The Smart Rat

The Smart Rat

Recently¹, the brains of two rats have been connected, allowing them to send a signal from one brain to another over vast distances, with a computer in between. This is highly interesting all by itself since it shows that brain-computer interfacing can be achieved and, given the accelerated speed of inventions nowadays², will lead to human brain-computer interfaces in the relatively near future. Soon there's going to be sender/receiver rats. And then sender/receiver rats in a network.

In many circles this is considered to be one of the possible ways to achieve the Technological Singularity, where the creation of super (and subsequently hyper) intelligence means we will no longer be the smartest species on the planet. We'd be, to compare, the dolphins, and something else the humans with capacities and motivations dolphins can't begin to phantom.

Or we'd be, to compare, the rats.

2013 CE

Today

It's March 2, 2013. Current time where I am sitting is 23.00 GMT or UT, which is the same thing. And the fact that we are still, in the days of global interconnection by means of a relatively new invention called The Internet, messing around without a globally accepted, understood and universally used definition of 'what time it is' I find mind boggling. Decades into the space age, surrounded by a massive web of global communication satellites that support said interconnection and when we want to make a phone call to a continent, or even another country more than 15 degrees from our present location in the MeatSpace, we still have to calculate and possibly visit one of those nifty time conversion websites to figure out what time it is on the other side of the device. My MMORPG's are always patching when I'm not expecting it because I didn't get that Mountain Time or some such right. How bizarre is that? And it gets worse.

Introduction: Occam's Sword.

I've been thinking about the Technological Singularity a lot, recently. And about Artificial and/or Autonomous Intelligences. About evolution, science, history, games and all kinds of stuff that appears to be far apart. I've been doing that thinking because many things in human history up into our current society just don't add up. Lack reason or logic. I have this nagging feeling current scientific consensus is in many area's actually standing on pretty thin ice. I have this 'something is just not right' gut feeling for decades and have played with it on and off for quite a while. This time I embarked on formulating a general theory and illustrate it with supporting data that would pass the test of Occam's Razor[1].

Today, it starts here.

Working on my search for the mute, which will be posted here in subsequent chapters, I had too much fun to keep working on it in silence, and private. Or as private as you can be, in 2013, on a box that is not just connected to the internet but also hooked in a University network that pretty clearly advised you, before logging in, that your activities might be monitored.
Anyhow, without further ado, I'll explain all about it later, here's the first post which will be completely alienating if I don't state beforehand that this world is, in my view, not a real world but something else. A simulation, a virtual reality, perhaps a game. This post assumes the latter.
This world can't be real. It's a game! And then the news we read makes sense, all of a sudden.
Enjoy!