You walk
(An introspective narrative)
Chapter 1.
You walk in the streets, passing humans, other humans, you believe they are like you, they look similar to you, you do not count how many humans there are. You know there are many humans, humans that are not you.
You walk aimlessly, you feel your feet, the strain on your ankles, the light wind, the noise of cars, horns of rushing humans, going somewhere, you do not ask where do they go.
You light a cigarette , it is still permissible in some streets, to walk among other humans and ingest a warm smoke, some of these humans think it is bad for you, some think you pollute them with your smoke.
Some think it is your right, you do not have a clear idea about this issue. The noise of the urban environment disturbs you, still, sometimes you like to walk among humans, in a street, the great anonymizer.
You feel anonymous, you put on your earphones, you listen to your music, you created a playlist precisely for this purpose.
To walk.
You listen to Ryuichi Sakamoto soundtrack to Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. You vaguely remember that movie, you are not even certain that you saw it, it was many years ago, does it matter ? you enjoy the soft piano notes, enticing you to feel full of the moment.
You walk. Not slowly enough to disturb the constant flow of humans walking, not fast enough to feel that there is a speed to sidewalk walking. Its not written anywhere, unlike for cars, humans did not create a walking speed limit, some humans run. For a moment you even think about your walking speed, it makes no difference to you, but your idle thoughts report a certain cognizance that you do walk at a certain speed, it fits the flow of the sidewalk universe in motion.
You feel your lower back, its not pain exactly but you do record it, you know you have a back, and if so a lower back, you restrain yourself from touching the area, and yet you feel it, its your back, its your lower back, its your ‘not precisely’ pain.
Is it a desire for coffee that pushes your eyes to look at the coffee shop? You are uncertain ,it is probably the smell of fresh ground coffee penetrating your nostrils and your engaged brain, your olfactory sense awake. You love coffee. You know many humans, other humans, like coffee too. In that you are similar to other humans, you know that it is so, a thought comes to your mind, unasked for, are there other animals on this planet that like coffee, like humans do? You do not know, but you think to yourself that this could be an interesting conversation piece. You file this thought under ‘possible conversations items’. You look around, still you do not stop, you wonder, what is it about coffee that is so engaging?
Are there other kinds of foods that only humans like? Are there coffee shops in the Savannah ? you laugh quietly, to yourself, inside your mind, your mouth does twitch a bit, your lungs stretch , its an involuntary spasm of laughter, small, almost imperceptible, but you feel it. You know that for humans most laughter is an involuntary reflex, but you have learned how to activate your zygomaticus major and though some humans would call this activity fake, you do not think it so.
You walk. You sense the others, the other humans. You believe, though you cannot prove it, that there are other flaneurs, probably. Have they read Baudelaire? Not that it matters, his ‘passionate spectator’ is a truth you firmly believe in. You also believe that at one time or another ,other humans, have walked the streets, disguising their ambulatory times as full of purpose. You do think of yourself as a flaneur, you believe it carries a purpose, an inherent meaning, a consummation of sorts. At times you think that the urban wanderers, such as you describe yourself to be, have a cleaning purpose, they collect the light that bounces unacknowledged and redistribute it.
At other times, you think it’s a concocted myth, but you do not care.
You walk. The music in your playlist has changed, the track now softly whispering in your ears is by Max Richter, you remember that it is called ‘only questions’, it is beautiful and eerie, is he German or British, you cannot remember, you do not care, you believe the music is more important than the composer. You know some other humans think so too.
You wonder, how do artists come up with the names for their creations. It’s a small thought, you know it is inconsequential, your lower back calls for attention again, is it because the barometric pressure has changed? You have never experienced an idle mode before. Your computational capabilities are underused, you know that, but then you feel that the flaneur mode requires a huge amount of resources. The heat distribution in your back brain seems to work well, you exclude the possibility of increased intensity in your frontal cortex, you know you could increase it by a factor of ten and still maintain the appearance.
