Porn : In abstract usage, anything which strongly and pleasurably excites the imagination for reasons of elegance in design, integration of disparate elements, or excellence of execution. An example. Another.
Warning, strong mental images, among other things.*
Lying awake in the middle of the night recently, I** idly asked The Generalissimo about the variations in handling investigations that had been tried as his reformation of civilization had progressed. His early ‘Musings‘ chapters had described his Psyops Corps as having been an early success in that arena. He said “Too many to ever keep track of, and they are still evolving.”
“OK”, I encouraged, “give me some examples”.
“That’s another thing”, he said. “None of this is simple linear story. There were too many independently evolving threads as soon as there were 100 Tessels, their populations rapidly grew to 10s of 1000s. Every individual Tessel was a wellspring of evolution, social, genetic and economic. Add in the development of Sexbots via our embodiment technology applied to Scherehazade, one of our servicebots, her subsequent role in achieving full human rights for sentient ‘bots. Sexbots, as they called themselves, had a defining need to be part of tight-knit family units that are successful in the minds of their normal humans.
“When the Tessels’ 8 sets of parents and their service bots merged into a family-business unit, combined with the widespread economic problems of the time, the culture began to include this new large-family social-business unit. Those self-assembled into a rapidly evolving world-wide civilization, a very peaceful (i.e. well-armed and well-prepared) segment of the civilization that simply out-evolved the pre-reformation order.”
“OK, but specific examples, surely you remember some.”
“I do remember, many. But I don’t know how you generalize over specific examples. Ideas, practices, fads came along, were the absolutely perfect way to organize everything in families and organizations. For maybe 10 years, 3 or 4 cycles of revision, trainers would do well writing and leading workshops on best practice. Inevitably, the best of the best were replaced by something that seemed the perfect solution to the now seen to be less-perfect version of the yet less-perfect system that it replaced, etc. In a mosaic, interacting with all of the other versions. That is what evolution is, continuous change resulting from internal dynamics and outside influences, and ours was a society that consciously and systematically used the evolutionary process to improve itself, continuously.”
By this time I recognized an attempt to deflect. He didn’t want to answer the question. “OK. I won’t try to generalize from any example, and your point always is that no one can. Just give me even one of those ideas about how to run a society and how it worked out. Come on, you have dozens of cases of anything else I ask about in your head, I know you have these.”
“I remember dozens of instances. We kept track of specifics, exchanged those and information about the outcomes, what we thought were outcomes at least, very freely. But all of the implementing families and organizations are complex systems, and the fads ran through families that were doing business with each other, were connected by marriage and descent. Complex systems interacting with other complex systems. Hard to learn anything outside of the very wide range of paths that happy and successful families and groups could use.”
I was not going to be put off. “One specific example. I don’t have a feel for the societies you organized without at least one specific example. How can I be your amanuensis if I don’t understand in depth? Your arguments about AI are that examples are the only solid way of transmitting information, the meaning of words and events with enough context to be useful in thinking!”
“The evolution of our civil society is out of order in the sequence of the history I am writing and you recording. You really don’t know enough to appreciate any of the stories. Why are you bugging me about this?”
“Because I am not just your stenographer, I am someone you depend upon, and I need to be able to think about the society you claim to have built. What is the problem here? Don’t you trust me? Or was this a major flaw in your world?”
The Generalissimo went quiet in my mind. I had not meant to challenge to his capabilities as a system designer, it just popped into my stream of speech. The silence went on for so long I had to stop myself from saying anything he could use to divert the conversation. I let it hang.
Finally he began. “In addition to the obvious, the many different ways of voting, achieving consensus and using outsiders to assist in resolving family disputes, one story that seemed to be urban myth circulated continuously. We think it was actually tried a few times, but that most of the cases were merely serial recreational sex bouts by Tessels and Sexbots. Sexbots tend to go along with anything Tessels suggest, so long as it involves sex with a normal, and recreational sex was most of the Tessel’s recreation, so that was a common pairing. Also, there were few Tessels in the early days, relatively few normals experienced these recreations, so there were not enough examples for a social wisdom to develop wrt such events. Ideal for myths.
