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But what is the right time? I asked him, and he wondered if time itself depends on those who are in time. If time uses us as channels for the past – yes, that must be so, he said, as some people can speak to the dead.
Male children are conscious earlier than female children, said Byron. I asked him what caused him to think so. He replied, The male principle is readier and more active than the female principle. This we observe in life. We observe that men subjugate women, I said. I have a daughter of my own, said Byron. She is docile and passive.
That is not their sex; it is their biology!
Is there not more to life than marriage? I asked. For a woman? said Byron. Not at all. For a man, love is of his life, a thing apart. For a woman, it is her whole existence. My mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, would not agree with you, I said. And yet she tried to kill herself for love, said Byron.
body. She did not die. No, she did not die. That came later. Giving birth to me.
Why is it that we wish to leave some mark behind? said Byron. Is it only vanity? No, I said, it is hope. Hope that one day there will be a human society that is just.
I do! I said. I do not! said Byron. The human race seeks its own death. We hasten towards what we fear most. I shook my head. I was
I do, he said, for how can it be that the body is master of the spirit? Our courage, our heroism, yes, even our hatreds, all that we do that shapes the world
is that the body or the spirit? It is the spirit. I considered this and replied, If a human being ever succeeded in reanimating a body, by galvanism or some method yet undiscovered, would the spirit return? I do not believe so, said Shelley. The body fails and falls. But the body is not the truth of what we are. The spirit will not return to a ruined house. How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body? Is it my body that you love?
I cannot divide you, I said.
I used to wonder about her in her coffin below. And I never thought of her as rotted, but as alive as she is in the pencil drawings of her, and more alive yet in her writings. Even so, I wanted to be near to her body. Her poor body no use to her now. And I felt, and I am certain that Shelley felt it too, that we were there all three of us, at the grave. There was comfort in it, and not of God or heaven, but that she was alive to us.
I am. I’m here to consider how robots will affect our mental and physical health. That is a good question, Dr Shelley. And let’s not forget the Soul. I’m not sure that’s my area … We all have a Soul. Hallelujah.
One life is not enough … She nodded at me. Uh-huh.
My mind idled around the difference between desire for life without end and desire for more than one life, that is, more than one life, but lived simultaneously.
There is something unworldly about his form. An approximation – as though his body has been put on hastily, so that his spirit might walk in the world.
What is an homunculus? I asked. A creature not born of woman, he answered. A made thing, unholy and malign. A kind of goblin, misshapen and sly, infused with dark power.
Suffering, I do believe, is something of the mark of the soul. Machines do not suffer.
What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold – until it’s time to call in the wrecking ball. In any case, the Royal Society only moved here in 1967. History is what you make it. Tonight we are the history we are making.
Intelligence – perhaps even consciousness – will no longer be dependent on a body.
She says, Professor Stein, you are the acceptable face of AI, but in fact the race to create what you call true artificial intelligence is a race run by autistic-spectrum white boys with poor emotional intelligence and frat-dorm social skills. In what way will their brave new world be gender neutral – or anything neutral?
time. There is nothing neutral about AI.
learning. Yes, there are problems – but it is my view that such problems are temporary, and not systemic. The woman won’t back down. She holds on to the microphone and shouts at him: WHAT IS SO SMART ABOUT THE END OF THE HUMAN?
It is from the natural sciences that the barrier between organic and inorganic is being dismantled.
do. Valhalla is burning and the white male gods are falling into the fire, but the Rheingold is what it always is – pure and
untainted – and it will be found again, like a second chance, like a new beginning, and these will be the bad old days, when humans ruled the earth
But when have things ever worked out great? In the human dream?
The thing about humans is that we process information at different speeds, depending on the human, depending on the information. In some ways machines are easier to deal with. If I had just told machine intelligence that I am now a man, although I was born a woman, it wouldn’t slow up its processing speed.
I love this place. I like anything that sits across time. Makes me feel free.
as Max points out, Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of helicopters centuries before powered flight. The time will come, says Max. It always does.
Men carry it but they can’t pass it on. Only the mother passes it on, right back to the mother of us all.
Isn’t content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn’t free-floating; it’s enmeshed.
I believe that the modern diaspora – that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind – global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves – all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.
too. Life is hard. Hard is OK. It’s hopeless and helpless that sucks.
high-functioning madman.
That depends on whose story you believe, said Victor. Or whose story you want to believe. It’s always a story, you know.
our experience of reality isn’t objective.
just as consciousness appears to be an emergent property of brain function – you can’t pinpoint consciousness biologically – it is as elusive as the seat of the soul – but we would agree that consciousness exists – and we would agree that at present machine intelligence isn’t conscious. So perhaps reality is also an emergent property – it exists, but it is not the material fact we take it to be.
a sudden illumination of the way we live, forever wrecking the good we have for the little we have not. Or clutching at the little we have for the good that would be ours, if we dared
He who is so passionate about freedom is afraid of fate.
swirled. Her breasts in her dress were jellies of mirth.
My story is circular. It has a beginning. It has a middle. It has an end. Yet it does not run as a Roman road from a journey’s start unto its destination. I am, at present, uncertain of the destination. I am sure that the meaning, if there is one, lies in the centre. I am fearless and therefore powerful.
My story haunts me. It is the master of my mind. Rest now! It is but a story.
You who believes that we are shaped by our thoughts. That our thoughts are our reality?
This story has become my reality.
joie de vivre.
Joie de vivre
It’s not survival of the fittest – it’s survival of the smartest. We are the smartest. No other species can tinker with its own destiny.
The size of our lives hems us in but protects us too. Our little lives, small enough to make it through the gap under the door as it closes.
If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (he pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.
Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.
Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness. When we are alone it is the darkness that remains.
