The View Of God

By Porthos,

So we want to bring a machine to life! For this we need to design an entity called Mind, which is nothing but a logic running continuously until the life is preserved. Or should I say, the life is preserved until this logic is running continuously.

For designing logic we have to take a design oriented view. That means we can take a view where we see the world being visualized in front of the mind, or we can take into consideration how the body of the mind interacts with this world. The first consideration will give us the inside view of the mind and in the second
consideration we have the outside view in the world where we see the body bearing that mind. Which view is accurate and correct? Or both are valid? I’m stuck at this crossroad. Let me analyze both the views further one by one and hopefully I’ll reachmind for it. Mind is the invisible and abstract part of a living body, existence of which is the very reason for the body’s life. At the end of the day, it’ll be nothing to a concrete conclusion.

First, the outside view!

In this scenario, we’ll roam around in the world. We’ll be witnessing our subject as a body. We’ll be majorly looking upon how our subject will move, speak, appear, and react to particular situations coming in its way. So we’ll be able to testify whether the interactions of our subject will be valid in this world or not. In short we’ll have an external glimpse, whether our experiment was successful or not. Pretty accurate picture! But will that be all?

Taking this view sounds very liable. But it does not put light on how the body will actually think during each interaction or action; the exact thoughts and emotions. The biggest loophole in this approach is that even if we make one body which can act, move, and behave in the way we want to, our experiment will be complete. But the problem is, lots of experiments like this have been completed in the past. A perfectly made humanoid robot is the successful end of this endeavor.

In this way, whatever the body will do, it will be justifiable from our view, not by the robot itself. Its inside will be blank machine as always. There won’t be need of emotions and thoughts. There won’t be any need of life at all.

So is the inside view important?

During the inside view scenario, we’ll be the robot or machine itself and from its own point of view, we’ll look at the world. We’ll actually design this point of view under this consideration. This will reflect on its thoughts more accurately and will justify the actions of the robot properly. In this case the machine’s life will be in complete form. It will have thoughts, emotions, and the actions will be logical in conjunction with these.

I believe this should be the most correct approach towards designing mind. But it also has some grave errors. Supposing a mind like this, we won’t need to design any world at all. In robot’s point of view, it can happen that world is just a visualization. The world will just need to contain only the part which is directly in front of the body’s viewpoint. Rest of the things doesn’t need to be there at all. Those things can be taken care by some storyboard script, where it’ll be enough to make the mind believe that the part exists. In this case, the world won’t even exist. And that would be catastrophic mistake in our experiment. If there’s no world, then where will the body of the mind live?

We can explain both the scenarios using a first person shooting game.

When we are actively playing that game, we get the inside view of the bot that is actually representing us in that virtual world. Our own mind becomes the bot’s mind and the bot becomes our avatar in that world of arena.

Whatever is on the monitor screen would be something rendered by the computer’s graphics on the fly upon the command of the game server. Rest of the arena won’t need to be rendered as only the sounds of the encounter coming from that part are enough to make us believe that the part actually is there and some fight and activities are going on there. We, while playing, will continue to believe that if we looking at arena’s part A and part B is out sight, even then the part B exists. We will continue our faith in this world’s existence until the day someone like me realizes, that it’s just a virtual game. Nothing actually exists.

On the other hand, when we take the spectator’s view, or when we are just watching it being played between bots without being the part of the game, we are taking that exterior view.

In this view, we are creating the world, but the bots which are playing will just be computer bots, designed and made to play like a real player. They will be completely blank from inside. The game will be absolutely dead with only living mind in it is actually watching it in spectator’s view, and rest are just humanoid renderings by graphics.

So if both views are flawed, then which one to take? Which one will be the vantage point in this setup? I have a solution!

What about a view that is different and detached from the above two views? A third view. On this idea, a certain question arises that is there still space for any more views? Fortunately there is! For this we’ll have to go out of the dimensions of both the scenarios. It may be perceived as not something of a view, but a space where we can apply some mechanism to synchronize the two views we’ve discussed. From this space outside the dimensions of both the views, we get a clear perspective of both the scenarios.

Now when we go to this third view, we have the control to both of our perspectives. The idea is to pipeline the actions and reactions happening in both the view worlds in such a way that ultimately both of them together start giving out a single common picture. It means whenever the mind does something through its body, that action is captured coming out of the inside view and fed to the outside view by generating a proper effects there. And whatever happens in world of outside view, it is captured and the effects are so produced in mind’s inside view that it perceives the proper changes through its body’s eyes. As all the actions and reactions are synchronously reflected in both the views, they start to emit out an illusion to their respective perceivers that both of them are in single common world. In general sense, we are creating an action pipeline between both the views and that is possible only when we are detached from both.

Let’s explain this further taking the example of our FPS game. Neither we are the bots, nor are we the spectators here. But the logic that is connecting the inputs and outputs of both. Suppose a networked session of the same is going on, where few of the gamers are playing as bots on their respective screens, and some spectators are watching the ongoing game via some big common LCD projectors. Now we take the place of the server, and our job is to take the inputs from every portal and broadcasting the effects on all the systems on the network. Because of this activity, everyone in the session will get the clear and common picture of the game, rather than each one having a different perspective in case of standalone environment. For example, if one the gamers fire a bullet at another bot, the screen of the gamer who is controlling that another bot should display a bullet coming down at him. And in the same case, the spectators should get the whole picture of one bot shooting a bullet at another bot at the same time. This activity will go on until even a single one of them is present in the session. If all of them retire, the timespace ends for both the scenarios as there is no activity coming out from anywhere and the session ends. This will give the illusion to all of them in such a way that they’d think that actually they are watching a game that is going on at a common arena.

This is the view we need. In this regard, we’ll design the mind, and we’ll also design the world for it. And then we’ll connect both in a common time dimension so that both will be justifiable to each other. If we are the creator of this world and the entities living in it, so the view will be the view of the creator itself. Rather we can say, it will be “The View of God”!