“The interpretations, myth, as I said, were based on the unique characteristics of both the Tessels and the Sexbots. The manufacturers of the base servicebot systems gave them senses as good as the technology allowed because that extended their usefulness. For example, the ‘bots had eyes with wider spectrum, far into the ultraviolet because of gems as lenses and far into the infrared because of cooling the sensors below normal human body temperature. The infrared allowed them to see into the human body, although the images weren’t sharp, but the outlines of organs were visible, arteries and veins could be seen to pulse, total blood flow to areas of the brain, etc. Add a couple of infrared lasers, and their eyes doubled as spectroscopes.
“Their hearing was as good as a young human’s at the detector level, but their signal analysis was far better, and the ability to buffer samples and compare them allowed teasing out signals after the fact. They could do signal processing at the analog level using ordinary DSP and at higher levels in the sensory processing with Deep Learning modules. They had excellent chemical sensors from the spectroscopic capability as well as the normal set in tongue and nose. Those were as good as a blood hound’s, humans can’t hide much from their dog.
“Their skin senses included the ability to detect electrical currents, so had your EKG and EEG from the touch of a hand. Later models of Sexbot could secrete a pharmacy in saliva and mucosa, and voluntarily warm any surface of their body to as high as a human could stand via control of their ‘blood’ flow that cooled their electronics.
“All of those endow the Sexbots with beyond-human capabilities. They can see the flash of blood in the brain and behind the eyes that was the latest lie detector mechanism. There is no perfect lie detector, of course. Not people, not machine, the problem is intelligence and training against intelligence and training. Normally, that is heavily baised to the side of a professional, centralized authority. Sexbots and Tessels changed that.
“Sexbots were uniformly lovely sensual and very sexy beings, but the best didn’t compare to a Tessel. Tessels were the ultimate in sexually-selected human primates, and have the effect on normal humans that the out-of-Africa humans must have had on the Neanderthal, Denisovan, and other Erectus descendents. We, Homo sapiens of African origin, were the new variety of human, the main lineage of all humans alive today. The new Africans definitely had some aspect of a super-stimulus in the space of selectors those human predecessors were sexually attracted to. You can tell by how fast the Africans moved through the world and how completely African genetics mingled with and ultimately out-competed all the locals in a hyrbid storm, incorporating all the parts of the locals’ genome that was an advantage in the new environments.***
“Tessels are uniformly a robustus version of normal phenotypes, big men and women. Male Tessels are nearly all strikingly handsome in a very masculine way, with big heads, sculpted features, luminous light brown skin, large and wide-set eyes with crystalline irises of dark golden hazel. Variations were bull fighter, swordsman, gladiator, lineman, intellectual, in standout to stunning. Some didn’t fit into categories, physiques and faces, like their minds, that did not exist in normal human phenotypes. Female Tessels ditto in a very robust feminine way.
“Male and female, Tessels were randy as well as irresistable. There weren’t enough Tessels to satisfy their need for variety and Sexbots preferred normals as a result of their psychology, so Tessels often had humans to bed. Normally one-morning, -afternoon or -night stands, as mere normals didn’t amuse them long. They left a lot of broken hearts, scorched souls and stretched orifices. Didn’t matter, not many people had the emotional or intellectual self-control to turn them down, not even if they were so lucky as to be asked another time. Nor the time after that.
“Normals who grew up with them were resistant to their Tessels, for the usual incest-taboo reasons. That extended in part to other Tessels, so siblings and family members and Sexbots weren’t Tessel worshipers. Normals who had not been exposed to Tessels reacted to any Tessel as involuntarily as for an IV drug. Tessels pretty much got what they wanted, and normals got what they couldn’t resist.
“Tessels are wide-spectrum in their choice of recreational partners. For normals, Tessels were unrivaled lovers in every way, sensual, intuitive, caring through great control, extreme vigor and stamina. Tessels expected a lot of a person, by giving so much. Tessel psychology required that, their repayment for getting what they want, exercise and pleasure and variety. Lots of variety. Often.
