Volume 4: Spacetime Singularity Chapter 9: Brain in a Vat
Observer No. 2 was not so interested in protozoa at first. After all, the universe is producing new individual consciousnesses every moment. They are big and small. The big ones can reach the scale of planets or even star clusters, while the small ones may only be on the order of microns or even nanometers.
As for the origins of these creatures, most of them were formed spontaneously, and of course a very small number were re-created by existing intelligent individuals.
This "creation" is not reproduction in the usual sense. Reproduction refers to the self-replication of organisms, which is an instinct rooted in the genetic code of any life. However, the creation of other species or even other forms of life requires an extremely high threshold.
This is because different organisms have completely different reproductive systems. When encoding a species, it is not just about constructing consciousness, but also about constructing the entire genetic structure and internal replication logic.
So generally speaking, the prerequisite for creating a new species is to have basic information about the new species within the known knowledge system . For example, if you want to artificially create gas organisms, you must at least have seen the appearance of gas organisms and have a basic understanding of their genetic coding forms.
Otherwise, even if consciousness emerges in the newly created brain, this brain cannot be called a biologically independent individual, because it cannot absorb energy from the environment on its own, let alone reproduce on its own. It can only be said that it has created intelligence rather than a biological organism.
Throughout history, metal civilizations have created large numbers of these "brains in vats" to help them perform distributed computing and analysis, and this technology has become the cornerstone of modern civilization for them.
As for those created consciousnesses, they are unaware from birth to death that the meaning of their lives is only to be used as computers by an advanced civilization that they have never seen or imagined.
Of course, according to the previous inference, we don’t even know whether these created conscious individuals have the concept of “life” or “death”. Unlike Zhuang Zhou who turned into a butterfly in his dream, these created consciousnesses don’t even have the ability to think about whether they are dreaming in this life, after all, they will never wake up.
To wake up, you must have a body and senses that can clearly interact with the environment. These are too luxurious for a conscious individual dedicated to calculation. After all, the resources and energy required to maintain a brain circuit are much greater than raising a cub. And after artificially creating a new cub, a lot of new theoretical issues will have to be discussed.
In fact, ethical issues have also created considerable obstacles to the biological research of metal civilizations, which is why their civilization has created very few new organisms since its inception.
These ethical considerations are very reasonable because no one knows whether the newly created life can be controlled by themselves. After all, we cannot even be sure whether we can truly communicate and interact with species that are reproductively isolated from ourselves.
Such questions about other minds emerge endlessly in the process of cosmic exploration, and have directly promoted the birth of a new discipline, namely, the study of interspecies relations.
This course was extremely difficult, but it was the best course that Observer No. 1 learned during his education. The internship assignment he submitted during the exam season that year was directly published in the entire academic community as a very important scientific research result.
But no matter what, whether or not to communicate with new organisms is a matter of probability, so the risk of creating new life is still very high. Besides, why would you actively create a new species to compete with yourself for the already scarce negative entropy in the universe?
It is also based on this consideration that most new organisms created for experimental purposes will be destroyed immediately after the experimental cycle ends. This has of course been opposed by some philanthropic "life protectors", but after a major accident all different voices disappeared.
The energy creatures created in the laboratory at that time spread rapidly in the space at an extremely terrifying speed. They grew and became stronger after devouring a large number of stars, and even engaged in a long cosmic war with metal civilization.
Of course, the outcome of that war was the victory of the metal civilization, but the price was also extremely high.
After that incident, if laboratory organisms have spread into outer space or are found to have the potential to spread into outer space, the space within hundreds of astronomical units around the petri dish planet where they were born will be designated as a quarantine zone, and related research activities will be forcibly stopped, waiting for professional personnel to carry out destruction.
However, throughout history, this situation has rarely occurred, because half of the experimental conditions required to create life are extremely harsh. Similar experiments are all driven by the collective consciousness of civilization.
The new lives created by hands will attract the attention of the entire civilization from the day they are born. It is unlikely that the situation in the real world will happen, such as the mad scientist Frankenstein creating the devil in his small workshop in "Frankenstein"..
Observer No. 2 did not consider the protobody as life at the beginning. As mentioned before, a large number of consciousnesses were born in the universe, and most of them were incapable of constructing their own bodies and senses. A small number of those who successfully constructed their bodies learned how to reproduce, and those who did not learn how to reproduce basically became space junk after the negative entropy was exhausted.
We have no way of knowing whether the comets that are everywhere in the universe have ever had self-awareness. How do you know whether the asteroid belt in the solar system is a large cemetery of meteorite life?
But since the original metal life began to replicate itself, everything has changed. It has proved that it is not a meteorite that accidentally awakened consciousness, but a real life.
This seemed extremely absurd to Observer No. 2. The carbon-based animals on Earth had never come into contact with metal civilization before, and it was unlikely that they even knew about the existence of this form of life. How could they create creatures with reproductive systems and a basic skeleton different from their own?
Moreover, this creature "happens to" have A boson as its internal energy source, and "happens to" be the same species as the observers in the universe? Is there really such a coincidence in the world?
