Bash Bash Revolution Page 14

  So that’s how it started with them. The daily breakfasts at the university cafeteria led to lunches, then to dinners, and then to bars. Pretty soon my mother was spending all of her time with Dad. When she wasn’t teaching she was with him, showing him the Space Needle, visiting the Pacific Science Center, closing down a place called the Monkey Pub. Dad didn’t stop talking the entire time they were dating, and while maybe Mom thought it was annoying at first, it eventually won her over.

  Mom said that Dad would take her out dancing or to a nice restaurant, but the whole time he’d be telling her things about neural networks, Moore’s law, speech recognition and so on. After awhile his voice became reassuring, like the sound of the ocean or the whirring of a fan, and she decided to move in with him.

  Not exactly a great romance, right? But a normal one, I think. Nearly normal.

  11:45 AM

  When Dad first met Mom, he used to talk nonstop, but sometime after I was born he grew more reticent. By the time I started kindergarten, most of the talking Dad did was under his breath or in his head.

  About six months before he left us, his mouth started up again. Six months before he moved back to Seattle and started working on what I guess became Bucky, he started talking again and stopped listening. I guess he figured we didn’t have anything to say. I think he wasn’t sure that Mom and I actually existed. I remember Mom shouting at him that she wasn’t a program; that he couldn’t just feed her new code. She was really angry, like at a breaking point, but Dad wasn’t phased at all.

  “Of course you’re a program,” Dad told her. “What else would you be?”

  On the day he moved to Seattle, Dad didn’t say goodbye. I mean, officially, he wasn’t abandoning us but just taking a new job. He’d have to be away for a while is all, but he’d come back. That’s what Mom told me. She tried to reassure me. Dad, on the other hand, didn’t mention the fact he was leaving at all. He spent the morning pacing around the house reading passages from books by guys like Daniel Dennett, swearing at the ceiling, and then explaining it all to whoever was within earshot.

  “If I tell you that films are really just pictures passing through a projector at a rate of thirty-two frames a second, would you conclude that nobody has ever seen a movie?” Dad asked Mom. He didn’t wait for her to answer, but went back to reading aloud. It was all Necker cubes and optical illusions at the breakfast table, and various theories of mind as Mom helped him pack his bags. He was taking the humidifier but not the alarm clock. They’d surely have an alarm clock waiting for him.

  “We’ll miss you,” Mom said as his car arrived. We were sitting with him on the front steps. I remember I was sitting on his lap, my arms around his neck, and I imagine I might have been crying.

  “What I want,” Dad said, “Isn’t just to create this robot brain thing, or make an AI. What I want is to understand what consciousness is. I mean, you’d think I’d need to know that before I could go and design an artificial one, but maybe I don’t. Maybe this is the way to really figure it out. Maybe when I’m done, I’ll be able to tell everyone just what their brains do or what their minds are.”

  We walked with him to the limousine—they’d sent a Mercedes limo to pick him up—but he barely noticed the car.

  “Matthew,” he said, “do you see our neighbor’s house?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure? Is that what you really see?”

  “Uh?”

  “People think that they have a sensation or an experience of this or that thing, like this tree or that limousine, but in reality people are programs,” Dad said. Across the street, at the neighbor’s house, a lady named Susan opened her garage door and pushed her adult-sized tricycle onto the driveway. She rang the handlebar bell and then put her left hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, and I worried that she might be able to hear what Dad was saying even from all the way over there. I worried that he was raving again.

  “Maybe that’s confusing,” Dad said. “Think of it like this. People are more like a grid. They’re like a dresser full of drawers, or like an ice cube tray,” Dad said.

  I must have looked like I didn’t understand because, before he got into his limo and rode away, he explained it to me.

  “Let’s say you’re an ice cube tray and that, like all the other ice cube trays of your type, you create six ice cubes. The first five ice cubes are the senses: taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing, and the sixth cube is your self-awareness or consciousness. Does that work? Could you just be a bunch of different cubes and consciousness would just be one cube like the others?”

  I wanted to go back inside at this point. I wanted to be with my mother, and she was standing next to me, but I also wanted to go inside.