“But Tessels only mate with Tessels, can only fall in love with Tessels. Tessels started the trend of female Tessels and her chosen mate being the 9th parent of the next-generation Tessel, she donated the blastula into which the other parent’s iPSCs were injected and then became the surrogate mother, those needed to be a large frame to carry very large babies. That made a Tessel one of the parents, tied them more tightly to the family. A male Tessel, meaning one of the 8 or 9 cell lines whose cells had produced the Tessel and mixed through all of the organs, was always a father of future Tessels in families lucky enough to have two. Tessel populations exploded in those early years after their intelligence became obvious.
“There was endless speculation about the exact features of Tessels that were
super-stimuli for normals. There was no speculation about the reality. When a Tessel walked into a room, everyone oriented on the Tessel. They were a natural phenomenon, completely outside of normal experience. People weren’t much good at resisting normal temptations, they were helpless against Tessels, much less Tessels with Sexbots.
“As a pair, the Sexbot could record and replay every aspect of the subjects’s physiology and the Tessel was the expert in analyzing patterns, abstract or behaviors. The pair conversed with their chosen human partner, asked questions and the Sexbot recorded physiological functions, heart rate, blood flow, galvanic skin response whenever they were touching the normal, breathing rate by several senses. Both remembered voices and images and other sensory inputs as data with great precision and resolution. Those could be related to those with the scene as seen by a couple of wide-spectrum cameras. 3D reconstructions and recordings, they could see your heart thump the first time as every drug hit you, your breath catch with each new pleasure, the exact state of your excitement, chemical by chemical.
“In these myths, never consistent, it was a formal interrogation and everyone knew it was a formal interrogation, and that they had some reason to talk to you. Or perhaps
a gesture of favor. Or perhaps an opportunity to ask you for a favor, or getting the information needed to decide whether to ask you. Or perhaps just part of routine information gathering. Nobody knew, and perhaps you wouldn’t until some time later. But, Sexbots and Tessels were part of what made the world work, provably, and so no one much objected to the possibility of these interrogations, no matter the myths were very widely believed. I think that is because loving, intense and strenuous sex and ‘invasion of privacy’ cannot coexist in the same mental space.
“The myths were complete in irrelevant particulars. Some religions, moralities and social traditions required the more traditional version. The office settings gave the interrogator more sensors, and Sexbot charm and many povs and wide-brand radio links to everything combined really well with the Tessel’s ability to distract normals, making them think things were going well.
“The myths were consistent about the mental effects on the human of the sexual interrogations, although there was no detail. They were often surprisingly like the imaginative scripts of the interrogations porn that emerged along with the myths. If you were in bed with a Tessel and a Sexbot of sexes attractive to you, they chose carefully, you were in heaven and hell, simultaneously.
“Heaven, because mere humans can rarely achieve the nuance, energy, passion, intensity to arouse a normal human that either of those beings could do alone. Together they were overwhelming. If both free to guide your pleasure with drugs (most people agreed to that, of course) and if the subject was innocent, interrogations tended to go well, ecstatically wonderful so far as as they could remember afterwards. Pleasure could become quite exhausting if they found reason to doubt, felt they needed to dwell on a point.
“Hell, because they enjoyed it very much, reveled in the experience with every person, but the normal human was not the pleasure for them that they were for the normal. Something in that, some atavistic theory of the brain’s reality analysis engine none can resist, some very conserved part of the sexual selection circuitry, makes every normal realize these sexual partners are your superiors in enough dimensions that your progeny will be well-served if you work at pleasing these people. And so normals try hard to please and be pleased, and understand in the midst of their ecstasy how inadequate their efforts are. I thought this was the reason nobody would talk about it afterwards.
“All the while, the pair sooth and pleasure their way to understanding whether you are guilty enough of anything that normals should look at you further.
“Sexbots and Tessels have different genetics and agendas, and so don’t trust themselves to act upon such information, which can only be, of course, ‘Guilty as hell of something surrounding these topics’ with the associated list, ‘Nervous, too scattered to do evil on purpose’, or ‘A calm mind innocent as a lamb or a zen master if also criminal’. Very rarely ‘A great fuck’, although I understand humans are improving over time.