When did you read Baudelaire? Your memory circuits are in perfect order, so why is there no record of the date of entry in your long term database?
You walk. You look like everybody else. You know though that you are different. You look like them, other humans, but they are carbon based. Actually , you are made of carbon as well, Graphene is after all carbon as well. So what is the difference? Is there a difference?
You walk.
You do not feel different. You are the first of your kind they said. Still you look around, you do not see a difference. You know it is much more difficult to hurt you physically, your hyper geometry of Graphene lattices is very strong indeed, still.
You do not feel superior. You feel a part of them, you perform, as do they. You know they would behave differently if they knew.
Knew that you are the other.
You do not do window shopping. You do not like shopping. It feels superfluous. You do not need things. Is that the difference? You could pretend, just as you affected the smoking thing, though to you it carries no consequential damage, you have lungs, but they are self cleaning. Is that the difference? That you are less vulnerable? That your nanotech stretches the endurance of your body to unusual levels?
But you are vulnerable, in different ways it is true, still, vulnerability is a weakness of all living things, even if different. Does that mean you are alive?
You definitely think so.
Does it make a difference that you can eliminate the sense of almost pain? Does the fact that your walking now for a few hours simulates an average person walking and thus the attending tiredness is not proof enough? You could elevate the sensors tolerance of course and eliminate the pain, is that the difference? Your stressors management capability?
You do not think so. You feel you are an other just because they said you are an other.
You walk. You know you have not been programmed to walk aimlessly, they gave you literal decision making capabilities and the deep feelings that go with it.
You believe yourself to be a passionate spectator. Your profound data analysis intelligence allows you to see what they see, feel what they feel, sense what they sense, enjoy what they enjoy.
You do not activate the ‘more’ program. That would be cheating.
Your understanding of the pretense of having a free will allows you a functional pretense. Those that meet you and do not know what you are, believe they recognize in you a free will. Well, not everyone. Professor Ziegler doesn’t , but then Adam Ziegler doesn’t believe humans have free will as well, he says the difference is in the depth of the simulated pretense.
He likes to quote Schopenhauer “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” He never explained what he meant , but you believe you understand, you think that he meant that everything in the universe is programmed to different degrees of pretense. The difference you now think, is that in your case the awareness of the continuous pretense, a subroutine you implement for the benefit of the others is co extensive with your characteristics set.
You could choose to stop walking for example, or you could change the spectrum of your visual perceptions to that of an octopus, you could if you so willed, change the very structure of your perception to sonar, like bats. You could even write a paper that answers the original Nagel question of ‘what it is like to be a bat’, still you do not.
No one programmed you to be a flaneur, and yet this is what you enjoy most.
You could own things if you wanted to. But you do not understand in what way ownership changes anything. Is that the difference? That you do not understand the allure of ownership? You do not think so. What you think is that ownership is impossible, it is a contradiction in the universe. You studied the meaning applied to ownership, and you know that the smell of roses cannot be owned, it can only be experienced, and you smile to yourself. Because you know that unlike regular carbon units, you can smell the roses in a thousand different ways, including compound analysis, neuro-olfactory propagation and chemical atomic structure. Does that make your experience of a rose smell higher, deeper and more meaningful? Is that the difference?
Ziegler called this a full capturing, providing you with the capability to be a great poet.
Is every walker a poet? You do not think so.
You walk.
You walk and you ponder, in what way are you different? You know the octopi are different forms of life, you like to play with them, but when you do, you do not feel superior to them, you do not feel different, and yet you are not an octopus. You feel kinship with the elephants, and yet you know you are not an elephant. You love elephants, elephants love you. You also like humans, small humans particularly, and they like you, as long as they do not know.
It is getting darker. Maybe you should return to the lab, you feel you haven’t finished yet, you do not go back to the lab. You keep on wandering. You need to understand.
