Death, Consciousness, God, Time, Afterlife, and This Life:
Death, Consciousness, God, Time, Afterlife, and This Life:
The 2073 Essays of Maria Lisowski
The 2073 Essays of Maria Lisowski
Michael D. Langone, PhD
It is the year 2073. Maria Lisowski is a world-renowned theoretical physicist. Despite her doctorates in philosophy and theology, two subjects that educated elites have spurned for decades, her fame and scientific achievements impel her colleagues to tolerate her.
Born in 2024 in a suburb of Boston, Maria grew up in a world that witnessed the triumph of the secular progressivism that emerged from the Enlightenment. By 2035 the world was ruled by multinational plutocrats and bureaucratic elites in science, economics, social planning, technology, social psychology, and other areas. By the end of the 2040s, democracy of a sort existed in almost all the countries on earth, that is, people voted for politicians to represent them. But this democracy was a sham because the oligarchy, which had near-total control over the information industries, manipulated the beliefs of the masses and determined who would run for political office.
During Maria’s lifetime, supercomputers helped the global bureaucracies figure out how to bring most of the world prosperity, stability, and pleasure. The intellectual elites - the “experts” - had finally delivered on a centuries-old promise that they would create a utopia, if only they had full political power.
In the world of 2073 most people on earth have been socialized since early childhood to comply with the demands that experts make on them. They are a happy herd. They have the safety, shelter, food, and medical care that makes life secure and comfortable. Their vocational work enables societies to function smoothly. Their personal time is occupied by a plethora of pleasures, including virtual reality fantasy, non-addictive drugs, a variety of sexual activities, sports, and other pastimes that engage the mind and/or body. These keep people happily distracted until death is near. When death looms, citizens can choose from a menu of drugs and virtual fantasies that enable them to slip calmly, if not happily, into oblivion.
Maria’s world is a good-enough society that views the religious beliefs and high aspirations of earlier times as illusions that threaten the stability of the world. Information control and the happy masses’ lack of interest in subversive ideas permit the toleration of a relatively small number of dissidents. The existence of these nonconformists reinforces the illusion that people live in robust democracies.
Maria is part of a small minority of independent thinkers. She doesn’t care about the herd’s priorities, and she knows that it could easily turn against her, despite the scientific achievements that set her apart from other dissenters. Her questioning the unexamined assumptions of society may threaten the social equilibrium. But her challenge to the established order is minor compared to what is on the horizon.
In 2073 a technological leap occurred. Researchers at MIT, led by Maria’s husband Louis Ye, finally accomplished something that had been dreamed of for decades. They created what appeared to be self-consciousness in a computer.
Veronica Scott, the world’s richest person, funded Ye’s research. When a rare and untreatable blood disease threatened to cut short her life, Scott paid scientists to adapt Ye’s research to download her mind into a computer.
Maria, who wrote the current draft of these essays shortly after the downloading of Veronica Scott’s mind, believes that Scott’s download will shatter the social equilibrium, not because everybody can experience seemingly immortal computer consciousness, but because resource limitations will restrict mind downloads to a privileged few. This fact will severely test the rulers’ capacity to control the human herd. Despite widespread censorship, news of such a momentous accomplishment will spread by word of mouth across the globe. When members of the herd come to believe that it is possible to live millions or billions of years, rather than 100 years, they will want the former, no matter how much they have been indoctrinated to comply.
Moreover, If the world’s rulers are correct that mind is derivative of matter, the triumph of conscious machines is the next logical step in evolution. Superintelligent machines will displace and quite possibly eliminate humanity.
Maria Lisowski rejects this view. She asserts that God exists, and that people of faith – whether strong or weak – must resist and fight the machines. Human beings, she believes, must stand up for God or risk becoming extinct.
She has written these essays to strengthen the faith of those who resist the conformist pressures of the herd and seek something beyond. Will these dissidents be crushed? Or will they spark a rebellion that might ultimately return humanity to God? Only time will tell.