“The myths lacked any specifics in either methods or results, and I emphasize how little of this is solid as compared to the usual detailed writeups that we regularly exchanged as part of assessing the various ways of managing families, businesses and relationships in this new and rapidly evolving social system. The excuse of the time was ‘privacy’, tho much was in the lab records, so a lot could be inferred. There was a regular industry of that, dozens of commentators in every society followed our experiments and the families.
“There was no doubt of the reality, Tessels and Sexbots enjoyed sex with normals. However, not much information diffused into the rest of the culture. The normals uniformly claimed not to remember much, most had versions of ‘heaven and hell’, no specifics, that they told their closest friends. But the overall tenor of these sessions from the very few who wrote anything at all was “Minds and training striving for understanding and trust that enhanced pleasure.” A few mentioned massage and quiet discussions of topics the three of you found of mutual interest, the affection of a new and attentive caring lover. Interest in your past, what you thought of particular events, people who you knew in those days, mutual social connections. Odors, music, sensations, drugs enhancing the senses and appreciation. They expected you to guide them with your expressions of pleasure and made it easy to be expressive.
“This era had a revival of the practices older religions used in meditation. We later found it was due to the servicebots searching for ways to better identify with humans, as the process of embodiment continued in our labs. They adapted the imaging techniques of the scholastics to enhance sexual pleasure as Scherrhy evolved to being the Sexbots they all became. Fantastic lovers spreading their skills in pleasure was one aspect of their evolving psychology.
“‘Great sex and great interrogations’ was the name of the genre of porn videos that resulted. They recruited Tessels and Sexbots, most were happy to showcase their talents. Interesting scripts, amazing images, as Tessels’ impact transcends the screen. It is a truism often heard, that were they all ugly as sin, their true passion would make us watch with the same fascination.
“I never believed the myths. The Sexbots had a need to be around humans because they needed to share human values as a condition of being judged human, knew they were a simulation, and needed continuous validation of their models. Sex is a major part of our shared values, they loved it for the same reason. The Tessels were like young people abroad in a world that worshiped them. Both Sexbot and Tessel behavior was completely normal for humans in that situation, it was the same that resulted in out-of-Africa humans superseding our predecessor species.
“I thought the myths were the same as the explanations for the ‘bots adopting their hats. People need explanations, assume we are the cause of everything if we can while remaining ‘good’ in our own mind, and if not, it must be due to something out of our control. We couldn’t admit that we would act just like that, so made them into something new in the world.”
I have to admit, I was stunned by the story. After a few moments of mental whiteout, I dazedly asked “And it is all arising as an inevitable consequence of your planning? Or evolving, or whatever you are actually doing, however you describe it this week.”
He pretended patience, I think. “Get your mind around the concepts here. We set ourselves up to evolve to evolve, and were evolving. We were guiding our own evolution because we thought the civilizational ROI on that was the highest of any achievable goal on which we could focus human minds and do so in a scalable way.
“But in guiding evolution without coercion or subsidy both biasing results and setting up opposition with skin in the game, you only get to change your own bit of the environment, and only so far as the local community allows you. We had a specification for the kind of society we wanted, positive sum at the scale of a world-wide civilization. Achieving that required honest institutions. Honest institutions required honest people of a particular shared set of values. That culture required different concepts and people in new configurations raising humans for a different guiding social purpose than SAT scores.
“Honest human required open minds and culture. We didn’t want a shame culture, we needed an achievement culture. Those required understanding people as complete beings, biology through every aspect of our social lives, then open and accepting in the sense of understanding of failure, but not in the sense of failure not being known and discussed or not having it affecting people’s future. Combining the possibility of an individual’s failure with open acknowledgement of failure is a tricky balance. We worked at the evolution of our civilization, theory and practice intermingled at a local, family-business level.
“Generally, the idea was to have a family system that fostered some kinds of openness, and using those to produce the high levels of trust that then allowed everything else to be open. I wrote specifications for the group size, the possible structures of the groups that produced the psychology of people who could reliably trust and thereby build an evolving civilization. We decided that sexual openness was necessary for any trust, because otherwise men and women were too competitive for power, and that ruined the civilization with power games that subvert trust. The extended hunter-gatherer troop moved into a modern business setting was well within our human social ranges, normal even in modern times except where the Catholic religion eliminated clans in Europe.
