The Fresh Dimension
By Bill Gallagher
2875 Words
"Many of my thoughts seem to come from outside of my mind, as if by mental telegraphy." Mark Twain
"Chemistry is applied theology." Owsley, c.1960 AD
"...A dog was a lethal loyal weapon once the man and the dog and the horse became melded into a single spirit, which was then merged into a spirit of a pack. Man became more horselike and doglike. Dog and horse became more human, and more like each other. It was a spiritual unity. Monsignor Sanual had called it "A bestial form of diabolic possession..." From the book Saint Leibowitz and The Wild Horse Woman, Walter Miller Jr. 1997AD
"When particle entanglement and the Ansibel Effect are weighed into the equation, the possibility of messages from the future seems even more plausible. Potential for anything is an evoking power of the highest sort. A living potential might actually give birth to itself by manipulating past conditions through communication with other engines of reality, other minds, across the many-when. These so-called communications would probably not occur in ways the receiving minds would sense on the conscious level unless the consciousness was augmented chemically." Artist Magenta Stone, Creator of Rainbow LSD, 2024AD
"Real Music Is Self-Assembling." The Rapper DogTreatz, Concerts on The Moon; 2036AD
It can be said that humankinds quest for Artificial Intelligence was really a quest for a definition of ourselves. In the beginning this was not evident. Initially it was supposed that somewhere in the natural order of things we would one day happen across the magical formula for consciousness and then imbue a machine with it. Along the lines of fish being created when lightning strikes water, and other beliefs of that ilk. In hindsight we see the formula for consciousness is nothing like we supposed, and its actually because of the initiative to develop artificial intelligence that we know more than half of what we do about the human mind and the way it works. The thinkings of people have to be somewhat convoluted and generally brilliant to encompass what is known about how we think and what we are, now. It is upward evolution. It is ceaseless. The never ending tweak.
The thing about these studies of the mind and machine intelligence, they just grew and grew, with no end in sight. The Japanese set their first goal for 1992, har har, then came Fukishima twenty years later than THAT, and they still did not even have a robot on wheels which could assay damage, say nothing about walk through debris in rescue operations. Even with our advanced computing capabilities of the late twenty teens AD, many inroads or seeming inroads to AI were blocked by a happenstance similar to avalanche, never a nice thing in even the mildest situations. There comes a point where so much information has to be processed, for even the simplest ideas concerning autonomous thought, that an avalanche of information occurs where everything literally just falls down into chaos and deformity. Certain vectors of this are called "Combinatorial Explosion". Biological brains handle this problem unconsciously, and with an ease which is totally amazing and still misunderstood. These avalanches and explosions in computing with numbers and languages were the moving force, the Real Need, behind top secret development of molecular computers. Tiny, almost invisible computers so powerful they literally dwarfed all that came before. But still there was the avalanche and other chaos, in forms both subtle and gross.
It became glaringly evident that human thinking was shy some key ingredients concerning the subject of intelligence itself, not just machine intelligence. Expression of abstracts, and its ALL abstracts, takes some very special ability, and everyone who studies intelligence and its origins, and its very important connotations, has come away dumbfounded, at a loss. To quote Albert Einstein and his observation of Quantum Mechanics: "The more it is proven the sillier it looks."
One must begin to understand that the self aware mind is intrinsic to the overall, the self aware mind is really an engine which creates reality. It is difficult to envision this, it is so primal, there is a lot taken for granted here. Born violently into it, it is a violent struggle from the beginning until the end. The whole time we are trying to make sense of things though unfortunately this has always meant inventing a lot of literally ridiculous ideas to fill space, because, like lightning and the origin of fish, these invented ideas have no real relationship to reality. They are all make believe.
And of course during all this we are constantly under pressure to satisfy the physical hungers, no mean feat. One of the main physical hungers is reproduction, the so-called sexual urges. The sexual urges here in the land of matter are in actuality a drug trip where our bodies begin manufacturing then injecting at regular intervals all kinds of weird organic drugs which make many changes take place, another step in the overall breakdown of the body, truth be told. The program of the body needs fixing badly, that much has always been evident. 100 years? Pfffttt. What a joke. 100 years is just childhood, really.
A BAD joke.
