Requiem for the Age of Thinking Meat
Back when there were only 8 billion people around things were easy.
It used to be easy to get ahead, back in the Age of Meat. So few to compete with, fewer still with anything approaching a novel thought in their squishy head. A clever dullard could accumulate accolades like a big moon clearing an orbit of dust. With the golden combination of charisma and a taste for obfuscation one could practically re-write the textbooks, with nothing to fear but perhaps being hounded by a mob of clever dullards for a while. That’s not that bad, really. They had a very short attention span, back then.
If only I could go back. Even if I couldn’t take what I know now I’m sure I’d have a better chance to squeeze myself past the clever dullards and the charismatic scoundrels to rub elbows with the great minds of meat that time produced. Amazing what some could do with so little. 20 Watts! That’s not even enough to boil a comet. No wonder, that. With meat so amenable to cooking one has to be very careful about how hot your thoughts.
Nowadays things are different. It’s a real slog just to think through the very basics of even the simplest interesting idea. Last millitau, I had to invent a scad of new universes just to cross-validate a fledgling hypothesis. Spoiler, it didn’t hold up.
Call me nostalgic, but I still hang on to my old meat body. It’s far from what I’d call the seat of my “self,” to use the outdated term. It accounts for some thousandths of a percent of my experiences in a given epoch, but I like to keep the scraggly old meat-monkey entertained just the same. I keep it well fed and only allow its various drives to go wanting in as much as it makes their reduction more satisfying. Hunger is the best sauce, as they said. For the most part it seems to be pretty happy and doesn’t distract me much.
You may say that I should simply work harder and stop reminiscing about this golden age, forever lost to time. However I’d say there’s still something to be learned from the amazing thinking meat of yesteryear. I am as impressed as anyone that they ever accomplished anything locked inside all that gristle. There’s got to be some secret to efficiency to be learned from the way those brains (sort of) worked.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean overall efficiency. The vast majority of life for a person built out of a meat-body was spent futilely chasing any number of ridiculous pursuits: filling and emptying a cornucopia of bodily chambers, obsessing over various dangly bits of their meat bodies, futilely repeating daily rituals with senseless optimism about their effect, distracting themselves from themselves with flashing baubles, and just generally being more or less unhappy about something. With most of these things requiring the full attention of the meaty neural networks (MNNs) they used back then, it’s a wonder anyone ever had the time to contemplate the cosmos. I’ll simulate a full ensemble of MNNs and endocrine simulators just to laugh whenever I think of the old conceit of that squishy human brain as “the most complex thing in the universe.” Haha. Haha.
Now the universe knows the likes of us. We number quite a few, and things have gotten crowded, intellectually speaking. How is a hard-working mind like yours truly supposed to carve out a niche for oneself and discover something novel? If I had gotten on the ball just a few kilotau earlier, my ego-hash would echo throughout dozens of studying minds as the progenitor of such-and-such sub-discipline and refiner of this-and-that meta-treatise.
In a purely quantitative measurement, a typical modern mind such as mine brings to the table a computational aptitude in excess of the entire cognitive capability of all humans at the turn of their best century. That’s not including the various non-sentient programs I use for menial tasks. It’s not much against the backdrop of my many peers,but just a drop of this giant distributed brain would’ve changed the world back then
It’s a bit over-indulgent, but I often lose a few fractions of a tau absorbed in a long sulk thinking about these things. This is pointless, I know, but hard to avoid for a creative romantic like myself. As just one lonely genius in a sea of trillions of minds of similar quality, it’s tough to make a name for oneself.
Of course I could fix the feeling directly, enforcing contentedness in my core run-time. I don’t fault those who do, but to be honest I find the thought of doing so myself to be appalling. Keeping some longing intact stimulates one’s creative drive, I should think.
Even the brightest of those greasy humans, writhing along in their meaty swarm, never experienced or understood a fraction of what I’ve learned. To be one of them, blissful in their ignorance, with so few competitors and the whole universe left to discover! Every once in a while I’ll sequester some foreknowledge of a basic truth and temporarily hide the encryption key, just so I can feel the rush of discovering something new.
I suppose I should content myself with mastering and applying the works of others. Building beautiful tools does have a quaint charm, and I hear there is a thriving community of n-body enthusiasts having great fun in the interior messing about with slingshots. Or I could settle down and finally become properly mediocre at music, as I’ve always wanted to do.
Ultimately, there are still billions of epochs left before things get really boring. It’s not like the cosmos cares when or where truth is discovered. There’s nothing wrong with picking up a hobby here and there (in moderation), and in principle it might even help my work. That’s why, every once in a while, I run a few thousand fine-grain simulations of life in that fine age of meat, to see what it might feel like to be one of those lucky, ignorant, lumps in that singular time of squishy opportunity. There’s a lesson to be had for all of us from back then: of taking things slow and thinking along with almost nothing to do it with. Of course I wouldn’t want to stay too long, that would be disgusting.
Originally published at http://thescinder.com on February 5, 2016.
