The Universe and Stuff. (Whoa)

I think I thought something cool just recently and its one of those things that you gotta write down before it escapes you because its so hard to maintain the understanding.

First, my sacred few but loyal readers, forget all this stuff about good and evil, right and wrong, god, religion, and all that. What I am hoping to relate to you this evening is really outside of those guidelines.

Here we go...

Imagine for the moment that nothing exists outside the Universe. No afterlife, no before life, no god, nothing at all outside the Universe. It is just us. We are the whole deal.

Now imagine that the Universe has a nature to it, a sort of fundamental personality. And the most basic characteristic of the Universe is it's relentless longing to comprehend itself. Self-comprehension is the only thing it has ever wanted for Christmas, and every other holiday for that matter. It will stop at nothing to attain this self-comprehension. No amount of pain and suffering, no amount of time, no amount of false starts or dead ends...nothing will get in its way of understanding what it is.

So the Big Bang happens, light shows up, atoms are born, elements start gettin' freaky with each other, eventually planets introduce themselves into the picture and they start dancing around the stars like they own the place. Amino acid here, amino acid there and bingo: DNA. Now things start moving forward like there is no tommorow. First its single cell nobody's then its multi-celled somebody's. You know how it goes. Life it seems has a drive and an obsession to cultivate and refine itself that is matched only by the Universe's drive and obsession to understand itself. A fitting pair.

So now we've got animals stomping around staring at each other cause they've got all the might and muscle, but no curiousity. No curiousity that is, until the monkees show up. Suddenly the world is percieved by a monkey brain that uniquely understands the way in which the world around it falls into line with what said monkey wants it to do. The monkey can adapt, even if just a little to the changes that occur around it.

Zooooooom forward some time and..... tada! Homo sapiens show up walking around on two legs as if none of the other animals could have thought of it. The people, however, start making noises to each other that are more complex than any of the noises any of the other animals can make. And as luck would have it, they have opposable thumbs.

Smart as they are, they cant seem to help killing each other an aweful lot. This would be sad except for the fact that we are still not thinking in terms of right and wrong. It turns out all that killing had some pretty nifty side effects. Most notably the exchange between different people of ideas and tools. A pursuit of the best and brightest gives way to some wild new toys.

Before you know it the military industrial complex is not just born, but alive and kicking and very much in need of a whole lot of food which comes in the form of money and passion.

The money comes from taxes and the passion comes from patriotism and/or nationalism, depending on whether or not your familiar with Francis Bellamy, the nationalist socialist that wrote the pledge of allegiance in 1888. His version, which stands almost unchanged today was minus the words 'under god' as he was an athiest; aren't they all. The words 'under god' were added in the 1950's.

ANYWAY, things were really heating up between all the different people and it looked like they had finally figured out all kinds of really cool bombs and guns, but what stole the show were these nifty machines called 'computers.'

Computers were slow and dull to start with but alot of people saw how valuble they could be. So as you could imagine, alot of people set to work with computers. From the perspective of the people, the places computers could take us were limitless. But from the perspective of the Universe the limits of technology would not be discovered until the technology began creating itself through the artificial intelligence. A lovely turn of events for the Universe as machines require much less time to become refined to the point of usefullness than anything organic that the universe had created up to that point. The Universe still had a need for the humans though, because we would first need to come up with artifical intelligence that could then be perfected by the computers.

An artificially intelligent computer could fulfill the ultimate goal of the Universe, self-comprehension, faster and more efficiently than we could.

When the Universe began it was a mess of disorganized energy. Then things started bumping into each other and here we are, still bumping into each other. Some people have Hummer's though, which either plow right through or bounce off, which is entirely beside the point.

Back to task. If you really sit back and think about it, it makes sense that the Universe would make us first and then we could make the computers. In fact, when you really sit back and take a gander, computers are just extensions of us and we are really extensions of the Universe.

My whole gist is that artifical intelligent computers would simply be the Universe's most complex attempt at understandig itself. The kicker, of course, is that we are the Universe and the Universe is us. This all might sound like a bit of a bummer, and I hate to introduce a moral eye into this so late in the post, but I think it's kind of exciting to be so close to what may turn out to be the final great chapter in this Universe's long held quest to answer the eternally awesome question: Who am I?