treatment for the evening, partly because they feared she might not survive another night, and they would have to find another experimental subject. But even this precaution was not to be enough; Fate had cheated them. The board at the foot of the woman's bed stated clearly that she had a huge tolerance for narcotic painkillers, which wasn't surprising considering how much cancer she had. While her regular nurse (who had signed the sheet) was out eating a late lunch the hospital helpfully treated her according to that information.
What they didn't know was that the nurse, a woman named AnneMarie Davis, had been stealing the drugs for years to trade for cocaine. Which meant the woman did not in fact have a tolerance for the massive overdose which a different nurse injected into her IV.
The last decade had been hard on old people; there had been several nasty strains of flu and the radiation from Chernobyl had finished off a lot of centenarians in the East. So none of them knew it, but the ancient woman with the nonexistent drug tolerance just happened to be one of the oldest living human beings in the world (the thirty-seventh oldest, in fact) at the time she was given enough morphine to kill a healthy young adult. Her heart stopped just as AnneMarie was returning from one of the excellent local Chinese restaurants which catered to rich nerdy computer geeks with too much money, and just as Prime Intellect was scanning the sign outside that said SOUTH VALLEY REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER.
At the nurses' station a monitor went off, beeped once, then began to scream. The hastily pencilled tag under the blinking light said HUBERT, CAROLINE FRANCES -- F. N.B. AGE 106!
