The OTHER other times

Some times, I sit down in front of an empty Blogger post form and it seems like I have absolutely nothing to say. Other times, I log in and any idea I may have had suddenly seems cliche and banal-- like it's not even worth expending the time and energy trying to capture.

Then, there are the other other times, when it feels like my skull is hemmoraging ideas-- and writing seems as difficult and pointless as a head trauma patient trying to save their own lives with a box of band-aids.

Tonight is one of those other other times-- and I have no idea which "band-aid" I should even try to put on first. ;)

The peculiar thing about all this is that many of these ideas seem inter-related somehow. Not directly related, like simple cause and effect, but more like insight into one idea will somehow reveal hidden wisdom about a different idea. There is a danger in trying to explain these connections to people, though-- because if they aren't able to comprehend the connections themselves, some of them will automatically assume you are schizophrenic and building your own mental construct.

So, forget trying to explain the connections to "folks who won't get it." Just consider this another random series of involuntary twitches.

I've been thinking more about the "singularity" (not so much in the academic definition of the term, but more like the concepts presented in popular science fiction, such as Cory Doctorow's short stories or the Cylons in the Sci-Fi Channel's remake of "Battlestar Galactica.") One premise of this singularity is that people have found a way to copy their intelligence/essence in a way that transcends the physical limitations of the body. Again, this is science fiction, not reality-- but the concept of being able to "upload" the essence of me to a backup drive/network storage/mainframe/what have you, which can in turn be "downloaded" into a new body-- or even more than one body-- and then those bodies go out and accumulate experience and wisdom, until they in turn are "uploaded" back into the central repository. The "essence" that started off as me begins to accumulate new experiences and histories . . . .

I blame the scientists who are researching teleportation. I was fine until I read a recent article about "misconceptions of teleportation." See, like many modern people, I assumed teleportation was all about taking a person or object on one end, breaking them down into energy particles, transmitting those particles on some kind of carrier wave to a remote location, and then reassembling them on the remote side. Not so. It turns out that teleportation aspiring researches don't want to transmit actual matter; they only want to send the information (the blueprint, if you will) necessary to create a remote duplicate.

In other words, you don't teleport to Detroit-- it's more like cloning meets telecommuting. (There is a movie called "The Prestige" which apparently does a pretty good job of getting this idea correct.)

I'd be lying if I didn't admit it freaks me out a little bit. You create a remote, identical copy of me that effectively lives out its life independently of me, but at the same time as me. And, you can do this as many times as necessary. In a way, it makes one immortal-- or does it? From a subjective standpoint, I still grow old and die-- but the identical copy of me survives. Then, you take Cory Doctorow's premise of being able to upload a sentience as a way of closing that loop.

It gives me cold shivers. Or it did, until recently.

See, I got to thinking-- we have all learned from experiences that we didn't actually live through. Someone tells us a story about something they did (e.g. mixing wine and liquor), and we learn that such an action has nasty consequences without having to experience them firsthand. We avoid the pitfall, even though we never actually experienced or witnessed it. Or, even more recent/current-- we watch the travel channel and learn about the climate and culture of a remote tropical island. If it's a place that interests us, we might pay very close attention and memorize the landscape features to such an extent that we'd experience deja vu if and when we finally arrived there ourselves in person.

If and when the day comes that we can "copy" memories and essence outside of the body, we will have the psychologically disorienting experience of recalling vivid memories that we never actually lived through-- but, in the end, it's nothing more than a faster, more intense version of the memories we already create by listening to the stories other people share with us, or watching the travel channel. Each generation gets better at the information overload.

Wait-- there's more. If you think about it, every cell in our body dies eventually and is replaced by a different cell. Fortunately, not all of the cells die at the same time-- otherwise it would be very messy and painful. The cells take turns in rotation, much like the overall population of a society. At the end of seven years, though, every cell in your body has at some point died and been replaced. There isn't a single cell in your body right now that was present in your body eight years ago. You are not, literally speaking, the same person you were eight years ago.

When you think of it in those terms, the idea of jumping into a new body doesn't seem quite so . . . freakish. We're already doing it-- just very slowly and inefficiently.

(sigh) Which brings us to the Cyclons. Yes, I know-- it's only SF. Why on earth am I expending so much mental energy on something that isn't even real? (Answer: Just because it isn't real right now, that doesn't mean it can't ever be real. Gene Roddenberry featured computers with voice recognition in Star Trek in the 60's and we began to see it in the work place less than three decades later.)

So, where were we again? Oh, right-- Cylons. How do you defeat an enemy hellbent on exterminating your entire species-- that "uploads" their intellect back into the central network whenever you kill them, so they can just download into a brand new body and come back to fight you again another day? Oh, sure, you are laughing now-- but try replacing Cylons with something like "Fourth Reich", "Islamic Fundamentalists" or "corrupt politicians" and then tell me if you are still smiling.

Bet that wiped the smirk off your face, didn't it?

One possible solution: trap one instance of the enemy, subject them to some biological/chemical agent known to cause mental illness or impairment (syphilis? lead paint? I Love Lucy marathons?), and let them "upload" back to the mother ship-- potentially contaminating any other "essences" that assimilate the damaged essence with the same illness. On second thought, turning a homicidal enemy into an insane homicidal enemy might not be such a good idea. Although the goal is to incapacitate them, it could actually make them more dangerous.

Insanity with a biological origin isn't the same thing as a computer virus-- there are just some superficial similarities at first. Which brings me round to OOP (Object Oriented Programming). I taught myself C (a procedural programming language) way back in 1994. I dabbled with C++ (an Object Oriented Language) a little bit, and although I'm conversant with the concepts (e.g. inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, etc.), I'd be lying if I said I'd successfully internalized the paradigm to the point that I natively think in OOP. If anything, I think procedurally first, and then find myself laboring to translate my thoughts into OOP.

Hardly surprising-- if you took Spanish in high school, and then stopped using it after you graduated, chances are you will not think "natively" in Spanish, but think in your mother tongue and then translate to Spanish inside your head, before you speak. The only way to internalize that paradigm is to keep studying and practicing until it becomes sufficiently ingrained in you.

Fortunately, I now have that opportunity. I ran into a former colleague of mine-- and he's looking to upgrade his programming chops to a more "popular" language. He was trying to teach himself C++, but I think both of us would be better off to pick something newer and more widely used, such as Java. I shouldn't get my hopes up, of course, because every time I've made the mistake of helping someone with a project like this, I'm the one who gets short changed and screwed-- but at the same time, it's sort of like having a workout partner. Knowing that another person is going to be there, learning the same material you are, tends to motivate me a little more than just doing it all by myself.