Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [45]
We are talking about data that has a kind of life of its own. We will call the sum of all this data a childhood; it's as good a unit of measurement as any other.
We'll assign a value of one childhood to our imaginary globe. This, by the way, being a conservative estimate.
Now, pull back from the globe until it's a small shape in the centre of the mind's cinema. Add a second globe next to the first, identical in every respect and also with the value of one childhood.
Add a third globe and another after that in a line from the first. Keep on adding the globes but start to curve the line in on itself so that we are left with a spiral of globes. When you reach the centre and run out of room you should have a hundred globes and a kilochildhood of data.
Rotate this spiral through ninety degrees to the horizontal and start adding the globes in three dimensions, building a second spiral outwards from the centre of the first spiral. When it reaches the circumference go down a level and repeat the process working from the outside in. Repeat this until you have a cylinder a hundred globes tall with a storage capacity of a hundred kilochildhoods. Create another hundred thousand cylinders of the same dimensions, stretch them out in a long line and then carefully wind that line up into the shape of a sphere, just like a ball of wool. This ball will have a capacity of ten million kilochildhoods or ten gigachildhoods.
The average drone mind is made up of one of these balls. It gives them a standard estimated intelligence rating of eight times that of the average humanoid.
String these balls together into another line and wind them up into a much larger ball. We are now entering into the kind of cosmic numbers that only the machines can truly understand. One of these superballs has a capacity of 13.3 tetrachildhoods and is the usual size of a ship's mind. It also represents the upper limit of what, for the sake of clarity, we shall refer to as the ball of wool construction technique. Ships' minds have an estimated intelligence rating of a thousand times that of an average humanoid, although ships are usually the first to point out that once past the sentience threshold it becomes impossible to truly differentiate between levels of intelligence.
Philosophically speaking. They go on to talk about the role of experience, sensory input matrixes and endocrine interactions. The average humanoid, if they've managed to stay awake, usually replies that all this might be so but they still can't beat your average drone at chess. The ship then tells them that they're missing the point and then shifts the conversation on to something more interesting.
Since we've now reached the upper limits of the ball of wool construction technique we will have to shift paradigms. Imagine the superballs are in fact two-dimensional planes, like planes of very thin glass with sides of near infinite length. Imagine about a million and float them in a subdomain of hyperspace that is simultaneously very large and the size of a proton. Once you've managed that, no cheating now, imagine a string of these proton-sized subdomains and, you've probably guessed it, wind it up into a ball.
That is a section of the mind of God. Nobody ever tries to estimate its intelligence. Nobody wants to be that depressed. Trillions of thoughts rush at translight speeds through God's mind.
Huge deep thoughts that move so quickly that before you finish speaking your first sentence God has probably predicted the entire course of a conversation you're going to have next year.
There is only one mind that is any way comparable to that of God's, although of vastly different configuration and attribution. It is currently residing in a time capsule that constantly hangs one picosecond ahead of the everpresent now.
If they could communicate, what thoughts would these two utterly different minds share?
Concepts so utterly grand and grossly inexplicable that their very articulation could disorder the progress of creation.