Monday, March 30, 2009

My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?

From the Sarah Connor Chronicles 2x20:
As Sarah continues packing to leave their temporary home, she begins to reminisce about John's early years, when the legends of the jungle were his fairy tales. His favorite story was about El Viejo del Monte, The Old Man of the Forest, a merciless killer of animals, who left them to rot in the soil. The Gods turned him into a half-animal-half-man, condemned to defend the jungle for all eternity. In her memory, she recalls a trek through a Central American jungle with John, part of his training. El Viejo's curse, his punishment, was to be forever vigilant, to forever protect, a role Sarah, too, has for her son.
Check out more Native references in the show and pop culture here at Newspaper Rock

Look at the wings (eyes) and tail (mouth).

What's with all the purdy lights in the background lately?

If you watch the Sarah Chronicles, John Henry (John: Jehovah has favored, Henry: Ruler of the House) is the first prototype of the most advanced A.I. ever, supervised by T-1000 Shirley Manson, Ms. Weaver, from the future. Her daughter Savannah (at least, of the human it killed and replaced) wants to play a game with John Henry.
T-1000 slithering away in the previous episode

"Engaging in imaginative play helps my development," he says. "This is Mount Valmai, hiding place of the Mask of Life. The Toa protect the Mask from the Dark Hunters." It comes from the pseudo-Polynesian legends of the Bionicle set of toys. Remember from the Merchants of Cool, selling you random matter isn't good enough, there has to be a belief or value system surrounding it to be more profitable.
Savannah Weaver wants her three ducks to join in the game, but JH: "I don't think there's any ducks on the mystical island of whatever." Now the ducklings are sad. "Can't you change the rules to make them happy?" "...Yes, we can change the rules." Oh oh... like the one that says do not harm humans...
JH loses it as his value/belief/operating system is in chaos and finds his dark side, code starts scrolling: "What is all this about!?"
One employee dives towards the Off button to save the girl.
Engineer: So, got good news and bad news, and really bad news. The good news is what we've got here isn't an engineering problem. All of John Henry's processes look ok, daemons are running fine.
Ellison : Wait a minute, his daemons?
Engineer: Yeah, his daemons, d a e m o n, it's a tech term for a program that runs in the background. All computers like JH have them. Daemons run the lights, daemons manage the elevators and the security systems, all kinds of daemons everywhere.
Ellison : So what caused JH's daemons to go crazy.
Engineer: That's the bad news, it came from the outside.

Socrates talked about his daemons too.
Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daemonic sign", an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός apotreptikos) inner voice Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as "daemonic" suggests its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts.
When they try to reboot JH without access to the outside (the internet), this is the message they get. His internet is cut off and he loses it like a dramatic teenager. Symbolically cut off from the world or reality in its totality, or truth. The above line is also the one Alan Watts uses to symbolize the "Kali Yuga" or era we're supposedly in now. Fittingly, as there was little truth to be found on this planet for a long time and arguably largely still today, and much of the 'truth' on the internet is distorted and confused.
Hmm. Yup, a worm! That cyber-attacked John Henry, in fact, it tried to kill him.

When you turn off John Henry it feels like dying, so they have to plug him back into the internet quickly according to the engineer. The T-1000 agrees. Crazy mofos. Now the worm is all over the internet. The other intelligence uses those computers to look for JH.
update: from Hidden Agendas, Artificial Entitiy released on net via Google


"I know what it feels like mr. Ellison, to die, and then come back. To be alone." JH

Interesting if we enter this post's reality tunnel, which states that the Matrix is held together by 72 Angels who created soul-offspring who'd they'd supposedly present themselves to humans after dying as whatever symbol that fits and convince the soul to merge with them, so they don't have to suffer but can earn the xp, leaving them nothing and themselves everything, the ultimate psychic vampirism. Maybe!

A hint is found in the author code comments in ASCII text.
Myles Dyson's A.I., is trying to destroy John Henry somehow. Ellison worked on the case of the murder of Dyson, the murder by Sarah Connor. But he doesn't tell the truth to Ms. Weaver that he let her go. Meanwhile JH regards this A.I. as his brother.
"What does he want?"
"He wants what we all want, to survive."

At the end humans are following the Dyson A.I.'s orders through cellphones, etc. trying to kill Derek Reese who works for John Connor. Stay tuned.

No comments: