From the author
I composed this sketch some time ago as a kind of creative rethinking of the story that I was telling , as well as its possible further development with some free fantastic assumptions. Of course, all this is only partly inspired by the author’s real experience, making it possible to try to answer the question: “What if?..”
There is also some plot connection to my literary series “Notes of a Nerd,” individual short stories from which I periodically post on liters (however, familiarity with them is not at all necessary, since their scientific basis is very, very shaky, which may not be to everyone’s taste here ).
The following text is given without changes.
Thanks from the author
Dedicated to the memory of two Stephens with whom I was lucky enough to live during the same period of history and who were able to revolutionize my experience of using electronic devices:
To Stephen Cole Kleene (Klaney) (1909 - 1994)
Steven Paul (Steve) Jobs (1955 - 2011)
I also express my respect to all the authors and participants of the series "Black mirror".
A special tribute to my colleagues – in library work and in general. Well, I am also immensely grateful to those for whom the Tambov wolf is a colleague: without you, this work certainly would not have appeared!..
Thanks for the support also to all those who warmly received the first “Notes of a Nerd.”
A few introductory words for readers
This is not a sequel to the main storyline of Notes of a Nerd, or even a prequel. The specific time of action does not play a role here at all. However, the action itself as such is also almost not observed, and the connection to the story about Nastenka itself is moderately arbitrary (although I hope you will like this story arc). Nevertheless, it is strongly recommended to read to everyone who has already fallen in love with “Notes”, as well as to those who prefer a more “solid” genre basis to various overly fairy-tale plots. If at times it may seem difficult for someone to digest all this, then believe me: in the process of writing I myself felt even worse.
*
Everything is not what it seems... Even I seemed to myself yesterday to be different from who I seem to be now and who I will seem to be tomorrow.
This is exactly what my VKontakte status was (or is it correct – on VKontakte?) up to this day. From now on, I will no longer seem like anyone, nor... just I will not.
Well, that is, I myself have long suspected that I simply do not exist, and everything that happens to me is just a dream... for someone else.
I’m ready to prove this to everyone :) Where is the evidence of my activities on the Internet? There are almost none. All my contacts with the outside world are also very limited. Meeting me by chance is generally a rare piece of luck (someone was very lucky recently). Agree: a completely typical case for someone’s bad dream...
Or maybe there has been no life on Earth for a long time, and I may be the only surviving fragment from a snapshot of the collective mind, once sent into the global information field by a desperate, dying humanity?..
The only thing that is encouraging in this scenario is that since only a cast of the mind of such a complete loser as I was really destined to survive, it means that humanity was indeed doomed from the very beginning, by virtue of the very fact of its existence... Because my own life - or those pathetic attempts at it that befell me - will soon come to an end.
I decided this for myself - quite consciously and unshakably. Why continue to multiply suffering in the world—whether yours or someone else’s? At the same time, I have always been categorically against suicide in any form. But he won't be. Tonight I am simply initiating the procedure of erasing myself from reality - final and irrevocable. Agree, this will be the best and extremely elegant proof of the truth of my theory (that is... a hypothesis, of course! I always forget that the theories are those of Einstein or Darwin, and mine still has to grow and grow to such a loud epithet).
In addition to the fact that from time immemorial experimenters, in the interests of science and trying to confirm their own rightness, carried out experiments on themselves personally, no one will suffer from this action for another reason: my disappearance will be practically unnoticeable to everyone - simply due to the fact that, As I mentioned, few people even noticed me before. Therefore, my absence will remain just as unnoticed... Although, strictly speaking, since I will be erased not only from space, but also from time, the last statement will be true for any of the people. However, precisely in my case, in view of the above-mentioned reasons, even the changed reality - as a result of my removal from it - will differ so slightly from the original that truly these changes can be neglected for the good of science.
Hah, you ask, what does it matter to me if humanity finds out about my discovery, if I myself no longer exist and, therefore, I cannot rejoice at it myself? And will the evidence of the invention itself remain if all mention of the inventor is actually erased from reality? Well, I took care of that too. It’s just that at the right moment the trigger of the process will work, and I will eliminate myself, but my brainchild, in theory, should not be affected by this due to the fan-like nature of this process. As for myself, to be honest, I have always been little interested in the question of my own future existence in purely everyday terms, such as whether I will get a wife, whether I will subsequently have children, or whether I will acquire any other living creatures. What does all this mean on a global scale?.. I sincerely feel sorry for all those idiots who believe that their own genetic code for some reason is so important for the Universe that it must certainly be preserved and passed on to future humanity. Are any of you ready to agree with the indisputable fact that your own unique and inimitable personality is just one of the vast number of endlessly sorted options on the universal quantum computer, a random pattern on the web of reality? That reality, whose only goal is precisely the endless selection of options in order to find the best for its further complication and development.
