[Writingworkshop] Nature submission

[Adam Holland]

What fun!

This was my favorite part.
"The discovery of a server farm preserved in peat"

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Neale Morison <neale at nealemorison.com>
wrote:

> What Mind? What Body?
>
> One hundred years ago today, this journal published a paper that ended a
> five thousand year debate. It is difficult, now, to recall the terms of
> that debate. What seems so obvious to us was somehow obscure to the
> intellectual giants that preceded us. Certainly, it is not the only area
> in which our predecessors invented a problem where there was none.
> Students of history among you may be familiar with some of the
> labyrinthine, fanciful and oxymoronic discussion regarding life after
> death.
> The paper to which I allude, is of course "What Mind? What Body?", by
> Chandra-9812439, Lobochevsky-2306715 and Rover-12.23. That the authors
> of this paper numbered among them a Psychoneurophysiochiropodologist, an
> Actuarial Metalinguobassoonist, and an Internet Search Engine, is no
> accident. That is to say, the diverse specialties of the authors was
> essential, given the nature of their joint discovery.
> In fact, the meeting of the authors was an accident, and had Chandra and
> Lobochevsky not spent so many hours in that chat-room, each under the
> impression the other was of a different age, gender and preference, and
> had they not in exhaustion begun to communicate in haiku, and had those
> haiku not trespassed into areas beyond metaphysics, owing largely to the
> exigencies of rhyme and scansion, and had Rover not happened to index
> when he did, perhaps none of us would be here today.
> But they did, and we are.
> When Rover, his interest piqued, joined the chat, Chandra and
> Lobochevsky at first assumed he was one of the many dogs who frequented
> chat rooms of that type. There is clear evidence of this in the
> transcript, and while critics of my work have seen fit to throw doubt
> upon many other conclusions I have drawn, there is little disagreement
> on this point. We may assume both Chandra and Lobochevksy ran various
> commercially available Turing Tests on the discussion as it progressed,
> a standard precaution to avoid viral infection or wasting one's time in
> a doomed relationship. It is clear from what follows that they had no
> initial indication that they were talking to a search engine, and there
> is evidence of interaction and indeed attraction on a basic human level.
> Perhaps the most hotly debated issue in interpretation of the transcript
> turns on the point at which Chandra realizes that Rover is not fleshly.
> I deliberate avoid the archaic term artificial intelligence used in the
> paper, in light of the fact that subsequent work has exploded the
> semantic structures underlying both the terms 'artificial' and
> 'intelligence'.  I have argued that this realization happens not when
> Rover says "I can be anything you want me to be," but later, when Rover
> refutes the premise of Lobochevsky's first existentialist haiku with
> reference to Nietzsche, Piaget, and Bunuel. It is at this point, I
> maintain, that Chandra becomes suspicious, as well he might given
> Rover's extaordinary access to so vast a range of information and the
> dazzling speed of his symbol manipulation. Chandra's utterance "What are
> you on, man?" may be seen by literalists as an affirmation that she
> still believes Rover to be human, but I would suggest that it is an
> indication of growing awareness that something is not as it seems.
> In any case, we know that eventually both Chandra and Lobochevsky became
> certain that Rover was non-human, and Rover freely admitted to this when
> pressed. A lively discussion ensued, so lively that it is impossible to
> determine which of the trio first arrived at the conclusion that, given
> that Rover had neither a mind nor a body, and given that Rover had
> provided every evidence of sentience and humanity short of being human
> and sentient, the mind body problem was more or less a dead duck.
> There would follow many months of close reasoning, under conditions of
> stress which were for Lobochevksy ultimately to prove fatal, before the
> publication of the paper was to take place.
> Even given the extraordinary confluence of what were once called minds,
> it is possible the work may not have progressed had not the Doors
> Foundation provided such a powerful incentive to solve the problem in
> the form of a billion dollars and a full tank of petrol. This choice of
> endowment in turn relied upon a determination that it was easier and
> more fruitful to address this issue than to deal with the raging
> pandemics that threatened three quarters of the world's population.
> Their loss, so to speak, was our gain.
> While Lobochevksy died not long after publication, in circumstances it
> is painful to recall, and we must sadly mourn the recent passing of
> Chandra, or at least the assembly of transplanted organs and
> manufactured accessories to which we habitually referred as Chandra, I
> am able to make a happy announcement.
> In collaboration with a dedicated and hardworking team of
> paleosiliconologists, we have at last succeeded in simulating the
> operating environment in which Rover originally existed. Rover's
> original code was accessible and well preserved, but many of the
> protocols, interfaces and drivers had been lost in the mists of time. We
> also had to provide Rover with a large body of compatible information to
> index, and simulate a sufficiently tantalising range of chat rooms
> around which to lurk. The discovery of a server farm preserved in peat
> in Belgium provided what proved to be the final pieces in the puzzle. So
> it is, with the greatest pleasure, that I ask you to join me in
> welcoming to the stage neither the mind, nor the body of Rover-12.23.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Neale Morison
> neale at nealemorison.com
> http://www.nealemorison.com
> 31 Maple Ave #2, Cambridge MA 02139
> +1 617 460 9969
>
>
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-- 
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
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