Notes to Self

[oneirophrenia]

Thing to do when I eventually become a god (a la the characters in Robert Reed's Sister Alice or John C. Wright's The Golden Age):

First things first: Bestow godly powers (read: nanotech assemblers, quantum computing capacity, and hyperdense matter weaponry) on all my friends...or, at least, those that I like enough to consider turning into superhuman bad-asses like myself.

Second: Eradicate the remainder of non-god humanity, every goddamned disgusting small-minded moronic one of them. For good measure, I think I will pound the entire earth into a clump of neutronium about the size of a basketball, and then punt that chunk of crap into a black hole for good measure. (Addendum to Mass Destruction Plan: First, I'll scan the entire planet into digital storage, so I can later recreate a decent virtual replica of it minus the 8 billion assholes who currently call it home.)

Third: Start replicating endlessly, so I will finally have enough time and capacity to get all the stuff done I'd like to! (i.e., finishing up this novel, playing Atari games forever, playing with my cat, watching all the movies I've missed out on, shaping a planetary nebula into a gigantic wang of glowing hydrogen, etc. etc. etc.)

Now here's the rant. "My! Aren't we just a petulant megalomaniac today!" you say? True. Today, I have read articles about: families in South Africa refusing the bury the bodies of their dead relatives because some dirt-pit "prophet" said those poor people will rise up and walk again; a 19-year-old mother stabbing her 19-month-old daughter in the back with a kitchen knife--for no reason at all--and leaving the kid to die in the snow of a local playground; a schizophrenic man being found not guilty by reason of insanity of chopping off his mother's head because he thought she was Satan; and assorted other simply incomprehensible examples of sheer human idiocy. I will NEVER claim to be the most stable or level-headed human alive--I'm as nutty as a fruitcake and I admit it--but...at the same time, I've always tried my best to overcome these alzumenschliche shortcomings and Do the Right Thing(tm) as much as possible with as straightforward and reasonable an attitude as possible. I've not always succeeded, but...christ, it literally blows my mind that in the dawning years of the 21st Fucking Century humanity is still behaving little different than it did in the Middle Ages. There's no reason to expect a species to shrug off millennia of genetic predilections, social conditioning, tradition, and whatnot in only a few hundred years...but we should all pause right now to remember that the last 150 years have displayed more advancement in knowledge and technical ability than the previous three thousand years combined. We don't at present have the complete wherewithal to build a Utopian system for ourselves, but I am still amazed--AMAZED--that as a whole the human species could have achieved so much in 1.5 centuries yet still remain so fundamentally uncivilized. The vast majority of humans all over the world--including right here in are own smug American backyards--are still little better than animals. Worse than animals, in fact. I've seen cats exhibit the most savage cruelty when batting around injured mice for fun before they bite off their heads--but you know what? A cat is not neurologically advanced enough to fully realize the moral and ethical weight of what they're doing. A cat is no less self-aware or emotively advanced than a human, but a cat's brain is still not packing enough processing capability to comprehend abstract concepts like "mercy" and "ethics." Ergo, we can't expect a cat to feel sorry for a prey animal--that would just be ridiculous. But every single human with a more-or-less functional brain can understand this shit--for the gods' sake, it makes human civilization possible in the first place! The fact that 99.999999% of humanity doesn't seem capable of doing so makes my head spin. We choose to be animal-like in our behavior because it takes less effort to just act according to gut reactions and predetermined behaviors than it does to actually think about what we're doing. Hey, it can happen to anyone--it happened to me about a year ago--but anyone worthy of being called "Human" should at least be aware of that and be prepared to act accordingly.

OK. Enough bitching. Time to start doing something about it.

Looks like this upcoming semester is going to be a really, really, really busy one. I'll have about fifteen research projects dealing with human  and transhman ethical constructions in the works now....

Comments

[mirvana.livejournal.com]

Your evil god-like plan reminds me of a novel I read, one of the Dune prequels: The Butlerian Jihad. You forgot to mention the part about having your brain removed from your human shell and implanted into a much more supererior mechanized body.

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams?