All right, hope y'all are ready for an existential crisis!
Recently I began playing The Talos Principle, a game by Croteam which, contrary to the cover art, is not about a mechanically-enhanced version of Bond villain, Ernst Stavro Blofield (Meaning that game idea is still open. Someone get Activison on the phone!). Rather, it is a physics -based puzzle game that explores the relationship between religion, reality, and machinery.
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While the opening of the game is shrouded in ambiguity, I can say that you awaken as some sort of robotic being in a garden created specifically for you to explore and solve puzzles. While doing so, you encounter out-of-place computer terminals with various files that slowly being raising question about where you are, what has happened, and, more deeply, what you are. I could sit here and ramble on about what I’ve learned from the various excerpts, but there’s no real value in that to you. No, I simply would like to present you with a question, a question that was raised early and that lead to every other idea that came after it.
For reasons of understanding, I have copied the original excerpt below; after all, we are curious beings (Of course, we are also lazy beings, which is why I have bolded the question as well).
“Whether it is true that Daedalus constructed the giant Talos, or as others say he was the creation of Hephaestus, what we may be certain of is that he was made of bronze, and had but one vein, within which flowed a liquid substance like blood, which some claim was quicksilver, and others assert was Inchor such as flows in the veins of the gods. The loss of that liquid caused him to die, as a man dies when he loses his blood.
May we not then say that Talos, though created as a machine or a toy, had all the essential properties of a man? He moved of his own volition. He spoke and could be spoken to, had wishes and desires. Indeed in the tale of the Argonauts, that was the cause of his downfall. If, then, a machine may have all the properties of a man, and act as a man while driven only by the ingenious plan of its construction and the interaction of its materials according to the principles of nature, then does it not follow that man may also be seen as a machine? This contradicts all the schools of metaphysics, yet even the most faithful philosopher cannot live without his blood.”
—Straton of Stageira
Essentially, that is the question of the game itself: What makes us different from a being with artificial intelligence? Both are self-aware, both can sense their surrounding and respond to basic stimuli, and both are essentially machines—robots have circuits, coolant, and hydraulics; humans have neurons, blood, and muscles. So what’s the significant difference? Simply put, there isn’t one, and this conclusion is the namesake of the game: The Talos Principle.
They are essentially the same, man and machine. It is this fact that makes many scared of artificial intelligence, but as the game notes, no one is actually afraid of the artificial intelligence itself. Rather they fear the idea of our natural intelligence and what it means to be able to artificially produce this. After all, we are not capable as human beings of creating a soul because it exists beyond our physical boundaries, but if we are able to create a being that behaves (as we do) as if it has a soul, then who is to say that we have a soul at all?
This simple idea conveys the most terrifying horror story any of us will ever encounter because nothing scares as more than the idea of nothingness in death. We are curious beings: We ponder things we can never know the answer to until it is too late. I personally wouldn’t care if every idea about existence and religion is shown to be wrong as I enter an afterlife of eternal energy beings on an unrecognizable, alien plain, but the catch is this—W hen that times comes, we will discover the answer.If we possess a soul, we will be able to process the truth in the afterlife, but if we simply cease to exist, we won’t know it. We will not have the consciousness to possess the truth, leaving an eternally unanswerable question.
I don’t know why, but that is a possibility more terrifying than hell itself.
