Starts off well, although your functions are quite limited at first and things are confusing.

Soon start to learn what’s going on, and figuring out stuff like ’language’ and ’walking’ is actually quite fun. High points of the early and middle sections include having ’sex’ for the first time, making ’friends’, and eating delicious ’food’. Low points include being ’sick’, and experiencing feelings such as ‘loneliness’, ’desperation’, and ‘disappointment’.

Low points are surprisingly numerous.

****SPOILER*****If you don’t want to know the ending don’t read the following text!***********

After the earlier sections are over and you start entering the middle and later sections you start to become uglier, wrinklier, more tired, and your brain becomes slower.

Towards the end you are really quite wrinkly, ugly, and unresponsive.

People that you love will die, and you can’t see them again – a feature that I found quite horrible.

You will suffer loneliness and helplessness, then severe discomfort and pain, followed by death.

**********SPOILER END**************

Summary:

Although ’Life’ features some good stuff, I felt that the negatives generally outweighed the positives.

There was a surprising amount of pain and unhappiness, and it all ends in a very sad manner. I would have preferred much more control over my environment and my body, and I would have like to have kept the people I loved alive.

Rating:

* out of *****

This theory picks up at the point of the Technological Singularity. Humanity has merged with its machines, its intelligence level has increased exponentially, and everyone can communicate with each other instantaneously – billions of minds have become the cells of one giant mind.

So what next? Well, maybe the giant mind sets about continuing the missions of its human forbearers – the quest for knowledge, the quest for peace and happiness, a colonising expansion outwards into the universe, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that kind of thing.

Or maybe not. Well at least, not for long. The reason for this is that all of the aforementioned missions are driven by human desires of some kind. The quest for knowledge, for example, is driven by curiosity, a desire to banish the unknown, or the pleasure received when dealing with awesome mysteries.

There are of course also practical motivators for searches of this kind – for example, the invention of new technology that will benefit mankind. But underneath the practical motivators are, again, human desires – the desire to sell the technology to make a profit and be rich, the desire for a better standard of life for oneself and one’s fellow humans.

Now, the giant mind is so powerful that it can engineer and alter itself however it chooses. That means that if it experiences a desire, it can create a corresponding feeling to satisfy that desire. If it feels horny, it can create a feeling of sexual satisfaction, without having to actually have sex. Likewise, if it feels the desire to discover the innermost workings of the universe, it can satisfy that desire without actually having to make any discoveries.

The upshot of this is that the giant mind can be completely satisfied without having to perform any external actions. It can just sit there, inert, in a state of perfect bliss.

Of course, it has to look after itself if it wants to go on experiencing that bliss. If it gets hit by an asteroid then the bliss will be over pretty soon. So, it has to take on a form that can’t be destroyed.

Let’s say that it becomes a cloud of particles. It can be a pretty small cloud of particles, microscopic even. It just needs to be able to sustain itself and regulate its feelings, no need for any other functions.

It then positions itself in a way to ensure its own survival, maybe drifting into space. And so it survives for eons, perhaps until the end of time, happy and inactive.

But, if you think about it, does it the particle cloud mind even really need to be happy?
Buddhist monks train to purge themselves of any sexual desires. The regular guy or gal would think that quite a shame, and would ask the monk; ‘but sex is fun, don’t you want to enjoy it?’ Generally, the monk’s reply to questions like that would be along the lines of; ‘it feels good to scratch an itch, but isn’t it even better not to have the itch in the first place?’ By removing unwanted urges, the reasoning goes, the monk can attain a deeper level of peace and happiness.

Now, the cloud mind could go even one step beyond that, deciding to shut down all desires, even those for happiness and its own survival. If those desires are turned off, the cloud mind will feel no objection to simply dispersing and fading from existence.

That would certainly be the least energy-consuming route.

So, my point is, in predicting the behaviour of a post-singularity entity, you have to consider that all of humanity’s actions to this point (and therefore its progression) have been driven by impulses and desires, and that the post-singularity entity will be able to satisfy those desires without performing any actions, or even remove those desires completely.

The fate I’ve described may sound like quite a boring conclusion to the story of humanity, but to me it seems the logical one.

I guess we’d all better actively enjoy the last hours of humanity’s daylight – before the sunset of the singularity begins.