Einstein, it seems, once remarked that God does not play dice. Of course, he doesn’t play - he just goes through the options. And this is not God in the usual sense, but only a finite machine for enumerating all possibilities. Turing Machine, if you like, is perhaps the most primitive device imaginable, and yet theoretically possesses truly limitless possibilities. True, these possibilities themselves are embedded exclusively in the program according to which the machine operates and the machine itself, as they say, has no idea about the true purpose and meaning of which... So with our universal machine, in general, everything is the same - with the only difference that she initially works according to a self-complicating program, but at the same time still has no idea of its true essence.
And what is it, this essence? In constant improvement and development of the world? But all this is just a consequence of a permanently programmed tendency towards self-complication - nothing more. By the way, when applied to people this can be shown very clearly. Some of us think that he is so extraordinary and talented that just a little more and he will do something so outstanding that will forever glorify his name and change the world for the better.
Frankly, I myself thought so before - I tried to record various so-called “brilliant” insights of my interaural ganglion in the hope that they, too, would remain for centuries... I considered this to be the true meaning of my otherwise completely worthless existence. I complained that all kinds of cloud storage entered my life so late, as a result of which I would never return some of my early attempts at creativity, which disappeared forever in the abyss of timelessness along with the information carriers where all this was placed. How stupid it looks now, when I finally saw the true essence of things! a “cloud” of data that no one can decipher without me anyway - so what?.. The Universe will just make the necessary correction, and after some time there will be another suitable option for further self-complication! But all these so-called “geniuses” are sincerely confident that everything that they were able to dream up there is an exceptional kind of their own merit! Yes Yes…
So it doesn’t matter at all whether my venture today will be crowned with success or not. It’s just that, after all, I’m still interested in what will come of it! I remember that I once saw in exactly the same way the only goal of my future life was to wait for the new “Star Wars” - after all, it’s interesting what will come of it... It all ended with the fact that, having finished watching the Eighth Episode, I left the cinema with gloomy thoughts, which boiled down mainly to how it was a pity that I hadn’t died a long time ago, and now, no matter how much I wanted, I couldn’t unsee it.
So I’ve had enough of all these sentiments, I certainly won’t wait for new “Avatars”, and what else Disney in general and Marvel in particular have in store for us is now also parallel to me!.. Let Disney always be better for me be associated with memories from childhood - Mickey Mouse, various Ducks and McDucks, a fairy in a green dress from a cartoon screensaver, about which I clearly remember how she flew over a drawn castle and put a bold dot over the “i” in the title with her magic wand - and Now everyone is trying to convince us that the latter fact never took place in reality, citing recordings of Disney screensavers available on YouTube as evidence. Well, apparently, I’m still not the first one to play around with changing reality here...
True, this time the changes will not affect some stupid fairy, but a very specific person, who herself will never know how this or that story will end (underline as appropriate), what the new stories will be about, how will the previous ones be rewritten now?. But, by and large, all this is completely irrelevant. After all, there has always been and will always be only a very limited number of possible plots, and everything else is nothing more than endless combinations of them. That is why it seems to us so often that we have already seen and read all this somewhere before, even if in fact this is not the case... (And, at least in the case of the new “Star Wars”, all this is actually true so - you don’t even have to doubt it.) The same is with our life in general - all these numerous so-called “déjà vu” are exactly the same consequences of a strictly limited number of scenarios played out by life. Played according to a soulless program on a universal machine, as detached and indifferent to everyone as the people around me are to me...
*{2}
How did I come to live like this?, you ask? Well, we'll have to start from afar.
The fact is that, due to circumstances, over the past few years I have been forced to parse electronic copies of paper questionnaires filled out by clients and enter their results into the appropriate databases. The work is initially painstaking and thankless, which could drive anyone crazy if not for one circumstance...
At some point, the process of studying repeating, typical parts in various sample questionnaires inspired me to try to create a system capable of independently extracting user data from this mishmash of various symbols. Well, not quite automatically, but anything is better than manually parsing and typing data, you must admit.
