DESTINATION VOID
Surprise me Holy Void
A trip like many others headed to the home of matriarchal lineage. as a people we came out of the red mountains. The mountains themselves were fairly nice, feed by springs of thermal waters there was a comparatively large amount of vegetation than the surround. my people supposedly had made their dwellings in the cliff faces or in earthen adobe structures, that's what our family says, but we had long left those springs of our foremothers, crossed the barren deserts in all directions and joined 'civilized society' how accurate the telling of our history is is anyone's guess. census data shows sheep herders and farmers all near that same location, but in the context that the earliest of this data would be after mass migrations brought many others to near that same location, and before that rape and massacre mixed peoples and their gene pools. there is really is no way to know. but taking the story at face value, these people would have been a highly privileged people in the region. clear and easy access to water in a naturally defensible location. relative safety from the harshest the sun could manage. If there were people in the plains i can imagine their anger at being kept from this comparative eden. But this wasn't the destination of the trip. some other desert, and some other oasis within it. one made of wood, steel, and only aesthetic adobe claddings. for the vibes. the estate was large. and there was a party. I spent some time gathering the dishes, placing large bowls and platters of food. There was music blasting from speakers and it was always something different. On previous trips the music had been honkytonk, or unobtrusive rock. Things which had saturated the culture so completely as to be indistinguishable from the air it was transmitted by. This time however it was playing a different tune. mili, girls dead monster, supercell. i asked someone i was familiar with as we set out some casseroles what was playing the music, who was picking it? they answered that our maternal family system Theros played randomly things from it's database. family members with access to the machine could add things they liked. Then this selection of music was the result of someone with access adding it. It certainly wasn't me, but I felt like perhaps The random selection theros made was approval of me which it had never before given. I knew that some family members had access to Theros off network, but I only ever had access while I was in network with a guest account. I didn't even know where Theros actually was and had never seen it. But it did provide a lot of services in the family network. At least if it was accessible. I was somewhat miffed by the realization of that fact. But it's not like I had been outright denied access, it's just that I had never made an effort to find out who managed it and ask for any further access, or hell a specific account. I had my own grid, and it served me well, even when I was off grid, and that usually sufficed me. But I couldn't shake the idea that i should acquire some information about the theros network. I pulled out one of my devices and used it to ping a public service on my grid from inside theros' network. This would give me an IP in the logs on my grid which i might be able to use as starting point if i decided to go through with it. Having finished setting things up and not being a party person myself i tended away from the more busy sections and made my way toward the multi car garage where I had placed my backpack with personal effects on the side of a sofa which sat between the wall and car with room to spare long ways. on the way someone came up to me. We had talked before. Apparently we could talk on the same wavelength and she being much younger than me chose me to engage with above the likes of my other family members. she opened with some line about freewill. "so consciousness is just a haphazard emergent behaviour of the chaotic system of our brains, so maybe we just imagine that we have free will." I probably would agree with this notion. however this wasn't the game. most people in her life let her say what she said and because they either couldn't dance, or wouldn't for fear of ego injury to her. What she came to me for was the sparring partner. someone who /could/ challenge her notions in some way. So I picked up what she put down and smacked her with it. boldly and almost mockingly, in a gesture most of the family would consider somewhat out of character for me, who tended to act demure and placating "don't give me that crap. That would have no survival value and wouldn't have arisen in nature. Conscious creatures would have died out long ago" not quite a checkmate, but it was an attack of her premises from a direction she likely wouldn't have anticipated. she smirked while she thought about it and joined me at the sofa. "where'd you pick that one up?" she asked finally "Oh, actually from Destination:Void. The chaplain-psychiatrist makes this argument. It has some holes in it of course. Evolution doesn't select for things with advantage so much as it selects against things that are detrimental." "so consciousness could pop up as some kind of regulation process that invents the illusion of freewill and it's simply not culled despite that not being true because there's no great enough problem it creates..." "yeah. then there's the basic assumption that consciousness is something that arose at all, and not somehow more fundamental."
tags:
chaos cult dreams money philosophy safe