101. Glimpses of History, Scans of Reality

How many times in the past month has immediate reality allowed you to stop and reflect on the fate of humankind? If you did have the chance and disposition to look around and take stock, you also felt the presence of a subtle energy, the whole humanity holding its breath in the face of disaster, like a multiple being’s synchronous throbs and pulsations reaching our perception in waves of awareness. The key word is, again and again, threat.

Still, only on coming back to hope for the near future from the threat of the recent past can we resonate with other people’s visions. 

There’s this recent Scan of Reality, which brings together synchrony and diachrony, merging the you and the now into the eternal model of the human we:

Photo by Chetan Menaria on Unsplash

https://medium.com/@danduma/coronavirus-a-glimpse-of-the-future-c967c34e420b

All comments are welcome.

See also

https://challengingmyths.blogspot.com/search/label/Short%20story

36. A Plausible Scenario

The last of the humans

Google Images

Small piles of waste, clearly man-made objects, covered the beach, leaving only small patches of sand still visible. Among the remains of former wonders of technology, one could see at times biological remains of sea life, of former wonders of nature. The surf rhythmically stirred more remains, in a muffled thundering, washing them onto the beach. Grey snake-like clouds over the slow agony of the dying sun closed the backdrop of a scene bereft of any signs of life.

Near a group of dried-out, blackened palm trees, against the setting sun, one could make out a remotely human-like silhouette. Sitting on the edge of a rocky cliff the waves butted against before exploding, it was staring at the horizon. It had been perfectly still for a long time. But for a slight oscillation when breathing, it might have been a statue. Totally isolated in a thick greyish overall, similar to armour, his face hidden behind a mask with two small blackened pieces of glass through which one could just make out his features, the figure seemed in slumber.

Google Images

Suddenly, among the piles of waste surrounding him, there was movement. A metal plate fell, with a short screeching sound. From behind it, a rodent's nose appeared, sniffing the air. Slightly hurriedly and very excitedly, the rat made for a different pile, from which the empty eyes of a big fish stood out. This seemed to bring life back into the figure who, like a grotesque clown, turned his head to see the devouring scavenger.

The rats. The damned rats. Blessed were the rats, for they would inherit the Earth. Damned, damned rats. He almost lacked the energy to throw a stone at it and scare it off. In these days, non-synthetic food could only come from rats, and even their meat was foul, contaminated with germs and radiation. Alone again, Tristan – what a surprise to remember his own name, not having heard it in such a long time – looked out at the ocean.

The ocean. The dark, dirty and – for what he could remember – foul-smelling ocean. Still, the view was rewarding. Sparkling winks of a red sun were cast by the waves, bringing back memories of better times, of tourist havens by tropical waters, of chattering gulls soaring over the setting sun.

Google Images

He gazed at the quiet horizon. The sea was still calm, winding its waves in the distance. Why ever was he looking on the horizon? Was he expecting anything at all? He couldn't remember how long it had been since the last bomb flashed its message of death beyond the sea; the last sign of life. It had been on a calm, clear night, in which you could almost see the stars. The stars...

With unexpected cruelty, the pain was back. With a twist of agony, he convulsively held his belly. A totally instinctive and perfectly useless action, as he could hardly feel any exterior pressure through the thick protective suit. The murderer that grew inside him missed no opportunity to remind him his days were numbered. He saw something strange on his suit: at groin level, on his right leg, there was an incipient tear. Not dangerous yet, but he had run out of materials for repairs. It was only a matter of time before his suit would tear off, so he would no longer be able to leave the shelter. So what? Anyway, it was hardly any protection any more against radiation, and the air filter gave signs of having reached the end of its life span. Had he been healthy, he might have expected to live for a few more months even in those conditions. But the cancer was already gnawing away at his guts. It was just a matter of time... little time. Whatever, it didn't matter. Nothing really mattered.