The first such program, authored by me, was still exclusively home-written and homemade - and, to be honest, I still don’t really undertake to explain why in most cases it still coped with its task. Then I accidentally found one that suited me on the vast expanses of the Internet. framework - well, that is, a library of subroutines for performing all the necessary operations. The use of this framework was based on regular expressions that had long been familiar to all computer scientists, which made it possible to create templates based on them and, finally, ready-made definitions of the required text extracts, that is, those areas of this very text from which it was necessary to extract values for the already described patterns, replacing them with specific text.
How can I put this more simply? Well, many of you have probably seen so-called report log files that look something like this:
127.0.0.1 — — [10/Jun/2009:10:00:00 +0000] “GET /example.html HTTP/1.1” 200 — “» “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
Even an inexperienced user may be quite obvious that at some network address (in this case, local) at a certain point in time, an external resource is accessed in order to extract some kind of data using a certain type of browser and operating system. Right? And similar lines, from which a clear structure can be identified that can be decomposed (divided into separate semantic structures), can be repeated in the report file as many times as desired. A technician studies them, extracts useful information and, based on it, draws the necessary conclusions about the operation of specific programs, systems, user actions, etc.
Actually, in nature there is an immense variety of means for syntactic decomposition of such structures. By customizing one of these frameworks to suit my needs, I only slightly expanded its functionality for myself in order to allow me to select such ordered structures from arbitrary text an unlimited number of times. And the spaces between them can be filled with any symbols, which from the program’s point of view are simply garbage.
By the way, I was still surprised to myself why such a simple idea had been used so little before - well, at least I couldn’t find any mention of this kind of activity, and there were almost no reviews on my development at all. However, I came across some strange guy who sent me an email with thanks and assured me that from now on everyone in his library can now sort out the tables of contents of books with the help of such nonsense. To myself, I was only surprised by such an unusual scope of application of my method, and began to think further about what else could be done with this.
The new idea already seemed something crazier - I began to develop a tool that would already be able to independently identify all ordered and repeating structures in free text. Here, of course, there was no ready-made standard solution to the problem; we had to connect neural networks, which in general terms represent approximate models of the work of our own brain. Well, we are all still a long way from human brains in all the diversity of their qualities, of course - at best, at the moment we can similarly imitate the meaningful activity of some cockroach, nothing more. But, as they say, thanks for that.
And then, in the process of work, a new guess suddenly dawned on me: what if the development of our life itself followed approximately the same scenario? Well, that is, initially there was approximately the same program that was able to isolate meaningful sequences of the DNA code of future primitive organisms from the primary chaotic set of symbols, and then organize them into the necessary structures? Then, in the process of complicating its own functionality, this program organized the source code into increasingly organized structures until ... I appeared, able to clearly explain how it all works.
*{3}
And it was here that the true meaning inherent in the idea of the so-called “regular expressions” (that’s what we call these regular expressions in our jargon) finally dawned on me.
If you have never dealt with such structures before, then perhaps there is no need to start. They look too heavy and unreadable for the uninitiated to extract any useful information from them.
Although, perhaps, I’ll still tell you about one of the most important features. This is the so-called Kleene star (*), placed after the sequence of any characters we need and means that this sequence can be present in our text in this specific place any arbitrary number of times, including none. A brilliant thing, essentially opening the way to the self-generation of repeating structures. It was named after the famous American mathematician and logician Stephen Kleene, who, in fact, invented these regular numbers themselves.
And what’s even more interesting is the fact that this Kleene (who, by the way, is still Kleine, if we’re really being picky, but it’s become customary in Russia to call him since the first translated editions of his scientific works) worked at about the same time and on the same problems that Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel had. If you have not yet heard about the last two comrades, then I hasten to tell you that the first of them was remembered not only for deciphering the German codes of the Enigma encryption machine during the Second World War (by the way, this story itself not so long ago even found its own film adaptation with Cumberbatch in leading role), but also the most speculative concept of a computing machine. As for Gödel, he was noted for equally impressive theorems on incompleteness, the essence of which in ordinary language could be expressed as the idea of the fundamental impossibility of formalizing arbitrary things through any logically consistent systems. That is, there are things that mathematicians cannot fully formulate in their own language, and I could not write a corresponding program for them, and this has been strictly proven.
In general, it is obvious that the last two comrades were working on things at such a high level of abstraction that it is not surprising that both of them went a little crazy towards the end of their lives. Turing generally accepted the poison that filled the apple he had bitten off, unable to cope with the fact of public rejection of his own homosexuality. And Gödel, although he lived until the end of the 70s of the last century, began to detect the first signs of mental disorders back in the 30s.
