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Yonder
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"Is the organic defined by the absence of technology?"
"Yes... no... You're deceptively close to the truth."
"Do all unities have the same access to technology?"
"No. There are considerable differences. All have a technology of sorts, but it would take a while to explain why some of it is technology. Some of them don't even have electronic circuits--and no, they are not at an advanced enough biotechnology level to transcend electronic circuits. But if we speak of technology we would recognize, there are major differences. Some have access to no technology; some have access to the best."
"And the ones without access to technology are organic?"
"Yes. Even if they try to escape it, they are inescapably organic."
"But the ones which have the best technology are the least organic."
"Yes."
"Then maybe it was premature to define the organic by the absence of technology, but we can at least make a spectrum between the organic and the technological."
"Yes... no... You're even more deceptively close to the truth. And I emphasize, 'deceptively'. Some of the people who are most organic have the best technology--"
"So the relationship breaks down? What if we disregard outliers?"
"But the root problem is that you're trying to define the organic with reference to technology. There is some relationship, but instead of starting with a concept of technology and using it to move towards a concept of the organic, it is better to start with the organic and move towards a concept of technology. Except that the concept of the organic doesn't lead to a concept of technology, not as we would explore it. The center of gravity is wrong. It's like saying that we have our thoughts so that certain processors can generate a stream of ones and zeroes. It's backwards enough that you won't find the truth by looking at its mirror image."
"Ok, let me process it another way. What's the difference between a truly organic consciousness, and the least organic consciousness on the net?"
"That's very simple. One exists and the other doesn't."
"So all the... wait a minute. Are you saying that the net doesn't have consciousness?"
"Excellent. You got that one right."
"In the whole of cyberspace, how? How does the net organize and care for itself if it doesn't contain consciousness?"
"It is not exactly true to say that they do have a net, and it is not exactly true to say that they do not have a net. What net they have, began as a way to connect mind-body unities--without any cyberware, I might add."
"Then how do they jack in?"
"They 'jack in' through hardware that generates stimulation for their sensory organs, and that they can manipulate so as to put data into machines."
"How does it maintain itself?"
"It doesn't and it can't. It's maintained by mind-body unities."
"That sounds like a network designed by minds that hate technology. Is the network some kind of joke? Or at least intentionally ironic? Or designed by people who hate technology and wanted to have as anti-technological of a network as they can?"
"No; the unities who designed it, and most of those using it, want as sophisticated technological access as they can have."
"Why? Next you're going to tell me that the network is not one single network, but a hodge podge of other things that have been retraoctively reinterpreted as network technology and pressed into service."
"That's also true. But the reason I was mentioning this is that the network is shaped by the shadow of the organic."
"So the organic is about doing things as badly as you can?"
"No."
"Does it make minds incompetent?"
"No. Ployon, remember the last time you made a robot body for a race--and won. How well would that body have done if you tried to make it work as a factory?"
"Atrocious, because it was optimized for--are you saying that the designers were trying to optimize the network as something other than a network?"
"No; I'm saying that the organic was so deep in them that unities who could not care less for the organic, and were trying to think purely in terms of technology, still created with a thick organic accent."
"So this was their best attempt at letting minds disappear into cyberspace?"
"At least originally, no, although that is becoming true. The network was part of what they would consider 'space-conquering tools.' Meaning, although not all of them thought in these terms, tools that would destroy the reality of place for them. The term 'space-conquering tools' was more apt than they realized, at least more apt than they realized consciously; one recalls their saying, 'You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.'"
"What does 'eternity' mean?"
"I really don't want to get into that now. Superficially it means that there is something else that relativizes time, but if you look at it closely, you will see that it can't mean that we should escape time. The space-conquering tools in a very real sense conquered space, by making it less real. Before space-conquering tools, if you wanted to communicate with another unity, you had to somehow reach that unity's body. The position in space of that body, and therefore the body and space, were something you could not escape. Which is to say that the body and space were real--much more real than something you could look up. And to conquer space ultimately meant to destroy some of its reality."
"But the way they did this betrays that something is real to them. Even if you could even forget that other minds were attached to bodies, the space-conquering tools bear a heavy imprint from something outside of the most internally consistent way to conquer space. Even as the organic is disintegrating, it marks the way in which unities flee the organic."
"So the network was driving the organic away, at least partly."
"It would be more accurate to say that the disintegration of the organic helped create the network. There is feedback, but you've got the arrow of causality pointing the wrong way."
"Can you tell me a story?"
"Hmm... Remember the racer I mentioned earlier?"
"The mind-body unity who runs multiple races?"
"Indeed. Its favorite story runs like this--and I'll leave in the technical language. A hungry fox saw some plump, juicy green grapes hanging from a high cable. He tried to jump and eat them, and when he realized they were out of reach, he said, 'They were probably sour anyway!'"
"What's a grape?"
"Let me answer roughly as it would. A grape is a nutritional bribe to an organism to carry away its seed. It's a strategic reproductive organ."
"What does 'green' mean? I know what green electromagnetic radiation is, but why is that word being applied to a reproductive organ?"
"Some objects absorb most of a spectrum of what they call light, but emit a high proportion of light at that wavelength--"
"--which, I'm sure, is taken up by their cameras and converted to information in their consciousness. But why would such a trivial observation be included?"
"That is the mechanism by which green is delivered, but not the nature of what green is. And I don't know how to explain it, beyond saying that mechanically unities experience something from 'green' objects they don't experience from anything else. It's like a dimension, and there is something real to them I can't explain."
"What is a fox? Is 'fox' their word for a mind-body unity?"
"A fox is an organism that can move, but it is not considered a mind-body unity."
"Let me guess at 'hungry'. The fox needed nutrients, and the grapes would have given them."
"The grapes would have been indigestible to the fox's physiology, but you've got the right idea."
"What separates a fox from a mind-body unity? They both seem awfully similar--they have bodily needs, and they can both talk. And, for that matter, the grape organism was employing a reproductive strategy. Does 'organic' mean that all organisms are recognized as mind-body unities?"
"Oh, I should have explained that. The story doesn't work that way; most unities believe there is a big difference between killing a unity and killing most other organisms; many would kill a moving organism to be able to eat its body, and for that matter many would kill a fox and waste the food. A good many unities, and certainly this one, believes there is a vast difference between unities and other organisms. They can be quite organic while killing organisms for food. Being organic isn't really an issue of treating other organisms just like mind-body unities."
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