Google Images

Maybe it was best to put an end to it, the sooner, the better. A disturbing thought took him by surprise. He thought that he, and he alone, had the destiny of the whole human race in his hands. Should he want to, he could destroy the whole of mankind. Surprised by this revelation, he was possessed by an uncontrollable fit of laughter. The shrill laughter of the insane, the desperate, of the one who had signed a pact with Death. He had made up his mind.

With obvious effort, he stood up and put his hands on the helmet that covered his head. He switched the locks and took it off. He smelled the outside air and was overwhelmed by nausea. A putrid stench of decomposition hid any other smell. He held out his helmet and looked at it. He could see his bald head and haggard face reflected in the glass. Slightly smiling, showing the six teeth left in his mouth, he painfully hurled the helmet into the sea. He breathed in deeply several times. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he could feel the air burning his nose, his throat, his windpipe, his lungs. He must have been imagining it, radiation never showed any symptoms until it was too late.

Google Images

He fumbled in his pockets and found what he needed. It wasn't the first time he considered taking those pills, but this time his mind was made up. He put about a dozen in his mouth and kept the rest, just in case. The prospectus assured the ingestion of just one would produce a peaceful, painless death, but it was better to be on the safe side. Feeling free at last and in peace, even elated, he walked down the rocky steps to the sea. If he had to die, let it be in a last bath in the primeval ocean.

While he felt the wind on his face and the cold water flooding his suit, he thought of what he had done: mankind was about to be wiped out.

 

For, surely, he was the last of the humans.

 

© 2003 Daniel C. Duma PhD

Daniel C. Duma  is a computer programmer and an occasional writer of short, very condensed, and highly metaphorical short stories.

5. To choose, or not to choose, to do something -

- That's the paradox!

The topic was already announced in the previous post.

Now it's time to read.

And listen.

And [try to] understand.

          FUTURES NATURE |Vol 436|7 July 2005

What’s expected of us

 A predictor

It’s a tough choice…

                                                                   Ted Chiang

"This is a warning. 

Please read carefully.

By now you’ve probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you’re reading this. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they’re playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There’s no way to fool a Predictor.

The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that’s not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there’s no such thing as free will.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that’s what a Predictor provides.

Cat's Eye Nebula

Typically, a person plays with a Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in.

Some people, realizing that their choices don’t matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They’ll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.

Before people started playing with Predictors, akinetic mutism was very rare, a result of damage to the anterior cingulate region of the brain. Now it spreads like a cognitive plague. People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it.

Doctors try arguing with the patients while they still respond to conversation. We had all been living happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn’t had free will then either. Why should anything change? “No action you took last month was any more freely chosen than one you take today,” a doctor might say. “You can still behave that way now.” The patients invariably respond, “But now I know.” And some of them never say anything again.

Some will argue that the fact the Predictor causes this change in behaviour means that we do have free will. An automaton cannot become discouraged, only a free-thinking entity can.

The fact that some individuals descend into akinetic mutism whereas others do not just highlights the importance of making a choice. Unfortunately, such reasoning is faulty: every form of behaviour is compatible with determinism. One dynamic system might fall into a basin of attraction and wind up at a fixed point, whereas another exhibits chaotic behaviour indefinitely, but both are completely deterministic.

I’m transmitting this warning to you from just over a year in your future: it’s the first lengthy message received when circuits with negative delays in the mega-second range are used to build communication devices. Other messages will follow, addressing other issues. My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

René Magritte. The False Mirror

And yet I know that, because free will is an illusion, it’s all predetermined who will descend into akinetic mutism and who won’t. There’s nothing anyone can do about it — you can’t choose the effect the Predictor has on you. Some of you will succumb and some of you won’t, and my sending this warning won’t alter those proportions. 

So why did I do it?

Because I had no choice."

• Listen to the audio short story here:

       What's expected of us                                                                                                      

■ Ted Chiang is an occasional writer of science fiction. His work can be found in his collection Stories of Your Life and Others, published by Pan Macmillan.
© 2005 Nature Publishing Group