There’s no way this first post can accomplish all that it needs to. It’s an intro for an outro, and its job should be to establish the context of this publication. That’s no small task—one requiring energy and clarity of thought, two things I’m finding lacking as of late.
I am a deadman. However, thankfully and obviously, only in the prognosticative sense at this time. This publication is part coping mechanism and part master plan/last-ditch effort to strive for a form of immortality.
The pace at which my body approaches physical death seems to have rapidly accelerated recently. This could undoubtedly be a ruse, one that was necessary to ignite this project. If it's not a ruse, the odds of completing this publication are low. We all have our fingers crossed for the ruse version, and unless we get the all-clear, my coping will be heavily wrapped up in this... whatever this is.
As for the striving for immortality bit, there are multiple ways to define immortality, and this publication is intended to give me a shot at least a couple of those.
I'm afraid continuous physical immortality seems to be out of the question at this time, so I am required to take solace in a different type of immortality, the propagation of ideas. What are we really, if not the sum of our ideas.
The written word has been the most prolific tool in humanity's immortality toolbox, at least in sheer usage and effect size for propagating ideas. It took the crown from the spoken word just as its friends, recorded audio and video, are anxious to do to it. For the written word to provide the thoughts of its author persistence through time, the thoughts have always had to be compelling enough for someone to want to reproduce them, possibly many times over. That is until now. With the autonomous digital archive and copy machine known as the internet, how compelling a set of words is is no longer that important, at least in terms of persistence. How fortunate I am to be around and in the position I am in, simultaneously with this technology. It provides great relief for the impotence felt when facing the desire for immortality.
If you can accept that my words are me, if only in a very low fidelity sense, me, I will at least achieve this most rudimentary form of immortality - that is, the persistence of my ideas - by putting them down here. If the words only live on as an arrangement of atoms that make up the bits on a hard drive or its future compliment, I will have accomplished leaving a long-lasting change on the fabric of the universe. Granted, if that's the maximum outcome, I don't think that would be very gratifying. But hey, that's something, right? (There’s a lot more nuance to the ideas I’m just glancing over here that I hope I will be digging into some other day.)
Gratification demands more than mere persistence in this context. Propagation is the key. While persistence works across time, propagation works across space. Together they combine to measurably affect the universe's evolution. As alluded to before, the propagation of ideas generally requires that the ideas be compelling enough to be consumed or spread. Traditionally this has required a viral-like spreading among the populace. While one can hope their ideas are interesting enough to go viral, as it were, I think technology may soon give us another way to increase the persistence-propagation change drastically through space-time without the need for virality. I’m speaking of AI, of course.
If I can get down a thorough collection of the ideas that capture my essence, I can either bank on them being compelling enough to spread through time via persistence and propagation, OR I can bank on them being compelling enough for a single AI construct to be created to embody those ideas. If we can get to real AGI before we destroy ourselves, I don’t see this scenario, which I have completely glossed over, being out of the question.
I bet you didn’t think this is where this would be going, did you, dear reader? I suspect surprising directions will be the general theme of this publication, that is, unless there are only a few entries ever posted, as that would be the most expected outcome.
Until next time or never again, love you,
Deadman