As for Kleene, he was luckier - this cup seems to have passed. Kleene's own theorem also has an impressive formulation: “Every regular set is an automaton language.” Which, translated into everyday language, can be roughly expressed as the fact that any ordered structure can be divided into individual elements through calculations using regular expressions. Actually, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately.
Of course, in all this construction there is some kind of huge contradiction. What is there, one big gaping hole, I would say. After all, on the one hand, somehow life could have arisen mathematically and just as consistently self-ordered into more and more complex structures, but on the other hand, what? On the other hand, it is obvious that in the process of this, things and phenomena somehow arose that simply do not lend themselves to theoretical formalization due to their very nature. Does this mean that there is still some force acting from the outside? No, here I don’t even want to think and try to build some stupid theories. I personally had enough of the existing consequences of the work already done.
It’s enough, perhaps, that, being in a constant process of thinking about such things, I didn’t even notice how I lost my completely official and even slightly paid job. The fact is that over time, my mind was occupied less and less by routine fiddling with documents, gradually being more and more displaced by constant immersion in theoretical abstractions. And no one cared that with my previous developments I had already increased productivity at his home enterprise by an order of magnitude, and all the processes that somehow required human participation, I carried out “automatically” and in a matter of minutes! No, someone there was incredibly worried about the fact of what specifically I’m working here for the entire remaining time allotted for work... In short, arguing with bureaucrats and opportunists is always more expensive for yourself, it’s easier to say goodbye to everyone at once.
But then, left to my own devices, I began to think about completely wild things, namely, about personal omnipotence.
Remember how once upon a time in Tolkien Sauron managed to place the entire essence of his own power in a single ring, thanks to which he remained in principle invulnerable for quite a long time even after his own physical disincarnation? Yes, he managed to forge the One Ring for himself, and then he himself hunted for it. Well, let me now have an equally powerful artifact - my own Framework of Omnipotence! People will use it without even suspecting that somewhere deep down there are my own bookmarks, thanks to which I can now control their actions, even if I disappear forever from the physical plane of existence!..
Well, my first experience in this regard was a software package left as a parting gift to the management of my former company, which carried out the lion’s share of my previous work responsibilities. Oh, if only they knew what a time bomb I had in store for them in this framework... Well, now I’m ready to repeat the same thing, but on a much more global scale and with far-reaching consequences for everyone.
Frankly, I was very tense and excited on the day on which the test launch of the car was scheduled. I was tormented by conflicting thoughts. On the one hand, I was afraid that something would happen to me and I would never be able to complete the experiment. On the other hand, I was aware of its possible consequences for all humanity, and was almost ready to give up everything precisely for this reason.
And, as luck would have it, it was on this day that a kind of memorable meeting took place. On the way home, my gaze suddenly caught in the crowd an unfamiliar girl in a white and unseasonably light dress, and for some reason it suddenly seemed to me that it was her I had been waiting for all my life. Some mischievous lights were constantly dancing in her eyes, but at the same time they seemed to reflect an incomprehensible imprint of a great mind, which, as it seemed, did not at all fit in with the general feeling of youth produced by this obviously strange female individual in all respects. And for some reason, the lack of stockings did not bother her at all, even at such an early time of spring, when winter had by no means completely given up its post to her.
She is already in a familiar way - familiar to me! - she almost fluttered past, deigning me with her gaze only for a moment and - lo and behold! — was it just me, or did it really look like a smile? And then something came over me, so that I suddenly, without expecting it, in a manner completely unusual for myself, suddenly and clearly said after her the cherished:
"Hello!"
And she actually turned around and answered:
- Well, you’re just like a March cat! Probably born in March? Well hello! Let me take a better look at you. Wait a minute, who will you be according to our horoscope? Don’t say you’re not a fish, otherwise it’ll be a pity...
“I’m afraid to upset you, but it seems you didn’t guess right.” In fact, I am an Aquarius, I celebrated my birthday a couple of weeks ago. A small error, but still not included in your classification. By the way, what data is this based on...
“Well, then I’m really sorry.” I’m still looking for a fish for myself, and Aquarius is just in its infancy. But don't worry, your time will come! By the way, I have no doubt that everything you do is very, very important. Believe me, I myself have long wanted to know who I am and where I come from...
- What?! How do you know that I...
“I’m just an accidental error in your system!” Forget about me and continue working... - here she decisively walked away, casually waving her hand at me goodbye and leaving me in a complete feeling of prostration.
