Electric Sheep

Funny how many computer programmers I meet at a spiritualist gathering. Out of 3 guys, 2 were programmers at some point in their life. One woman's boyfriend was also a programmer who was teaching her how to program. And I wasn't even in Silicon Valley.

Funny how they tell me they are afraid to talk about spiritual things in their work place. Funny because maybe they'll all meet them one day at a similar gathering, a bunch of programmers gazing at auras and swirling hands over chakras. Heck, when I try to exercise my third eye, guess what I see? {I.see Java(code);} No, serious. I took a powernap yesterday, and within 13 minutes, I see a small circle of light "through" my eyelids in which /* Java code */ was floating about. Too fuzzy to be read, but they were in the same familiar format. Last week I woke up to windows popping up and closing behind my eyelids. I don't know if androids dream of electric sheep, but I'm sure programmers do.

What is it about computer programmers that draws us to the immaterial? I thought we were supposed to be positivistic, logical, "left-brain" types. Duh! We swim in the immaterial. Except we call it software, not spirit. In trying to imitate or augment the human mind with computers, many of us have learned to appreciate the incomprehensible sophistication of the computer in our body, if it really is in the body at all. As our technology advances, the boundaries between our tools and the environment they interact with blur until their location in the physical universe is obscured. I don't even know where this site is. Is it on tiny magnets in a refrigerated room, in the RAM of your computer, in your ISP's cache, floating through the air as perturbations in the electromagnetic ether, or all of the above? Similarly, where is our mind? Is it bouncing around as electric potentials between the axons and dendrites in our brain, quantum fluctuations in the microtubules all over our body, floating through the air as perturbations of the electromagnetic ether, or all of the above?

Those who believe in a purely mechanistic model of the universe should try to build a really smart robot. Maybe in their failure will the designers find their own souls. Michio Kaku says that the smartest robot humans have come up with barely competes with a cockroach in terms of responding intelligently to its environment. (It's on Mars right now.)

However, if the designers overestimate the AI they created, they run the risk of "robopomorphizing" humans. After all, humans are pretty stupid and robotic in many ways. We are the electric sheep Philip K. Dick's androids dream of, robotically following orders to consume and fornicate. Our boundless stupidity and suicidal violence makes it easy for some to envision electronic overlords putting us out of our misery. On the other hand, I think that some of us have figured out how to use that internal spark for something other than burning resources and firing the thrusting pistons, if you know what I mean. I believe our creative potential is left mostly untapped, awaiting evolutionary adventurers to "mutate" our so-called junk DNA into action.