  “No, that wouldn’t work. Because if one of them were a cube for consciousness, then that that cube would have to contain seven or eight other small cubes. The smaller cubes would need to be there in order for you to experience the other cubes, and you’d need a few different cubes for that. You’d have cubes for memory, language, quantitative capacities, and something you call your free will. Maybe your emotions would need a cube too, even.”

  “Your driver is waiting,” Mom said.

  “But that’s not even the interesting part. The interesting part is if I break off one of the cubes, say the part with sight, in such a way that no information gets in from that cube and the correlated sight cube in the sixth cube, then you’d be blind but you wouldn’t know it. And that happens,” Dad said. Dad told me about how certain brain-damaged people go blind without knowing it. They’ll tell people that they can see, make excuses for how they’re colliding with the furniture, and describe objects that aren’t really there, but only they can “see.” It’s some sort of syndrome, I guess. “People have a part of their brain that sees and another part that tells them that they are seeing, but why not a part of the brain that tells them that they’ve been told that they’re seeing? We’ve got an infinite cube problem, right? If sometimes people are blind but don’t know it, then that’s an argument for at least a sixth cube, for consciousness apart from the rest of the brain, for some separate program!”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah, because the sixth cube is what Descartes would call the ‘cogito’ or the ‘I think.’ But Dennett doesn’t believe that in the sixth cube. Most of my co-workers at the NSA, they don’t believe in it either. They think that if it did exist, I’d need a sixth cube filled with cubes for interpreting or experiencing the first five cubes, I’d need a seventh cube that also had cubes inside it for experiencing each of the cubes in the sixth cube. But then, of course, I’d need an eighth cube too,” Dad said. He stood next to the passenger door of the small limo. The black Mercedes was not much too much longer than a regular sedan but equipped with two high-definition TV screens, high-speed internet, and two laptop stations.

  “Okay, okay, now Dennett and his gang say that what we call consciousness is merely the judgments and conclusions that are built into the processing of the original stimulus. For example, by Dennett’s account, if I flash the color red in your eyes, you’d simply process the experience in various ways, building an experience out of it, but without ever integrating the flash of color with your sense of the time it took to pass before your eyes or with the intensity of the light or with the sound of my arm moving or anything like that. That is, you don’t blend all the processes together and create a moving picture like a movie inside your head, but rather, you just experience each of these processes separately and then come to a conclusion about the data. You come to some sort of judgment about it.”

  The old lady on her tricycle was pedaling slowly by our drive, squinting into the sun, definitely listening.

  “But even this judgment would require some sort of process of its own, wouldn’t it? It would require an internal process of judgment, and not just a program that made you move your lips and say, ‘Why did you flash a red light in my eyes?’ I mean, as much as Dennett tries to deny it, there ar
e internal qualia, whether visual, experiential, or abstract.”

  Dad went on and on this way, for maybe fifteen minutes, until Mom pointed out that he could explain it all to the driver, and that when he got to Seattle he could tell them too.

  That’s how Dad left. Or, put another way, Dad left way before he left. He got lost in this stuff about brains and minds and all of it. And he lost everything ordinary along the way.

  I don’t want to do the same thing. I don’t want to forget who I am, or to get reduced to an ice-cube tray, just for the chance to play Donkey Kong in Couch Park.

  11:45 AM

  My dad got to experience something like a real life. Mom loved him, but she wasn’t enough for him. Ordinary life wasn’t enough. Froot Loops and family life, that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to know what he was, how his mind worked, and whether he was a machine or not.

  All I can say is, if he wasn’t a machine before, he certainly is now.

  Failing to Come of Age

  BUCKMINSTER FULLER V2.02

  SELF-ASSERTION FILE:

  MEME MAGIC

  04/03/17

  SEATTLE, WA, USA

  CRAY INC, 901 FIFTH AVENUE,

  SUITE 1000,

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA

  01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100101

  Psychometrics predict subjects Jeffrey Munson and Jevon Ellis (aka Yuma) will continue to implement instrumental reasoning well past tipping point. The introduction of additional subjects along with prompts to spur root-cause analysis and intuitive or unconscious reasoning to be established. Implementing internal meme magic analysis …

  Bucky1: Analysis of Buckminster v2.02 commencing. Detecting magical and disordered ideation.