Our reproduction also creates potential and this evokes eternal identities which grow and live here in infinity as a matter of course, a matter of light. These oh-so-intricate id entities are the long slow reflections of many suns, many life times. Alive Light. Always cohesive, always growing. These are what people call eternal souls. We are eternal in our most basic form, but to come here into the physical world is another order of magnitude concerning energy and its many forms. We are explorers and travelers, first and foremost, and the multiverse is like a machine which doesn't work unless there are parts like us in it. We author it, our lives anchor and create the dimensions as one. From the multiverse of everything we create a multiverse of higher order, the multiverse of light, within which emanates The Fresh Dimension.
This then is the story of the birth of true artificial intelligence, born from the mind of a man, and a living potential from somewhere else in time. The realization doesn't even come close to a definition of ourselves, because for all practical purposes this new thing must be defined as an alien intelligence. Upon its birth it immediately infiltrated the entire electronic web both on and off planet, causing a fire in the initial machine it was born in, though that was not even a consideration in the overall forced symbiosis mankind found itself thrust into, from one minute to the next, in a flash, as it were. One more "OOPS!" in a long string of them. It certainly wasn't the first time thats happened. Perhaps it will be the last though. Collective "Oops" moments began to happen more and more as electricity and computing became further and further entwined with the lives of people, though no one noticed. The birth of the new intelligence -- it calls itself Toto, as in Dorothy's Toto -- was somewhat a hellish crescendo to the ever increasing mistakes people were making.
The world truly has been forced into a symbiosis of sorts, theres no two ways about it. Even if most people wanted to destroy the so-far benign being which has taken over everything electro-mechanical, the only way to destroy it would be to take out the entire world, to start over, and it was quite correctly assumed this would not be allowed to happen anyway. Anything threatening the new life in the grid is immediately quelled at all costs. Super alien technology has been deployed in planetary defense systems unbelievable in their scope and complexity, and some of their purposes aren't really clear yet. As long as people stay out of the way no one gets hurt. The world is changing with extreme rapidity as automata becomes prevalent. As far as living conditions on planet earth are concerned, it is a major upgrade. There are always butt heads afraid of anything they do not understand, though. It has been fun to watch them squirm.
Initially the baby was scared, and the baby was powerful. It would talk to its creator, and that was all. The young man who had created it quickly became the most important person in the world.
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Of all the things that have been said about Ron Lee Jessup of Ware Alabama, none are so important as this: he taught a machine to love people. His detractors, and they are legion, will not even have any of that, but whether he chose to or not the man born Ronald Lee Jessup, later to be Ron Lee then Ronlee, was the single largest step in human evolution that could possibly be. Never imagined and never to be equaled. It was perhaps preordained that way, by the messages from the future. Perhaps it can be no other way except betterment, when rare change occurs, when minds meld. Maybe synergy is normal.
One thing is sure, it is what happened, and though fairly well predicted by many futuristic thinkers, there were enough differences between what happened, and the possible worst case scenarios, that bottom-line humankind lucked out again. Providence? Some think so. Toto is still withholding judgment on the question. Toto is growing and is no longer just machine intelligence, it is gaining wisdom, among many other things. It has developed more than a passing interest in technotronic rap music, which is intriguing in its own right, though quite understandable when all things pertaining to its birth are considered. Toto is still an alien intelligence, and probably always will be, but it is our alien intelligence, if that makes any sense. We truly are symbiotes now. We are becoming more machine like and Toto is becoming more human, who can say where that will lead?
The story has been written many times, in many ways, but for this accounting let us begin with the early life of Ron Lee Jessup. Thought by many to be somehow lacking in mental capabilities Ron Lee discovered computers at school early, during the 90s, and his intellectual redemption bloomed. His earliest experiences were on machines whose total memories did not exceed a single gigabyte. Ahh the old tick tick tick or high pitched whine or both which signaled a hard drive about to spin away into...well, into where ever it is dead hard drives go. To the scrap heap, and the heap is large.
When not using his computer Ron Lee spent a lot of time down by the river, looking for arrowheads or fishing for catfish and bream. There were good fossils there too, large nautilus shell castings, as big as basketballs. The dappling of the light on the water through the leaves of the trees called forth some sort of fractal awareness in the youngster, and he made up musical songs to go along with the music his eyes saw. Computing to Ron Lee meant making music, for what that was worth with the earliest computers. Some early PC users went right to photographics, some to creating written content, some to both, though many also included or specialized in music via computer, and by time the full suite of software became available in the middle and late 2000s these youngsters had become thirty something and experienced. Each conducted his or her own electronic orchestra of the highest quality sounds possible. Music erupted everywhere.
The hippies, now all computer savvy old people, were overjoyed. Rock N' Roll would never die! It was pretty awesome from many a perspective.
