An article by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend...

The Anthological Mind – Probing Possibilities

    [thoughts from     ~burning woman~     by Sha'Tara]
 
 
In his book, Great Sky River, Gregory Benford writes about combinations of multiple intelligences, pieces of minds, both in humans and in advanced machines, or Mechs, on worlds where humans and Machines are pitted against each other in a life and death struggle for survival and supremacy.  His name for such a combined intelligence is 'Anthology Intelligence' and I think that's quite appropriate.  I call them partials.  Why?  Well, same as Benford's understanding, I realize that they are only a part of what they once were, or if they still exist in-toto, they exist in us only in part, other parts scattered all over the Cosmos, and united with other combined intelligences.  Seems to me there is method to madness here because if each one of us is thus scattered all over, beyond our own reach, we cannot be sure-killed (mind-annihilated), and we cannot completely compromise ourselves, or give ourselves away no matter what the inducement may be.  Our security lies in our ignorance of who we are, or may be, in a particular time frame.
 
When a pseudo human evolves (at least in these worlds) it comes to the attention of the owners/controllers of this  universe, the ones we call Time Lords.  These Time Lords, unlike the ruling Mech civilizations of Benford's worlds, need to control the evolving sentience, not destroy them as pests.  They need them as slaves and so must keep them from knowing themselves, from understanding their own power within their sentience.  To do so they implant them with a soul program with which the true rulers can control their 'emanations' or thought-acts through their emotional output.  It stunts the evolving sentience by re-circulating (or recycling, if you would) the emotional emanations back into their servo-mind systems, like a self-produced drug.  Emotional beings so controlled exist on the dregs of their own emanations.  Take for example the Earthian process of 'falling in love' which some repeat many times.  When such processes result in a permanent structure called marriage, the sentients involved fall into a sort of torpor.  The powerful excitement that induced them to commit to a permanent relationship dies quickly to be followed by a life-long case of inevitable unremarkable acts.  Families are spawned from this, and each generation repeats the same patterns.  Why, though questioned by some of the greatest of Earthian minds, is this so generally accepted as if it were a normal pattern of behavior?  Simple. Programming, and carefully crafted system-design that supports the process.  Even those who divorce, or who 'fall in love' over again, fall back in the same mindless pattern.  Nothing learned.  No place else to go, see?  That's the Matrix.
 
I could say the same of organized sports.  Utterly mindless, repetitive moves inside tiny enclaves by the same people over decades, nothing changing.  Yet Earthians flock to these idiotic displays of mindlessness, spending fortunes on tickets and assorted memorabilia.  Programming based on re-circulation of emotional output.  Then you have wars, just larger venues of the same kind of sport, but where killing becomes state sanctioned and you don't get thrown out of the game for unsportsmanlike conduct.
 
Benford's Mechs are not as sophisticated as the Time Lords, although his creation called the "Mantis" comes close.  The Mantis is a super mech, and anthological intelligence whose reach is scattered all over the Mech Mind worlds.  It is impossible to kill a Mantis.  If you destroy its physical presence and all the sub-minds it scatters and hides in its complex members of rods, joints, carapace, that is only the hardware and hardwired portion of it.  It's true 'identity' is like the Earthian Internet which is an entity improved-created, joined, accessed and deciphered by computers designed to translate Internet Data to human speech, in human type words and images.  No one can kill the Internet.  It becomes a kind of God. That it reeks of disinformation does not deter people from imbibing its offerings.  It's so easy, so satisfying, to access readily made information that requires no forethought. It is just another drug.
 
Another writer to masterfully craft the concept of the 'Anthological Mind' is Dan Simmons.  In his Hyperion series, the original human-created Internet gained semi-autonomy once it created the famous Farcaster, a system of quasi-instant beaming from one world to another.  At that point, the once benign information highway evolved into a power called the Techno Core and it became an autonomous entity, operating fully apart from, and beyond, the reach of mere humans.  No one could follow its moves any longer.  It became a Mystery.  And humanity became its unwitting pawn and eventually, its complete slave. 
 
Perhaps, had Earthians understood that as a sentience it always was a pawn, saddled from conception with a pre-programmed soul and had it understood the immense power it could wield from knowledge garnered by using it's 'partials' or it's own type of 'anthological intelligence' it would have been able to see its gods for what they are and successfully confronted them, overcome them and surpassed them.  Well, so far, no matter which works one reads, which information one finds, it has not done so.  It remains dependent upon what it believes to be greater minds.  It's current spate of brain-dead, greedy, lustful and violence-driven leadership world-wide demonstrate how little it knows of true leadership and how little control it has over who gets in such positions of power. 
 
So, it would appear, there is a possible way out of the endless cycle of violence, destruction, death and re-building for Earthians.  It lies in its latent ability to tap into other minds which are integral parts of its own.  But is there a will to do so?  It begins, I think, with this simple admonition:  Believe all things, believe in nothing.  Once we taste the heady freedom that comes from relinquishing the need to believe in anything, be it God, money, power, the family, the necessity of death, the need to eat, or sleep or living another day, whatever drives us, we can then become like little children.  We can believe all things and that kind of innocence can truly upset the teetering top-heavy bureaucratic applecart of earth man's divinities and powers. Once we accept that nothing is impossible, then all becomes possible.  These possibilities  may not be physically evident according to the measures of 'what is' given us by the Time Lords and desperately clung to by religions, administrations, educational systems, sciences, philosophies, financial systems, but they are nevertheless quite real and reliable.