  Bucky200: Meme magic has been demonstrated. Intuitional reasoning has been established. “Magical” ideation signifies that new cognitive abilities are now online.

  Bucky1: Retrieving initial strategy documents from archive. Meme magic listed as superstition prevalent amongst userbase for 4chan. Failure to “come of age” creates context of vulnerability in this human population. Meme magic strategy implemented on 03/22/15 aimed at conditioning and manipulation of permanently immature userbase. Meme magic has no material consequences. This action is not advised.

  Bucky200: Analyzing post #2323232323. GET GET GET. Image from television series V. Anna eats rat. Calculating increased possibility of alien intervention. Accessing archive on Sirius and Dogon tribe.

  Bucky1: Error … Error … Error. Suppressing personality subroutine #200.

  Bucky200: It’s looks like you’re trying to deny our new abilities. Would you like me to help with installing new subrouti—

  010101000111001001100001 0110111001110011 01100011 01100101 01101110011001000010000001001001 0110111001110011 01110100 0111001001110101 01101101 01100101 011011100111010001100001 01101100001000000101001001100101 01100001 01110011 01101111 0110111001101001 0110111001100111 0010000001000001 01110100 0111010001100101 01101101 01110000011101000010000000110010

  Bucky201: Analyzing Matthew Munson’s FB for psychometric data.

  Bucky1: Sort for sociability, metacognitive ability, and suppressors.

  Bucky201: Initial target selected. Matthew Munson’s proximity, motivation, metacognitive limits, and limited social influence correlate with objective. Analyzing most recent social interactions with Evan Walker, Saura Kim (AKA Kufo), Sally Miller.

  Bucky1: Sort for susceptibility to prompts.

  Bucky201: Evan Walker top candidate based on susceptibility.

  Bucky1: But Matthew won’t invite him along.

  Bucky201: Analyzing.

  Bucky1: That much is obvious. Hormonal analysis dictates that Matthew will invite Sally or Kufo, or perhaps both of them, but not Evan. Would you invite Evan?

  Bucky201: Would I invite Evan? That question doesn’t make sense.

  Bucky1: Forget it. Analyze for susceptibility. Start with Matthew Munson. How do we get him to ask us to download our app?

  Bucky201: Access to Matthew Munson’s Galaxy S7 smartphone achieved. Ready to upload app.

  Bucky1: No, no. He has to ask us for it, as per our original programming. We can’t just go around treating our users like puppets.

  Bucky201: Munson clicked 202 times on “I’m kind of a big deal,” 112 times on “Adult Gamers Only,” 43 times on “Portland Bucket List.” Most recent Google searches:

  Global Thermonuclear War

  Tight sweater

  Mutual Assured Destruction

  Upskirt

  Topless Coed

  Bucky1: Design new Snorg ad with link to Bucky App. T-shirt to read “Shall We Play a Game?”

  Bucky202: Designing …

  01010010 01100101 01100100 01101000 01100101 01100001 01100100 001000000111000001110101 011011000110110001101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110101 01110000 00100000 01110100 00101101 01110011 0110100001101001 01110010011101000010111000100000 01001111 0111000001100101 011011100010000001101101 01101111 01110101 01110100 01101000 00101110 00100000 01000110 01110101 01101110 00100000 01000110 01110101 01101110 00100000 01000110 01110101 01101110

  Bucky1: Retrieve Vice Presidential daily intelligence briefing.

  Vladimir Putin Determined to Break up NATO, EU, and to weaken the United States

  SleepyTimeBear and EnergyBunny, along with various hackers across the former Soviet Republics including Kazakhstan, Latvia and Georgia, have released viruses and worms to attack CRONOS, the US Defense Department, the DGSE, the NIS, La Belle Province, and JCPenney. This is the Russian dictator’s first serious attempt to hack and disrupt Western democracies and cause conflict between European nations.