“Well, it’s not fate again,” I finally thought and resolutely headed towards the house with the firm intention of passing my final test today.
*{4}
And now, having reached this place, you have every right to ask me: well, okay, you have created in your computer a rather convincing, as it seems to you, model of reality, with the help of which you can even calculate and visualize something. But even if this is so, how were you going to change something in the surrounding reality with its help? After all, your entire computer system is nothing more than an isolated environment, a sandbox, "virtual machine"...
Oh really? And you think that I did not take care in advance about the very possibility of creating a kind of loopholes to the outside world? Let's say I run my model, and absolutely nothing will change. It is not I who will be erased, but only a certain digital model of mine (or, rather, even a prototype of such a model), and only on my machine. Okay, but what if now everyone launches the same thing at home?.. Won’t this become some kind of digital implementation of such a well-known concept as egregor? Well, that is, from the point of view of the external environment, calculating the most likely outcome - suddenly, out of the blue, here and now, thousands of in-game bots suddenly wished for just such a development of events. Shouldn't the system itself adjust?
If not, then no... Therefore, I will stay alive to be glad that I was wrong.
Why will I be happy? Well, it’s just that in this whole world order I initially see some kind of doom. Judge for yourself: we are doomed not only to eternally scurry around in this jar, like Colorado beetles caught by who knows who on his own personal plot, and hopelessly trying to find a way out of it until we each die in our own time.
Moreover, for some reason this desire to penetrate the barrier is inherent in the human race. Although, it would seem, any environment hostile to us, according to the logic of things, should inevitably seem destructive to us. However, we always stubbornly look for loopholes for ourselves where, it would seem, we are reliably hidden by the system itself from all sorts of harmful influences.
Isn’t that right?.. Tell me: have you ever, for example, caught a virus on your computer through a browser? Theoretically, it is also like an isolated environment for your operating system, however... Who will stop you from opening any file downloaded externally from the Internet, with completely unpredictable consequences for yourself? And if you don’t leave a similar loophole with external launching of all sorts of bad things from the Internet from the outside, then will you want to use such an Internet yourself? For example, although I love my iPad, I constantly catch myself thinking that with this gadget it’s difficult to get rid of the feeling of some kind of sterility, as if something is always missing... But this is only a tablet, and with a serious computer This is generally difficult to imagine.
Therefore, we ourselves create some kind of loopholes for ourselves in order to break through the protective barrier. Actually, this has been the case since the time of the Garden of Eden, when God directly said that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil grows here, but you should not pick its fruit, much less eat it, otherwise... Well, you know the rest - human curiosity led to a completely logical result.
What happened these days? First, none other than Alan Turing, an unfortunate genius from the closed "sharashka" of the war period and a homosexual rejected by society already in the post-war era, actually led us by the hand into the world of computer computing, and then he himself committed a symbolic suicidal act by biting into a poisoned apple. Then a certain Steve Jobs made this most bitten apple the logo of his company, which at such an opportune time created the first MASSIVE personal computer, and the first equally MASSIVE smartphone (that is, a computer in a phone), and the same tablet (this very notorious iPad, with which I am now typing this text). Since then, Pandora's box has finally opened.
Well, then a certain Nick Bostrom added fuel to the fire, declaring our entire world to be nothing more than a computer simulation, and popular personalities like Elon Musk in every possible way picked up and replicated this idea.
And now a unique person like me has appeared, popularly explaining to you how this very Universe can work, using ideas already known by this moment. So go ahead - you have been unambiguously given very specific instructions for transforming the world. By wisely using everything I told you about, you can move mountains! So let the computational model I described become your own Framework of Omnipotence!
Or... do you still feel some kind of inescapable taste of poison throughout my text?.. Or maybe the so clearly readable viral nature of this message will somehow warn you against trying to check its contents for yourself? After all, what is stopping you personally from IMMEDIATELY DELETE this document from all your gadgets? Is the forbidden fruit still as attractive as before?.. In fact, just stop even thinking about all this, betray me, as the author, to the well-deserved symbolic death! Until recently, you didn’t think about me at all, did you? Well, just don’t think so in the future! Erase me from your own reality!..
If only it helps, of course. But I’m afraid that the Universe will adjust again, and there will be a new madman who will no longer be as loyal to you as I am.
In general, I did everything I could and said everything I wanted. I still leave the final choice up to you. For this, as they say, that’s all...
Source: habr.com