“And while I was working through all this, I invented Tessels and Sexbots. Or fostered the development of. Or something. Also a few social innovations that have, self-assembling as designed, pushed oligarchs into a losing propositions, their power is shrinking to nothing, they are part of the past because we out-evolved them, we shrank their environment to nothing and their population followed. Tessels, Sexbots and humans who grew up in the new families won’t work for any organization too large for them to know and trust everyone in it, there are fewer and fewer employees for their large corporations. Worse, you haven’t had legal problems until there is a Tessel-Sexbot pair on the other team. They love jury trials.”
He paused, obviously was getting ready to tell me about some long-winded case. I was learning The Generalissimo’s way of handling interrogations. Overwhelm them with honest detail while avoiding what you didn’t want to talk about. It kept them checking things, overwhelmed them with things to check, infinite points for digression.
“OK”, I said. “About the sex and interrogations, did those work, did they scale the civilization, did you have crime, etc? You keep veering off the ‘workings of government and effectiveness’ topic here.”
“There are, as it happens, many, many of ways to be sexually open because human imagination about sex has always been our most outstanding trait, and now we had Tessels and Sexbots to assist. The new family encouraged them to try new attitudes to sex. People were trying them all, enthusiastically! From Playboy through the San Fernando Valley and now the wonderful private performances of people pleasing each other, pornography had both documented our increasingly-public acknowledgement of sex in human life and changed the society’s behaviors dramatically, so this was all happening even before we came on the scene, adding the big families, Tessels and Sexbots.”
“And then it went crazy.” The Generalissimo went silent. Reminiscing, I guessed.
“Good crazy, bad crazy, crazy crazy? Give me some detail here.” I had never before had a problem getting The Generalissimo to talk. Normally he and Scherrhy were clammoring for my attention, wanting me to hear their stories, anxious that I understand.
“You use such simple words. Who defines good? Who defines crazy? The lives you and I lived before the recent reformation, the one a few years in your future, we obviously judged to be inferior to the new life after the reformation, because people moved from one to another voluntarily, attracted by satisfaction of life and economic security.
“Families sometimes became very well off, wealthy in the sense that they could invest resources in other families. Those were mutual support pacts, social and business, not primarily for monetary return. They were formal documents, and every family treasured its “investments”, they were a prominent part of the family’s reputation, but didn’t show up on the balance sheet. Get a reputation as a good judge of families and business, and people wanted your advice, read your blogs, valued your people in their organizations, bought your products or services, and their children married your children. And extended charity if you fall on hard times.
“The families that best-functioned as information processors produced the best businesses and best evaluated other mates, families and businesses for synergy of everything. When all this was used as a distributed R&D system, we devoted 10X the amount of human brainpower, never mind the Tessels, to search in the infinitude of combinations of the technological and scientific palettes. Add Tessel’s savant powers to that, civilization prospered as never before. We restored the environment, much in the world is improving.
“I am proud of my role in all that. But don’t take my word for it, all the histories say so, even the ones who blacken my name in …” His voice fell to silence as he ended that. He hadn’t meant to say it.
A crack in the facade? “So your name was not universally celebrated?” I ventured.
I got the sense he had rehearsed his rant, he normally hesitates often to choose the correct word from my mind. This was a rush of thought. “Listen, all this became known in my lifetime, we didn’t try to hide the facts, why call attention to ourselves? We had the best possible cover for our problem, a plausible story. Even better, a plausible story that was absolutely true, just not absolutely complete, a fact that would have been obvious to any professional who bothered to think about it for a few minutes. The story worked. We produced Tessels and used servicebots, exactly as everyone saw in our open lab books. We didn’t have to lie about anything, not beyond that 24 months of concealing the real state of the servicebot’s minds while we got Scherrhy embodied.
“Nevertheless, there were a blue million conspiracy theories about what we were doing. I didn’t look good in any of them.”
