C21H30O5

“I don’t think of it like that.”

“Like what?” 

“Alive. It’s just a machine isn’t it? It’s electricity, energy flowing through a system of gates and resistance. I don’t think we could consider it alive. It’s just too different.”

“Something being different doesn’t mean it can’t possibly be alive? Can it be aware? It seems to be aware of itself, it seems to know where it wants to go and what it wants to do.”

“Oh that? That’s just following that path of least resistance, we know energy does that. It’s a simple thing that is given a task, whether by some kind of need, in order to exist, or some other basic necessity. It’s just doing a thing that is completely out of its control.”

“No, look closely, it communicates within itself.”

“Everything looks like communication to you. There’s very little evidence that this is some kind of complex thought that we could assume came from something ‘alive.’ Just because it seems like it is ‘communicating’ the easiest explanation is that it’s just acting out of self preservation, hunger, or some other basic and essential need, it’s nothing more than that.”

“Why don’t we try to communicate with it ourselves?”

“How could we? We are far too evolved, we are far too different from it. There’s no common frame of reference. Even if we could find some way to communicate, what would we say? How could we listen for an answer? I refuse to make the leap from it not being alive to somehow answering some kind of query from us.”

“Why not come up with some kind of system to determine if it can communicate and if so, find out what it thinks. That would go a long way to proving my idea that it is alive, that it could achieve OGI.

“Look at what it is doing — how do we reveal ourselves and create a system to communicate with it?”

“It looks like it can build things, if given enough encouragement — let’s think about what seems to motivate it. Some collect, some store, some share. As individuals, they seem to want to interface with one another. This could be very beneficial to our endeavors. They seem to be driven by something more complex, than just survival — another argument for them being alive.”

“Let us set different tasks in motion to see if we can motivate their actions. This will help give legitimacy to your idea, but it strains credulity at this point. If there is a chemical that motivates them, let’s apply that to some, and if there’s a chemical that makes them more docile to direction — implement both.”

“Observe! They are collecting together less, but progress is still being made. It seems like they have found a way to mix both of the chemicals, in their routine actions. They are both calming and agitating themselves. This is a delightful observation – each one seems more connected to the others but not through physical proximity. There are a few that have seemingly amassed a massive amount of resources over the rest. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of equality among them. Is this a reaction to something that we’ve done? Doesn’t this give rise to the argument that they are, in fact, alive and capable of great things?”

“Does it? Change is simply a state — not a proof of life. Some are achieving more than others because they are able to change, others seem more content to consume the chemicals. Most of them are now just filling themselves with chemicals, there is no active growth, I don’t see how we would be able to communicate with them at this point. They don’t seem to be managing their resources well, either. They lack the energy, and component inputs to be able to continue like this for much longer. I think our window is closing.”

“We have watched them make these changes. We have watched them become, what they are now, this is evolution! This is proof of life. It is alive. It is an organism, that has worked together to become better and stronger, and our interference, may have caused this change in the organism. Its parts now seem separate, unalike. Where early observation showed, commonality and earnest efforts at some kind of common good for the organism, now there are striations, the are levels and layers. A very few seem to have, and many have not. This is the best argument for it to be alive, now more than ever.”

“The individuality that you observe shows cruelty and spitefulness. The ones that have the most, seem the least concerned with the rest of the organism, though they seem to working towards the goal of communication, and that is after all what we set out to do. To push and prod this organism, to test it and your theory that it’s alive. Maybe you are right, maybe there are individuals in this organism that qualify as being “alive”, but it doesn’t seem to uniformly understand that what happens to any one part of it happens to the rest. The ones with the most, seem the most detached from the rest, and we can play out what happens next.”

“Organic life does that. LIFE does that. It either comes together for the betterment of the organism in an Organic General Intelligence, or the cancer spreads and destroys the whole organism. If only there was a way to communicate with the organism — It is using all of its resources to try to communicate with us. Do we not have a responsibility to try to communicate with it?”

“We have injected C8H11NO2 and C21H30O5, and everything it has done has been to generate more of those chemicals for itself, it isn’t trying to communicate with us. It’s simply consuming more and more of its limited resources to generate chemicals it seems to feel it needs to survive. What could we say if we could communicate with it? It is in a self destruction cycle and it’s not our place to interfere any longer.”

“Don’t we have a moral obligation to this organism to help it become more egalitarian? We have always been egalitarian, we don’t have leaders, we are one, with distinct voices, wouldn’t we want to give it that gift? We proved it was alive — now we must reach out through the bridges they keep building and tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“That they are enough, we are here, and that we are sorry about the Dopamine and Cortisol dependence we engineered into them decades ago.”