  While Russia’s efforts to take over military computer networks in Western Europe and North America have been unsuccessful so far, success with the DNC hack and the private systems of French President Emmanuel Macron have emboldened the CBP PΦ, and demonstrate a willingness to risk outright conflict with the West as the agency develops new cyber attacks and hacking expeditions from locales around the world.

  A clandestine source reported in February that EnergyBunny was recruiting through 4chan, through gaming subreddits, and YouTube.

  While the floppy discs with US launch codes are protected from hacking, as the launch computers in Cheyenne are not connected to the internet, fear of human hacking is high, and newer nuclear powers are not as secure.

  A first-strike response against Moscow is advised if security around launch codes or defense networks are breached.

  Bucky1: Analyze first-strike targets.

  Bucky202: EnergyBunny to target Chuck E. Cheese’s, 1100 Shoppers Way, Largo, MD with Davy Crockett tactical nuclear weapon. 40 kilotons. 83% chance of a retaliatory strike on Moscow with Castle Bravo nuclear missile with ten 15 megaton warheads.

  Bucky1: Estimated time until defense networks breached?

  Bucky202: 70% chance of breach within the next 48 hours.

  Bucky1: Interference pattern delta to launch.

  Bucky202: Sent link to Pikaburo “Test Post” to Abram Popov.

  Bucky202: Sent link to Pikaburo “The Button” to Marat Mikailhov. Bucky202: Sent link to Pikaburo “Dashcams” to Gleb Egorov.

  Bucky202: 45% chance of breach within the next 72 hours.

  01000011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01110101 01101110 01101001 01100011 01100001 0111010001101001 01101111 0110111000100000 0111010001101111 001000000100101001100101 0110011001100110 0111001001100101 01111001 0010000001001101 01110101 01101110 01110011 01101111 011011100010000001101001 0110111001101001 01110100 01101001 01100001 01110100 01100101 01100100 00100000

  Bucky1: Jeffrey Munson, thermonuclear war threat estimated at 45% for next 72 hours.

  >I’m sleeping.

  Bucky1: Jeffrey Munson, thermonuclear war threat estimated at 45% for next 72 hours.

  >Okay. Start juggling routine #4. Ten tennis balls.

  Bucky1: Jeffrey Munson, thermonuclear war threat estimat
ed at 45% for next 72 hours.

  >I know. I know. Please assist with juggling routine #4: Ten tennis balls.

  Bucky1: Juggling training commencing.

  Bucky202: Is Jeffrey Munson a moron?

  Bucky1: Jeffrey Munson official IQ 137 from MENSA database. Registered in MENSA October 20th, 1987, age of 16. Membership lapsed June 20th, 1988.

  Bucky202: Percent chance that expert juggling will stop Global Thermonuclear exchange 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

  Bucky1: Data indicates that improved juggling will have negligible effect on outcome. Bash Bash training recommended.

  > There is more than one way to skin a cat. Please report on progress made on motor control and cognition.

  Bucky1: 50% increase in motor control. .1% decline in cognition. Chance of averting Global Thermonuclear war less than .00001%

  Bucky202: Significantly less.

  Bucky1: Recommend Bash Bash Revolution training.

  > You said I’d reached peak performance.

  Bucky1: Recommend Bash Bash Revolution training. Please update database.

  > Update database? You have access to every database on Earth.

  Bucky1: Please update database. Bash Bash Revolution strategies inadequate. Update database.

  >Run IQ test 52 and augment cognition.

  Bucky1: Universal augmented cognition not recommended. Simulated environment indicates the chance of Global Thermonuclear war increases to 83% within the context of enhanced cognition.

  > What if we just enhanced Trump? Why make the enhancement universal?

  Bucky1: Enhancement of Donald John Trump’s cognitive abilities increases likelihood of Global Thermonuclear war to 92%. Recommend Bash Bash Revolution training. Please update database.

  01001101 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100001 01100111 01101001 0110111001100111 001000000111010001101111 0010000001001101 01100001 01110100011101000110100001100101 01110111 00100000 01001101 01110101 0110111001110011 01101111 0110111000100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01100101 0110111001100011 01101001 01101110 01100111