Sensor range

Anyone who's never visited Riskail should take a good look, for descriptions of a Truly Weird World. Sci-fi fans could try these recent posts on a transhuman type and various planets, while fantasy fans might find more in a new take on wizards or a dozen cults. The blog always inspires me. I am going somewhere with this, somewhere in the clouds.

In the last day or so I've visited Ghost Hunting Theories for the first time, and read this post at The Digital Cuttlefish. Things started happening in my mind.

How can we reconcile ghosts with hard sci-fi, or even high fantasy? How does the soul fit into deep physics? What remains of us in the world when measurable life signs end?

I will now speculate on these ideas, but in the far-out spirit of Riskail, as if getting ready to write something of that calibre. Sit tight.

If we say ghosts and / or the soul 'exist', we presumably mean in this universe, which is to say they are accessible, i.e. that we can reach and measure them as phenomena. This sets up all kinds of questions. Where does the soul stuff go? Does it drift off away from life, away from warmth of stars, and pool in the dark interstellar spaces? What other soul stuffs does it mix with, of what other worlds and species? Does it return to us? Is it linked with dark matter, dark energy or dark fluid? 'Dark' seems the wrong word. This is light, even optimistic stuff. Bear with me here.

Maybe this is too easy an explanation, too pulp? What if the soul stuff - assuming it exists - never leaves? What if Spinoza is the one to guide us, and that nature is in fact one and unitary, and all is a part of it, spirit too? This is something I've mentioned before, here, re aliens. (How simple aliens seem now.) After all, our atoms come from the deaths of stars and return to nature, and enter the many cycles of the Earth, and maybe cycles beyond it. Reincarnation fits this worldview too. But what about the Warp? Do zombies fit? That's asking too much. Bear with me just a little longer.

Where would this leave artificial intelligence, minds uploaded to computer and our legacies to the world, our place in the historical record? What of those more powerful tools I suggest at The Digital Cuttlefish? Is the infrastructure of the accessible universe really an infostructure? After all, data uploaded to a computer is always a copy, and information exchanged in any way is mediated by language. Language is shared, democratic, constructed, not necessarily intended for any single experience of any single sentient. Language changes information by hindering or preventing the entry of the more irregular pieces, although when exchange is taking place, the potential for clarifying is higher. So experience is the purest form of accessible information?

Have you followed all the links? Good, then I propose the following information cycle, based only on the ponderings here. Maybe you can improve it?

Level 4 Cultural - information drawn from records and media
Level 3 Stored - information located in non-experiencing systems
Level 2 Mediated - information in transit between an experiential system and another
Level 1 Experiential - information experienced by an experiencing system

We could also add a level zero, but I'm not convinced the case is so strong:

Level 0 Universal - information as it is presented for experience

Perhaps the levels go lower even? We might be able to jump zero.

Level -1 and below Who knows?

This clearly places sentience above sapience, and would have all kinds of implications - how we deal with other animals for example. It downgrades culture and shared knowledge too, and places the keys to the universe firmly in the hands of the individual, doing his or her best to interact with others. Culture and knowledge do remain necessary of course, as a key chain, to help us remember where we put those keys.

Also, with experience in our cycle, we need a way to measure it. Assuming a tool can be found to do this, beyond the crude binary numeral coding systems we use today, and perhaps related to qualia, I propose the cimelium, plural cimelia. Cimelium is a Greek word which passed through Latin and means 'treasure'. The abbreviation could be ci.

Phew. How's that for an experience?

And how's that for a little pre-Riskail, or Riskail-lite? If NetherWerks is reading, have I got what it takes? Or do I flunk? Too down-to-earth maybe. Could be. On the trusty Angry Lurker “What?” scale, I'd say this post is at least what factor six or seven, and might be pushing eight or nine. It's just that Riskail is transwarp, and way ahead of us all. Then again, the Gigacrawler only just got going...

What factor six plus also suggests responses may go way off topic. But that's okay. Get it all out.
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