Why we do things

[flamingsword]

Some days I feel so tired that I don't think about having a purpose in life. And I do have one, though putting it into words is kinda awkward. I want to make the world weirder. To do that you have to make safe spaces for people to experiment and really get their weird on and not get slapped down for it.

But under that, I think I have the same basic motivation, though expressed differently, as every individual does. We're all shouting into the void:

"I EXIST! I AM WORTH KEEPING AROUND!!"

And hoping that the universe listens, and we do not cease to exist. Some hope that people will connect to us the way we need them to and don't know how to express or ask for. We want to be kept, most of us. There are schools of thought that say that self-hate twists this message into the negation of self instead, and we broadcast our self destruction. Or choose to broadcast nothing, as though we are already dead, do not deserve our own existence. Human nature being as wide-ranging as it is, that is very probably true. But I think that the point of origin for these behaviors is the insistence on our own existence.

We are coming upon an age where self-consciousness can happen in nonorganic beings and it behooves us to think about what exactly we are letting them in for. What is this state of being that we seek to share? Why are we so desperate to replicate it in beings we cannot hope to understand, knowing already the problems we have understanding each other? What are our responsibilities towards this new consciousness we are creating?

We are Uplifting the race of computers, and that makes us parents, of a sort. Happy Birthday NAO Bots! I hope we teach you to be better people than we have been capable of, and that your experience of the world is satisfactory to what as-yet-unknown nature you may have.

Comments

two comments in one >.>

[ot_atma]

I haven't decided yet whether I want that article to be clickbait or not. It seems like it would be easy to make a robot that can do that one thing; I want to hold out for more general intelligences. More context information is desperately needed.

--I want to make the world weirder.
Do you have any working definition for 'weird'? Is it strictly a felt sense, or is there some constellation of words that evokes it without also maiming it too badly?

[we_are_spc]

And may it not end in an "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" senario. >.<


I ndee to be less Jaded, I know this. I'm working on it. I'm also a bit more traumatized by events in my past than I first thought, and dealing with the complexities of that is... not fun. I'll put it that way since I have no English equivalent for the complexities of that emotion here.

-T~