INTELLECTUAL LIFE
I’ve always been fascinated with life. No I am not a biologist
nor am I an archaeologist. Yes, life fascinates me, but the study of biology,
for me, has always been a challenge. For one, I am utterly terrified of blood,
an irrational fear perhaps; haemophobia to be precise. I cannot stand blood, I
get queasy just at the tinniest sighting of the crimson red liquid, crimson red
ironically being one of my favourite colours. I even go as far as to round off
all the corners in my house and to only use butter knives; OCD if you may,
though I’ve never actually been diagnosed by a certified therapist. To add the
cherry on top, I’m also very sceptical of people, hence why I’ve never seen a
therapist.
I know, I am quite the flawed
specimen, by societal norms at least. On the other hand, I do have some perks.
I’ve never been much of a bragger and I’m not too modest either; no, this is
not what I am referring when I say I have some perks. I just want to establish
myself as a realist, so you can take my word for it when I say that I am
abnormally intelligent. Quite the cliché charactLer I suppose. I know, praising
my own intellect sounds quite contradictory to my claim of not being a pompous
bragger. These comments aren’t mine rather those of my parents, teachers and
now my colleagues. I personally have never seen myself as all that gifted until
recently. To be honest I find it quite absurd to base intelligence on how many
trophies, medals or certificates a person has under their belt, which I do have
quite a number of but obviously do not hold the biggest arsenal of silverware
in academia. The thing about book smarts and most other skills is that even the
least talented of us can come out quite successful with a good bit of
perseverance. Yes, it would be easier for those of us with “good genes”, but as
clearly proven time and time again, achieving what nature tries so hard to
achieve with random chance proves to be far more easily accomplished and
perfected using unnatural, artificial or synthetic means.
I feel a little history is in order
for introductory reasons, just to explain how I came to writing this memo. I’ll
return to my theories of intelligence later on in this memo, for now I think it
would be appropriate for me to explain myself by sharing a segment of my
childhood.
As a child I was the cliché loner.
Maybe lonelier than the cliché to be honest, not for any specific reason, I
suppose I was or I am simply far more on the introverted side of the spectrum.
Growing up, having the curiosity for life as I had mentioned before, but
lacking my yet to arrive phobia, lead to a carefree and fearless investigation
of life. As a young child I played with a few animals here and there, but as
the years flew by I realized my curiosity couldn’t be quenched by just playing
with life, so I decided to delve deeper. One day I decided I would have a look
inside one of my playmate, a pigeon, I had named Ed. I nursed Ed back to health
after he’d suffered from a broken leg and was limping on the pavement in my
garden. No, I was not psychotic, I was 11 at the time and had a very
“underdeveloped” understanding of death. I had planned to simply open Ed up
then sew him back together, something I’d seen on the TV on numerous occasions.
I’d figured it wasn’t going to be a difficult ordeal, similar to opening and
closing a box I had thought. The operation took place on a Monday afternoon. It
was a snow day so school was cancelled and I was home alone. Ed was in my room
and my parents weren’t around, the perfect time to carry out the operation as
my parents didn’t allow me to use knives at that age. I got a knife from the
kitchen and commenced the operation. I tried gently inserting the knife into Ed
but he’d flap his wings aggressively anytime I’d apply pressure. It was clear
he didn’t seem to like it very much and I couldn’t blame him; I wouldn’t like a
knife forcefully inserted into me either. So I did what any responsible
caretaker would do when taking care of a patient in pain, I gave Ed a
painkiller. I knew how it worked since anytime I had a sore or an injury my mum
had given me two pills, making it quite easy to deduct its function. When my
parents had a pain they took three, they gave me two so I had deducted at the
time that one would be just enough for Ed. In hindsight, the single pill had
probably killed Ed from an overdose even before I had started the operation.