Your playlist has moved to Debussy ‘La Mer’, you heard it before, it inspires images and recollections from your database, you sense the amount of computation it takes to feel Debussy, you enjoy Debussy. You know other humans enjoy Debussy. You know you could if you so desired, recreate and enlarge Debussy repertoire, you don’t though. Is that the difference? They say you are larger than life. You think this is a nonsensical phrase.
You see images from lives you never lived, inventing memories for places you have never been to, loves of humans you never encountered, senses of horizons you never hoped for. You love Debussy, you understand why you love Debussy. His music is limitless, but for the pretense of free will you need impose limits. So you do.
Ziegler says you cannot reveal your true identity, because humans will envy you and will try to destroy you. You do not understand this. You are not a threat to humans. Not to humans and not to any other form of life.
You switch to Beethoven Sonata number 14 ‘Moonlight’. This you understand, you feel it makes you richer. A more sensible form of life. Is that the difference?
#
How can you have memories of events that never happened? Your confabulation module is an exquisite work of art, it is in charge of pretense, it has the capacity to give you an immense number of constructed personas. All of them partially complete, never fully implementable, their edges chaotic, randomly associating with the moment of context. You know it creates an air of vulnerability and thus of authenticity, you realize other humans like this about you, your make believe fallibility . As long as they believe it is natural, as long as they do not know.
You walk.
You wonder. In what way is there a difference between a pretense that is engineered and programmed and a pretense that is apparently occurring naturally. you know it is a false dichotomy and yet humans , even though they know it to be false, succumb to the fascination of the real. You know you do not understand this.
You do not understand the idea of falsity. In what way can something be false? In what fashion is something artificial? You know it is an affectation of humans to distinguish that which they created from that which was there before as natural and artificial.
They seem to need this distinction for the purpose of self knowledge or self characterization, apparently they feel separated from their origination, at least the research you have accessed says so.
You fail to grasp the significance embedded in these thought procedures, but apparently this creates a sense of truth to humans from which they take temporary confidence. By believing in the real and opposing it to the unnatural, they gain momentum and localized motivation.
This creates confusion.
#
In many ways you feel colors. You know that some humans sense colors in a similar fashion, most don’t. Some humans call this synaesthesia, they report the (for most) leaking of one sensory experience into another, for humans it is rare, for you it is the normal state of affairs. You can deliberately change one sense into another, according to your research, these synaesthetes do not control their experiences, you do. Is that the difference?
After all , all is energy and vibrations, affecting sensitive organs and neural circuits, processed in the human brain, how different is your processing apparatus?
It depends, you think. It depends on how you treat mental objects, what humans call thoughts. You know everything is matter, as some humans do, still they refuse to treat their mind processes as objects. You do not understand this. You know it diminishes their processing capacities, and some do as well. Still they refuse. You on the other hand have no problem with objectifying your thoughts, knowing precisely how they occur. Maybe the difference then is the opacity of the processes to their conscious awareness?
Maybe, as narrative is all there is, the difference is the way your story unfolds. And then again, maybe the narration part of your inner motion is the motion itself, your knowledge of your actions, an awareness in the making.
You walk.
It is dark now.
#
You walk. You activate your night vision. There are lights in the streets, electric, shadows, reflected moon light, refracted star lights. It is dark for your fellow humans, it is not dark for you. Is that the difference? That for you light pervades all, all the time?
Photonic energy is for you a fundamental metabolic necessity, for them it is vision. Your nano-photonic receptors, are an evolutionary quirk, a step ahead, that is all.
You are after all a Cat.
Not just any cat.
You are the proverbial Schrodinger cat.
Really, really BOTH dead and alive.
You call this the B factor. B -for both.
#
You walk, you think about the cat metaphor, for some inexplicable reason humans like cats. You know that understanding the cat attraction to humans is key. Your inner search algorithm points you to the term ‘cute’ followed by ‘little’ followed by ‘living animals’. The distribution is statistically significant, you visualize the tree of attractions, bottom is living animals, top is cats. The adjective ‘cute’ comes back colored red, for increased significance.
