Personetics
Aug. 21st, 2007 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mabfanI finally tracked down the short story I remembered from "The Mind's I" edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. Part of the reason I had trouble locating the story when first skimming through the book was that the details were not quite as I remembered them.
The story is "Non Serviam" by Stanislaw Lem, which can be found in his collection "A Perfect Vacuum." The conceit of "A Perfect Vacuum" is that it is a collection of reviews of imaginary books, so "Non Serviam" serves as both the title of the review and the title of the imaginary book, supposedly written by a Professor Dobb, in which Dobb outlines the science of personetics. Personetics is the science of creating artificial personoids inside a computer. Dobb's personoids do come to argue theology, and in the end of the story, Lem quotes Dobb as saying the following:
That idea gripped my mind, but even more so did this one, just a few sentences later in the same paragraph:
For some reason, I had remembered the voice of the narrator slightly differently, which, as I noted above, is why I didn't find the story right away. I know that the idea that we live in a simulated world is an old one that has been explored time and time again. But Lem's story, which I must have read when I was eleven or twelve years old, was my first exposure to the idea, and it kept me thinking for a long time.
The story is "Non Serviam" by Stanislaw Lem, which can be found in his collection "A Perfect Vacuum." The conceit of "A Perfect Vacuum" is that it is a collection of reviews of imaginary books, so "Non Serviam" serves as both the title of the review and the title of the imaginary book, supposedly written by a Professor Dobb, in which Dobb outlines the science of personetics. Personetics is the science of creating artificial personoids inside a computer. Dobb's personoids do come to argue theology, and in the end of the story, Lem quotes Dobb as saying the following:
Imagine for a moment that I attach to my [computer] an enormous auxiliary unit, which will be a "hereafter." One by one I let pass through the connecting channel and into the unit the "souls" of my personoids, and there I reward those who believed in me...while all the others...I punish....
That idea gripped my mind, but even more so did this one, just a few sentences later in the same paragraph:
The bills for the electricity consumed have to be paid quarterly, and the moment is going to come when my university superiors demand the "wrapping up" of the experiment – that is, the disconnecting of the machine, or, in other words, the end of the world....
For some reason, I had remembered the voice of the narrator slightly differently, which, as I noted above, is why I didn't find the story right away. I know that the idea that we live in a simulated world is an old one that has been explored time and time again. But Lem's story, which I must have read when I was eleven or twelve years old, was my first exposure to the idea, and it kept me thinking for a long time.