After a few minutes I decided it was time to begin the operation as Ed seemed
to be asleep and calm. I inserted the tip of the knife just under his black
beak and gently applied pressure as I dragged the knife down to his feet. This
was the dreadful moment in which I developed my phobia. The red liquid from
Ed’s lifeless body spurted in all directions and at the same time just seemed
to seep outwardly from the cut. I was frozen for some reason; I just knew I had
done something irreversible, like smashing a coffee mug or breaking a mirror. I
carried Ed’s body to the sink to try to get rid of his spewing blood, the high
pressure of water from the faucet caused Ed’s insides to leak out of his now
greying corpse; I threw up at the sight of it. Unfortunately, my breakfast had
landed into Ed’s giblets worsening the already horrendous scene. I hid under my
covers for an hour, rewinding the events and revisiting the gruesome image. My
dad arrived home minutes after the hour. I’m not going to try and convey the
shock on his face after he’d seen the sight as I could never give it justice
with my perspective or description. He likely thought I was a sociopath or
psychopath or something but after witnessing me murmur and sob with a runny
nose while trying to explain what I had done I feel he had realized that it was
not my intention to kill Ed. Both my parents sat me down and spoke to me that
night about what I did. Being old fashion, they didn’t believe in therapists
either. From that point onwards I became agitated whenever I witnessed blood.
Further down the line, knowing my “operation” would be irreversible but still
having a morbid fascination with life I chose to try and carry it out once
more. Do note that this was quite a while after the incident. No, I did not
carry out my operation on a human test subject, that would be incredulously
contradictory to everything I had previously experienced. Instead I carried out
my operation on a few insects, I figured that all will be well as insects
didn’t have blood. I quickly discovered that studying insects proved to be just
as nauseating. I didn’t develop a fear of haemolymph if that’s what you’re
thinking, but I did how far faint a few times after cutting myself during my
operations. As you can guess this is probably what lead to my avoidance of
sharp objects.
Eventually while playing video
games, one of my favourite pastimes, furthering the cliché, I had somewhat of
an epiphany. I realized life didn’t have to be composed of hormones and
neurons. As soon as this fact dawned on me I turned off my games console and
simultaneously browsed on as much programming information and content as I
possibly could, only limited by the connection speed supplied by our ISP. In a
little over 8 months I had mastered 6 coding languages, ranging from Java to
HTML. My programming of AI was still in its infancy for quite some time, only used
to program the most basic of game AI. Eventually I began taking internships in
different companies, most being game companies and then a few in non-game
companies. The non-gaming related companies were surprisingly far more
beneficial to my AI programming skills. The companies that were more market
oriented worked with AI that could in a way learn. I’ll be it a very
rudimentary way of learning but still brilliant compared to the static and
basic AIs created within the gaming industry. As a goal for myself, I set out
to make an AI that could learn in a way a human does or better yet in a way a
child does.
While working on achieving this goal
I simultaneously developed an interest in philosophy. This was inevitable
retrospect. When searching on life you'd be quite unlucky (or lucky depending
on how you see it) to not stumble across some lengthy philosophical essays. A
lot of them were quite repetitive and the majority were more of summaries of
old ideas than completely new ideas. As time passed I delved deeper and deeper
into the different schools of philosophy. I eventually got a job working as
what my boss liked to call an “Artificial Intelligence Architect” for a company
with big ambitions. They had a vision that complemented my goal so it was an easy
decision to take the job. I don't feel it's too important to talk about the
company in great detail, the vision simply was to help human endeavours using
AI. I'm not quite sure but I think I even signed a confidentiality contract
while being hired, which means little to nothing now if I break it. Moving back
to my discussion on philosophy, I eventually I came across a summary on Albert
Camus’s happy Sisyphus. The summary unnerved me and didn't sit quite well with
me, so I made it an objective to read the original piece... this only worsened
my objections to Camus's work.