“Give me an example”, I said.
“The most popular conspiracy theory, or the version that was true?”
I erupted “The version that was true?!” The old guy was baiting me, I see now.
“Aren’t you paying attention? We didn’t hide anything! You don’t see the reasoning? Don’t call attention to yourself, be honest, and you can get a lot of stuff past the world for a long time. But someone inevitably figures it out. We depended upon the fact that most professionals are too busy to spend the couple of minutes thinking about implications of our experiment, and amateurs mostly don’t understand. The few who flash on the implications don’t have exposure, even with email and blogs it takes a while for their understandings to percolate into the minds of those who can give them wider exposure.”
“So they figured what out? Who they? Come on, what is the story here?” I have to admit, the guy was a master at deflecting the conversation away from sex.
“Please pay attention. We had, by the time of the 1000th Tessel hitting sexual maturity, a few 10s of millions of people in a society that was evolving to evolve. It embraced the new zeitgeist, positive sum games. It valued openness and honesty. We knew who the parents of every Tessel were. We were open with our data because it was in everybody’s interest, mutual advantage. It was just an extension of the open lab books from the research projects that were the Tessels and various medical spinoffs.”
“And that mattered how?” I was getting irritated at this history-telling style.
“We knew who composed every Tessel and who the Tessels fathered or mothered, those geneologies and individual genomes were of immense scientific interest, intensively studied around the world. So half a dozen people saw the connections and finally a statistician in a genomics group heard it and put the the conspiracy theory into public discussion. A firestorm of criticism resulted, with me at the focus.”
“Figured out what? Exactly?” I steamed. He meant me to.
“That Tessels were sexual superstimuli, and ordinary normals could not resist them. I told you that already.”
“OK, I am dumb. How did this make you look bad?” I was not achieving enlightenment here.
I couldn’t interpret his tone and manner. Not quite condescending, not quite amused, not quite impatient. Definitely not impressed. “I find this fascinating. I know what is in your mind, I have watched you writing in the last year and re-reading things you wrote. Vain, you are. But, you gave me the answer in your discussions of Neanderthals and individual selective breeding thinking and Genghis Khan. You weren’t the first to invent that particular version of immortality, but you synthesized it and tied it to self-evolution via a geneline selectively breeding itself. Everyone read your essays in our circles.
“But you still haven’t seen the obvious.”
My pleasure at hearing ‘everyone read my essays’ was immediately swamped by the obvious. “OK, I get it” I told him. “You contributed genetic material to a Tessel, and now you are set to become a genetic giant like Genghis Khan because the male Tessel you partially-fathered is impregnating women right and left? And ditto for all the other partial fathers who contributed a pluripotent stem cell? Your individual genetics received an enormous competitive advantage when you did that. Tessels are the fathers of Tessels, a compounding into future generations.
“I won’t even ask.” I continued. ” Nobody would believe you didn’t intend it, all of you. Ph.D. geneticists don’t fail to understand population statistics and founder effects.”
“Yes, nobody believes it.” The Generalissimo said pensively, sadly. “Yes, I was one of 1000s by the time the issue rose to any prominence. I took the biggest hit, my name was foremost through all of this, one of the few induced pluripotent stem cells included in any Tessel taken from an adult, and the oldest. My stature in the research community and among investors gave me advantages for a long time, so it was only fair in some ways. So I knew I needed to be the lightening rod.
“We saw it coming in plenty of time, knew it was inevitable after we understood that the Tessels were super-stimuli of sexual attraction. The interest the public had in the original 10 growing up was always intense, and became nearly fanatical as they became teenagers. We saw it early, visitors could not take their eyes off them in the flesh. For all the Tessels that followed, the intensity of interest exploded at that age, they were surrounded in public, rockstars, royalty. There weren’t actually any good analogies, Tessels were an super-stimulus to an archetype that tied deep into our primate brains.
“Tessels were potent also. If the woman was fertile, their catch rate was nearly 100%, because they had such an advantage in the sperm-vs-host competition, 9 fathers’ sperm in every ejaculation. Sexbots had the senses to know if a woman was fertile and not on a contraceptive, wanted to spread the influence of their family, and helped select the woman for the next bit of fun. The fact that they were so randy and effectively virile, well, I suppose we should have expected that, and the interactions. Certainly the public thought we must have.