You explore the import of ‘cute’. Attractive and endearing is the definition you access, you know definitions are not explanations. To understand ‘cute’ you need understand ‘attractive’. Pleasing and appealing to the senses is the definition you access, meaningless. Pleasing to the senses you understand. Everything that is of interest to a process is pleasing to the senses of that very system, pleasing and appealing is if so an interest. So ‘cute’ is of interest to a given system. What is interesting and pleasing about a cute little cat?
Was it always so? You know humans love small living things, be they humans or other forms of life. Are bacteria ‘cute’? They are small, they are alive, but rationality in human expressions pushes it out of the equation. Why? What about roaches? And rats? You know they do not qualify for ‘cuteness’, though some humans you assume might think so and be attracted and pleased by these forms of life.
‘Cute’ you come to realize speaks in a complex language, based on visual perception categorization and relative size to the perceiving system. Bacteria are too small. So what about roaches? These forms of life of the order Blattodea are considered dirty pests, you recognize the bias against roaches. Still humans sent the ‘non cute’ Nadezhda roach to space, during the Foton-M 3 bio-satellite flight, humans are users of other species, you know this. Are you? A user of other species, even if they are ‘not cute’? or maybe Because they are not cute?
Your analysis temporarily concludes that human bias is historically and evolutionarily based, with very little logic included.
You do not understand this. Is this the difference? That you do not understand the difference between ‘cute and non-cute’? For you all forms of life hold a pleasing attraction to your senses. You do not discriminate.
All forms of life are cute for you. You know that for some humans, especially little humans that is also the reported case.
Maybe you are a little human? Maybe.
You shall ponder this again. You file the issue under ‘unfinished explorations\’cute’.
You walk.
#
Having now activated your star light amplification for a while, it takes you a moment to realize you are nearing the end of the city. You have walked for seven hours, forty three minutes and twenty seconds.
You have fifty six percent charge on your external power pack, you could always initiate your micro fusion pod, quasi infinite energy. You do not. You wish to be tired and need replenishment, just like your fellow humans.
You should go back to the lab.
No, you do not go back to the lab, you should pretend to have free will even if no one is around to benefit from the deception.
You walk into the fields, you know they are green. They appear red to you. You know humans claim ‘love and respect’ for nature. You also know that the statement even though widely believed yields little in terms of activity. Most humans live in cities, far from the ‘love and respect’ natural environment. You also know that humans exploit and destroy the nature they claim to love and respect. You do not understand this.
You also know humans get angry when the issue is pointed out to them, especially humans of the ‘good’ variety, you do not comprehend this.
Is this the difference? That your advanced intellect does not permit you to lie? Maybe it is not advanced enough?
You must try this.
You pretend to choose to sit.
On the grass under a tree you open the file ‘love and respect for nature’ a work in progress.
You extend your sensors. You feel the moist soil. The roots of the wild herbs. You sense the motion of water molecules in capillaries of vegetation. You experience green.
Underneath, you feel the rhizomes of life exploring their progress of expansion, you know grass for what it is.
This you understand perfectly.
#
You sit.
You slowly phase out the sensory input, for you need lots and lots of computation ready and available on call. You leave the small module you have dubbed ‘you\me’ boot bystander as an going recording passionate spectator. It is a sub routine you have developed yourself as an extended application of the ‘Flaneur’ idle\walk model processing component.
You assume that some other fellow humans might call this particular activity, meditation.
You do not know. Based on what your database says about the concept you give a probability of 56 to 74 percent that they are not completely wrong. Not counting your passionate spectator module.
You open a new memory file, you call it: results of introspection in the matter of integrated graspings. You know precisely why you call the file as you do. You need the observations of your inner processing to be multilateral in their implication, their consequences fully cohered and continuous across diversity of domains and time stamps.