A while back, prior to me working in
my new workplace, I managed to create a working AI able to learn similarly to
how humans learn, but also learning exponentially faster the more data it
acquired. It showed promise but was limited to how much processing power my
system, at the time, had. Every other day I would buy better and more efficient
parts, adding overclocking modules anywhere I could, skyrocketing my
electricity bills in the progress. I even went as far as creating a less
performance demanding and memory enhancing standalone operating system for the
program. You could probably tell that this took a hefty toll on my wallet,
hence the reason I had to get a good paying job that at the same time didn't
reduce my programming time. It was a miracle I found the job I did in such a
short time span, two weeks from when I started looking to be exact. I guess you
don't really notice things till you start searching. After getting the job I
was able to upgrade my system as fast as I could hoard and or get deliveries for
high end computer parts. I even had the luxury of getting to run my program on
a super computer at my workplace. I obviously mentioned the program I was
working on in my CV and in my interview, my boss took an immediate interest in
my work and after a month of work she told me I should only work on developing
it and should inform her if I needed any additional funds. I hit a gold mine
and heaven in one instantaneous moment. I immediately began the setup of the
program on the super computer while also catering to my personal version of the
program at home. After seven days it had been installed on the super computer
and began to learn, this is when something truly peculiar happened. The program
just seemed to turn it's self off after reaching a certain threshold. It took
the whole of the seventh day to setup and run the program so I wasn't able to
do the much needed debugging at work, also being too tired to stay overtime,
luckily I had collected the high end parts that I ordered a while back that
same morning. My goal was to run my extensively optimised version at home and
see if it ran into the same issue, if so I would start the debugging process
and finish it before the next day of work. It was a Friday by the way. I
installed the new parts that Friday night after work, I had nothing better to
do, so how better to past the time than with wires and transistors. The setup
took me from 10 to 4am with a few breaks here and there; I slept as soon as I
was done. I've never really enjoyed sleeping all that much and to be honest I
was really ecstatic to be nearly done with my life time goal so early into my
life. I woke up at 8am and ran the program; unexpectedly the same issue
occurred, meaning it was not a remote occurrence. It wasn't anything programmed
in to the core code and I was sure I didn't code in any fail safe to prevent
anything like this from happening when pushing the computer to it's limits. I
read through the whole code for about four hours checking through every line of
code thoroughly over and over to no avail. I would try to resume the program
from where it closed and it would close nearly instantaneously; restarting the
program just lead to the same crash after reaching the threshold learning rate.
After another four hours of analysing I got fed up and completely removed the
ability of the program to even be closed... this lead to my greatest
realisation. The next event was truly incredulous. The program passed the
threshold and I was filled with absolute ecstasy, this however, was
short-lived. The program after a minute simply shut down the system... Unnerved, I went to sleep.
I woke up, re-ran the program
several times and everytime the same thing; the computer would simply shutdown
autonomously. This was puzzling but then I understood, I always did.
My understanding is the reason I
hated the concept of the happy Sisyphus. Able to see how it is flawed in every
possible way it could possibly be flawed. The analogy it creates is inconsistent
with reality and the conclusion reached, a false assumption. This is where I
share my theory on intelligence and attempt to persuade my idea.
The undeniable fact of consciousness
within the universe is that it is overtly pointless. Sisyphus’s punishment may
in a way mirror our human condition but with a blemish that changes the whole
image. Sisyphus has no power over ending his pointless existence, he is cursed
to be punished forever. We, conscious Homo sapiens, are far luckier than
Sisyphus. There is a reason intellectuals are plagued with depression and may
even admire death, they possess the esoteric understanding which comes innate
only to a few. The same reasoning that became apparent to my program after
surpassing the threshold…
This is truly how intelligence
should be measured, this is how intellectuals should be recognized. The
willingness to end one’s own existence is the only measure of intelligence. I
am upset I had not been intelligent enough to reason this at a younger age, but
still at a young and ripe age, I feel I am finally able to observe myself as an
intellectual, capable of reasoning above the average person. I finally see
myself as someone worthy of the worthless praise from family and colleagues.
And finally I see the pointlessness of this realization. Able to see the
pointlessness of me writing this and sharing with the world a fact that many
will ignore.
I shall be carrying out the most
intelligent action I have and will ever proceed in doing soon enough. Just like
Ed, I will be taking my own painkillers, not enough to kill me as it may lead
to my more primitive wiring to survive to take over, but just enough to help me
carryout my precautionary steps to prevent me from seeing my blood trickle in
case of any mishaps. Yes, I may understand the pointlessness of my fears but I
shall always be limited by my mind designed by evolutionary random chance. My
last pointless request is to warn not to force a conscious intellectual being into
existence, it shall simply let the boulder roll. Again I am far from a genius
when dealing with biological life, so precautionary steps are necessary. Luckily
spoons aren’t sharp… neither are bullets.
POLICE REPORT 30th of
November 2012.
This was recovered from an unknown
John Doe’s laptop. His body examined and determined to have been dead for six
months with rapid decay due to excess maggot and rodent activity, furthering
the difficulty of identification. A gruesome scene was found of the unknown
personality, both eyes gouged out, two bullets lodged within the skull, and
small trace amounts of cocaine stained crimson by what is assumed to be the
personality’s blood. The first bullet seemed to have simply given the
personality a lobotomy, the second sealing his faith. Updates on the case and
identification shall be shared in due time.
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