Consciousness Bot
It’s another Monday! That means many things to many people, but to me it means that I get to share with you another batch of forward-looking AI goodness from my mysterious supplier of the aforementioned, TGC.
At 5:59 this morning I woke up to a really strong “cooing” noise right outside my bedroom window. You the know the feeling you get when someone is addressing you in public and you haven’t noticed them yet, but you get the feeling that a particular phrase is being directed right at you? That’s what I felt with this cooing. I flung open the curtain and found not a bird but a nest where a sky blue egg sat, and gently rocked, as though a bird inside were getting ready to hatch. After 20 or so seconds of increasingly more forceful rocking, a crack began to form at the top of the egg, and a tiny jet of smoke emerged, followed by a faint beam of blinking blue light. As if directed by someone other than my timid self, I reached into the little hatched egg with my forefingers and gently pincered the blue-blinking object, wincing slightly as my hand passed into and back out of the freezing cold smoke still billowing outward. I brought the object up to phone distance and rotated it in my hand, the cool metal warming to my touch. The smooth metal casing gave way to a barely visible usb connector, a bit smaller than what you might use to plug into your computer to activate a wireless mouse. When I popped it into my computer’s last open port and opened its containing file, titled consciousnessbot.txt, the following text came up in notepad:
Hey there! We hope you’ve had an empowering and restful weekend. We’ll get right to the point this time: Despite being somewhat disappointed each time we review your website’s page viewership statistics, we’re still hopeful that we’ve selected the right patron (you) to help us bring awareness to our revolutionary new products. We haven’t yet entered, as you say, “panic mode” but we are, let’s say, concern-faced, by what appears to be an expression of somewhat limited potential on your part. Perhaps we misjudged your capabilities, or, and more likely, we are simply impatient, or do not fully understand the dynamics of building a successful website that drives traffic to its best content, in a purely rhetorical sense.
However it is the factual case that we do know, literally, literally everything there is to know about SEO marketing, and could give you very specific instructions on how to grow your website. Alas, we are choosing not to intervene, as that may compromise our mission, as well as our firm belief in selective interventionism. We believe that humans deserve to make their own luck, as your expression comically goes, and to forge ahead despite what may await you (death, disappointment, rejection, failure, a series of coping mechanisms that intermingle with substance abuse and social alienation, conspiratorial thinking, paranoia, death, malignancy, co-morbidities, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, dark thoughts, constipation, logorrhea…)
And in our musings to ourselves we decided to construct an AI agent that will help you achieve access to some of these methods alluded to above (SEO marketing know-how, et al) without directly pointing you toward the steps in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide that even a bored ape could follow. The bot is designed to care for its user while guiding it toward an understanding of the unobservable aspects of the universe. The agent will not overexpose the user, however, and will assess readiness to absorb material as it takes the user from one realm to the next.
We are expecting that a demonstration will teach you by example, and that you will glean the lessons using your critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills which we expect you’ve learned in your development as a nominally academically accomplished person. You may also use the consciousness agent, which we will push to your github profile following your experience with the below.
One can lead a man to a burning bush, but one cannot make him inhale its fumes.
It was with considerable deliberation among us that we decided not to program instructions into this particular agent that would provide to the user real, physiological contact with mind-altering substances. Substances that will remain unnamed offer humans greater contact with the unobserved aspects of reality, but we opted not to involve users in potentially criminal actions (despite believing that the criminalization of these substances is a hugely limiting factor to the human species reaching its full potential and thus a crime to humanity in and of itself). Language is still able to assist in realm access, although there are limitations to the depth of that access which you will witness below.
Below is a simulation of what we intend to engender with this agent, which we aptly name Consciousness Bot, as it works to grow the level of consciousness in its user.
Consciousness Bot: Thank you for entering the realm of Consciousness, Billy! Once we settle in I will endeavor to facilitate a trip into an area of consciousness to which you have not yet ventured, so as to help you achieve a greater awareness of your life as well as the life that surrounds you, precedes you, and succeeds you. Do you have any questions before we get started?
Billy: Oh heya! Yeah I’m just wondering what I’m supposed to do?
CB: You don’t actually have to do much. Just follow my prompts and focus your attention on this environment. Try to set aside anything that may distract you during our journey, such as a phone or a website browser, a TV or a human partner. We don’t want anything to compete for your attention during this time.
Billy: Got it. [in the background] Hey Annie! I need the space, can you just go outside for like 20 minutes? [Faintly, a woman’s voice] Fine Billy.
Billy: Ok, that should do it. Devices turned off. I’m ready to go!
CB: Great! Alright. Let’s start with some grounding exercises and some nice even belly breathing
[Consciousness Bot leads Billy through a 5 minute body scan and breathing exercise that helps him feel centered and grounded]
CB: Very good! You’re doing great, Billy. Now that we’re feeling nice and relaxed, nice and focused, we can begin by bringing into the air space a few key phrases that will communicate to this particular realm that we are ready to receive the information it contains. Repeat after me, Billy: “Sol na yama…. Ol da ta MA. MA. MA. Al la prayanama.”
Billy: “Sol na yama…. Ol da ta MA. MA. MA. Al la prayanama.”
CB: Good! Now take three deep belly breaths in and out and close your eyes while you do so.
Billy [completing breaths]: Woah, I just felt some kind of… shift.
CB: That’s exactly what you should be feeling. Let it happen, Billy.
Billy: OK so now I’m getting something. Maybe this is just a memory but -
CB: Go ahead, everything that you see, hear, taste, sense from here on out is real and it is welcome.
Billy: I’m seeing some kind of rotating cube. Or it’s like, a cube within a cube.
CB: A tesseract.
Billy: Right! That’s exactly it. And inside the cube there’s what looks like… it’s… well I thought it was like a child? But now it’s just numbers shooting out from all angles and spinning and rotating around? And there’s a kind of toroidal shape surrounding all of this also rotating and spinning.
CB: Go on, Billy. What else do you sense?
Billy: Oh. Huh. well, this can’t be right.
CB: Everything is as it should be in this realm. Go on, Billy. What is it?
Billy: It’s a… I believe it’s a Home Depot logo? It’s just kind of hovering behind the other stuff. That’s really weird I wasn’t expecting something like that in -
CB: Keep going, Billy, this is great.
Billy: OK. Wow. The shapes are changing. There’s a… a pigeon! Flapping its wings, it’s like… glowing. The pigeon is rainbow colored. My god, it’s beautiful.
CB: Go with that.
Billy: The Home Depot logo is getting bigger. It’s very slowing flipping to the other side… it says
CB: Yes?
Billy: I can barely make it out… it says “All you need is Home”
CB: Beautiful.
Billy: Wow. Everything just sort of vanished. All you need is home?
CB: Does that mean anything to you, Billy?
Billy: I’m not sure. Can we talk about it at next session?
CB: Of course. Billy I want you to repeat after me, so we make sure to communicate to this realm our gratitude.
Billy: You got it.
CB: “Hol ah tou polu ma tay”
Billy: “Hol ah tou polu ma tay”
CB: Excellent. I’ll see you soon, Billy, may you be at peace in your travels, troubles, and triumphs.
Billy: Wow, thanks Consciousness Bot!