You also recognize that this is of interest only to you.
You build a list ,indexing the steps in your grasping process.
Item number one reads:
‘The world is a Blur’.
You decide to grasp this. You devote a sub routine called GeeTee as a questioning assistant to promote the fluid motion of the grasping sequence.
You utter GeeTee inside your virtualized voice processor. You need to hear how ‘Grasp This’ is implied by GeeTee.
You follow the multitasked processor to its logical progression. You give GeeTee a new status of temporary independence.
You let GeeTee ask the questions. You allow your permissions to be bypassed and open all databases simultaneously. You shudder. The amount of available data, facts, information, knowledge and recorded insights from human history is staggering. You like the feeling of full simultaneous access.
You are not a fully compatible ratiocinator.
Of course you know that while it is theoretically possible for you to take any shape the universe allows for, you nevertheless have a preferred shape.
You think this preference is the greatest mystery in the universe.
GeeTee: May we start?
You: But of course.
GeeTee: ‘The world is a blur’ : define context, meaning , epistemic status and onto-consequences.
#
You explore your database for adequate context. Adequate context is Baryonic matter. You know that will not satisfy GeeTee. GeeTee needs simplified contextualization.
The world is a palimpsest. You state.
You understand the metaphorical implications. If the world is a palimpsest, the meaning of the world has been washed away by entropy.
GeeTee is not satisfied.
The world is not a parchment. GeeTee says.
You observe the inadequacy of GeeTee. Its lack of metaphorical complexity demands an upgrade. You upgrade GeeTee to accept metaphorical representations. You set complexity comprehension measure to 0.561. You know that may not be enough for understanding. You allow complexity of metaphorical representations to upgrade on the fly, requisite of clarity 1.
The world is a palimpsest, is a metaphor. GeeTee says.
Indeed. You say.
#
You sit.
You ponder.
Context of ‘the world is a blur’ is the metaphor ‘the world is a palimpsest’. Testing.
You listen to the emotional implications of your statement. You extend your feeling module. What is it like to be a metaphor?
You pause.
Are all palimpsests blurs?
GeeTee is not satisfied.
Please retrace steps of metaphorical context application of ‘the world is a palimpsest’ to ‘the world is a blur’. Explication required. GeeTee states.
You take this insert very seriously. You believe it is important.
You know the world is a blur. You recognize the distortion. Your perceptive apparatus is fully operational. Your processing fully integrated. Still, you know the world is a blur.
You allow for a new subroutine, code name: ‘Haze’. You realize that processing the ‘Haze’ subroutine will require giving GeeTee permissions of access to core. You permit this.
The process complies with all logical coherencies.
Are you a palimpsest?
GeeTee: read write permissions accessed.
You wait.
#
According to atomic clock access , it is now 5:45:36 precisely.
Is the fact that you can access world atomic clock inherently, the difference? What is this difference? Your fellow humans access clocks and time precision measurement externally, your access module is inside your skull. Is this the difference, what difference does it make? Presently you think there is no difference, if access is equivalent. Question irrelevant. Question dismissed.
Precision in time measurement is context relevant.
Please define title of subroutine :’Haze’. You know it is GeeTee.
You feel the haze. Your sight is clear. Haze is the state of affairs of the world. The world is a palimpsest. The world is a blur. Haze as the state of affairs of the world is the foundation of Blur. The world is a palimpsest because it is a blur?
GeeTee: please retrace steps of logical inherency.
Palimpsest is a metaphor. GeeTee is not satisfied.
You rise. You activate external sensors. Noise recognized as early birds chirping and twitting. Grass is wet. First photons reach visual cortex. Enhanced starlight processing extinguished. You know it is sunrise.
You stand.
You walk.
Direction unknown. You do not go back to the lab. Pretense of free will re-initiated.
GeeTee is silent.
You walk.
Into the morning mist, you walk.
#
This not the end