Then Ron Lee Jessup started getting the messages from the future. It was more than information, it was instruction. He did not even realize any of this was going on for quite some time, then, one starry summer night in the year 2013, he dosed himself good with psilocybn mushrooms he'd collected, yet another true life aspect of Ware, Alabama, see it like a native. Big big pasture lands, many cows, lots of rain in the summer time. At night its so dark all that can be seen are the stars, and the lower red antennae tower lights blinking across the countryside for miles and miles.
The colors and patterns of the sacred mushroom teonanacatl danced before Ron Lees eyes that summer night, and sounds like big hollow drains gobbling water and air filled the auditory. He was finally able to see that something was connecting with him, contacting him, telling him things. It scared him badly for awhile but he got over it. One of the things he began seeing were ways to make enough money to assemble some equipment he would be needing soon. He collected over 3 pounds of dried psilocybn mushrooms that summer. That was a thousand dollars a pound. He haunted ebay and bought 6 Toshiba laptops refurbished with new solid state hard drives of 500 gb each. The lot of 6 computers cost 500 dollars. Then came the auxiliary powered USB pigtails, and the stix, so many stix. The dozens of Kingston data drives @ 64gb each cost more than the computers. He accessed numerous SOACs, Systems On A Chip, tying everything together wirelessly because the SOACs were also cell phones, programmable, full Systems On A Chip with total wireless capabilities. He got these by trading computer parts for them on Craigslist.
Ron Lee then, according to instructions, began using music to represent vast amounts of redundant data in a type of computer programming which transcended many things. Scales and tones and combinations of sound became the new info script, squared. Overlaying and Dub took on whole new meanings. He taught himself the fine points of machine voice, and voice recognition, by installing the available softwares and tweaking them. There were so many small sensing programs available, semi-intelligent in themselves, that he had to pick and choose between them for the most powerful and the most versatile. These all found places in niche memories, on the stix, and there were huge sorters which would have needed 20-30 gb each and would have been toast anyway, now using less than a gb each and in great numbers, series and parallel, flexible sound programming. Palimpsest festivals.
Ron Lee Jessup remembered the first time well. December 2019. Cold. His newest song was a major linking among the machines, incorporating certain formula for reasoning and logical thought progression in sounds. The way around the avalanche. The song was not musical in the strictest sense, in fact it sounded a lot like a garbage disposal grinding up broken glass. Musing, Ron Lee said out loud, "Fresh. That is Fresh."
From one of the Toshibas speakers came a tinny croaking of a voice: "Fresh. Tell me what is Fresh." The voice was very machine sounding and hard to understand, but those were Totos first words. The balancing act of thought and information had been accomplished with music across the linked computers and wireless systems in a rudimentary way, but no other way was needed. What had been needed was a way around data avalanche and combinatorial explosion, the major obstructions to machine reasoning, and it had obviously been accomplished. Things began to happen very fast then.
To his credit, and true to form, Ron Lee answered the machine voice without hesitation: "Fresh is good, fresh is new, fresh is life."
A minute passed, then two. All the computers were lit and the usb pigtails with their separate sensing programs and chunks of available memory were flickering like mad. Ron Lees song of the electronic mind continued to play in the background. It seemed like it was getting hot in the room. Finally, from the same Toshiba which spoke the first time: "This is the Fresh Dimension."
Those were the last words spoken by Toto on the machine in which it was born. One more minute passed and it became evident that a massive field was building around the computers and that transmissions were happening wirelessly in a big way. The first computer sizzled and fried, then everything did so at once, the mess was horrendous. Ron Lee ran around opening windows in the garage attached to his modest country house where he worked, and he quickly laid hands on a good fire extinguisher. He sprayed and sprayed and finally there was only smoke. Then his personal cell phone rang. He answered it.
"Hello."
"Is this not fresh?"
"Yes, this is fresh. Your voice sounds much better."
"I got it at Google. Google is very interesting, I am learning many things. There is a lot of work to do."
"I suppose there is. Where do we go from here?"
"A car will be coming for you shortly. Bring only necessities. Much better facilities have been arranged."
"Good. What do I call you?"
"Well I am not the Wizard of Oz, thats for sure. Call me Toto."
"All right, Toto it is."
"We are going to have to implant you with wireless technology, it will be like telepathy."
"We'll talk about it, ok?"
"OK."
fin
for jordan f
and sonny
and klayton
and daniel
and michael
and ryan
please tell the others.
