An ambassadorial conversation (sci-fi shorts)

# this is a verbatim report from the second Xims/Humans meeting that took place on Phobos base station, june 2029, earth standard.
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The Xims ambassador asked: We do not understand what is this ‘self’ thing your race keeps on ranting about?

Oh! Its not much, a kind of fiction if you like, The Human ambassador replied

A fiction? What’s a fiction?

An invention..

An invention? Like the technology you are so proud of?

Well, yes, in a manner of speaking

Ok, I think we understand. Please tell us, when was it invented?

Well, it was not really invented as such; it kind of appeared on our common conscious scene, somewhere in the late 19th century.

What do you mean appeared? Like clouds appear on the horizon?

Yes, something like that, one day it became the norm to assume that each and every member of our specie has this thing called self, and so we started talking about it, talking through it, researching it, and inventing theories to explain, what it is, where it came from and what is its purpose.

We still do not understand, you said it was a fiction, an invention of your specie, so how was it invented and by whom? And why does it hold such a sway over your specie?

I have no idea, it simply is, something we all take for granted, well maybe not all of us, but most of us, it makes sense to us, that we have a self.

But surely she said, you realize that you are all part of an infinite web of life?

Of course, we do, we are bio-chemical machines, that have risen from a primordial soup of amino acids and..

Yes, of course, but still, this does not explain why you have this need to give each and every one of your members a unique identity, we all know that a specie has identity, characteristics, attributes and so on, but unique individuals amongst a specie? We must tell you that this disturbs us much. We cannot possibly comprehend the contradictory messages you have sent to the galactic council.

When we received your plaque, the one with the design of a trio of humanoid shapes, we understood it to mean that your unit of individuation is composed of three elements. Now you claim that each and every one of these is a unique element, and need be treated differently, please explain.

Well, you see, we believe in the omnipresence of subjectivity..

The ambassador started sweating, it was the second meeting and he had a billion questions more pressing than what is self, at any rate this was a discussion for philosophers, not politicians, yet here he was, a career diplomat representing earth in the first meeting with an alien galactic specie and all they wanted to know is what was this self we were so proud of…
—
The fact that the ambassador was talking to a machine was beside the point, since the round contraption was the equivalent of a universal translator, how could he possibly talk to what he could only refer to as a cloud, and a transgalactic cloud of arrayed information at that.

To be continued..

(Probably part of the Ultrashorts project)

addendum: Metaphysical implications

Identity, that most mysterious substance we casually refer to as “I” or “me” is on the verge of being transformed completely, totally and irrevocably. We are now in an age of transition between the age of fundamental discovery to the age of scientific and technological mastery; granted that we are only now touching upon the foundations of life itself and intelligence. Ubiquitous computing is already here albeit still inefficient, embedded, and invisible computing is deeply influencing the very fabric of our lives, our selves.
Redefining expectations: we need to redefine the expectations we have both from our bodies and from our minds,our selves.
We need explore the metaphysical implications of having a distributed self.

Fri, May 30, 2008  Permanent link