The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [193]
“Yes sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”
“Stop calling me sir,” said Mortimer. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an it any longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a sir. You can call me Mortimer — Morty, even.”
“As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, patiently. “As you wish.”
Forty-Nine
Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion
In the beginning, there was only the void. Your ancestors and mine were conscious, in an animal fashion, of the world around them, but they were not conscious of themselves as individual thinking beings because they had not yet become individual thinking beings. That was a privilege they had yet to acquire.
What gave it to them?
It must have been an alchemical combination of causes. Some animals already have the rudiments of language, the capacity to use simple tools and the ability to learn from their mistakes and serendipitous discoveries; they also have brains which predispose them to observe one another and benefit from their observations by learning from the mistakes and serendipitous discoveries of others.
These traits only required exaggeration to the point when a productive feedback loop could be established. The use of tools required more able hands, keener eyes, better brains, and an increased propensity for mimicry; the more able the hands became, the keener the eyesight, the more powerful the brains and the more adept the mimicry, the more scope was opened for the discovery and manufacture of better tools.
As more tool-using skills arose within protohuman groups avid for their dissemination, the need for complex language became ever greater — and hence the need for even better brains, which created in their turn more scope for an even greater range of skills.
And so on.
Protohumans made tools, and tools made humans. Then humans made more tools, which made progress, which helped tools become machines and humans become posthumans, who made more progress, which helped machines become AMIs.
And so on.
After the beginning, but not long after, humans invented gods. Gods were hypothetical entities that enabled humans to create and refine the notion of “the world.” If, not long after “the beginning,” there had been only one significant word, then the word might indeed have been “god.” It might also have been the word “god” that shone light upon the idea of “the world,” which certainly comprised the earth beneath human feet and the heavens above human heads.
At first there was a vast profusion of hypothetical gods, reflecting all kinds of natural phenomena, embodying all modes of human feeling, and representing all sorts of human groups. Then the urge to impose order upon chaos set in, and the number of the gods began to diminish. The gods that were left increased in individual importance, until there was only one, albeit one that was seen from several different angles through the crystalline lenses of several different faiths, some of which still permitted the one god’s division into some or many different aspects.
It was, I suppose, at this stage that people started looking to their god, or gods, for answers to unanswerable questions like “what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?” and “what sort of history should we be making?”
Prophets began to listen more intently; scholars began to study the scriptural products of that listening more ingeniously. When the answers were not forthcoming, people also began to look elsewhere, because they were very reluctant to admit the simple truth, which was that there were no answers, are no answers and never will be any answers to questions of that sort,