“Anyway, that my adult stem cell, 45 years old at the time, was one of the few in any Tessel, and I was therefore one of the few adults that could contribute 100% of their genes to the next generation, was especially held against me by the ethical purists of the time. The lab notes had covered the case in great detail, nothing had been hidden. In those early days, just after we had the technology to completely mix the cells in all the organs of the chimera, we still didn’t understand what produced the intelligence and so were trying everything in both animals and people. Our group decided to test the ‘age of stem cell’ being important or not.
“Yes, because I thought it was a good idea, and because the rest agreed it should be me. A few other labs tried the same thing, different ages, both male and females. My wife contributed a stem cell to one of the later female Tessels from our lab, Scherrhy insisted on that because my wife had been so important in her grasp of social issues as Scherrhy went through embodiment. Also gave her the classy black Fedora that became part of her image as she became spokesman for the ‘bots in their campaign for full human rights.
“By the time this all came out, I was father to at least 100 kids. The initial analogies were to the physicians in fertility clinics who used their own sperm. Terribly misleading, I thought.
“Still, the evidence was our male Tessel had fathered as many children in a year as Genghis did in his lifetime. Women knew where to go to meet Tessels, Tessels knew where to go to meet women who wanted to meet a Tessel. Standard meat-market behavior, it goes on everywhere for every age human. The only genuinely new factor was the Sexbot assisting the humans who composed the Tessel in their life satisfaction.
“That selection factor was hidden from humans, we only figured it out after we saw the catch rate. Normal humans average 300-1000 sexual acts for every pregnancy. Male Tessels with Sexbots were seeding 300 women a year at age 17, that slowed down only slightly into their 30s, when they joined families and spent most of their time and attention with them.”
“And you are still alive? Why were you not crucified, or worse?”
“Do I need to point out that I am not alive? But no, I lived a long and happy life after people discovered that all the parents of male Tessels were parents or grandparents to quite a lot of kids, but that a few of us had that major advantage.**** By which time, we had public opinion where we needed it. After the initial spasm of outrage, commentary framed this as a Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemming kind of thing. People forgive their leaders human weakness, and we extended that to cover this situation, whether a weakness in plan or deep and dark conspiracy.
“We didn’t disadvantage anyone in particular, no one could point to a personal loss, and had improved civilization and many lives within it. So there wasn’t any political fallout. Only the philosophy hardasses in the academic community, which had finally started enforcing uniform ethical standards in their analyses, tho not yet uniformly upon their own ranks, and the media, who always interpret everything in the most negative possible way, unless it is for someone who subsidizes them, persisted in making me out to be a madly evil scientist version of Genghis Khan.”
I marveled, then shook my head. “No political fallout? Really? Hard to believe!”
“The reason there was no political problem is, nobody who had skin in the game had been injured. You keep ignoring that point. We didn’t ever create any opposition with skin in the game. None of the women thought they had been taken advantage of, everyone knew the genetics of Tessals. All of them got good kids, and they know who the father and grandfather are, the entire genealogy. Those kids have a bond, are a new social unit, quasi-clans of offspring of different individuals making up a Tessel, a connection to the Tessel’s parent and current family, a genealogical connection to other half-siblings and a new reason to trust more people. They are well-adapted to this new social world!”
That was an argument from utility, not ethics, which he always used to justify everything. Well, unless it was a TINA situation. “You exploited your expertise, your knowledge. You did NOT give everyone the information they needed to make informed decisions. You failed in your own ethical terms! How do you justify it to yourself?” I asked.
“You are an idealist, like all those philosophers. You expect nature to allow a system without side-effects, without any downsides from decisions made in implementing them, operating them, from moves forced by nature and events. System designers don’t have the luxury of ignoring those points, we can only minimize them, or the risks from them, while making the system work as well as we can.
“So, I chose a design, a solution in biology that will likely produce genetic immortality for me and the people who participated in my experiment. I saw a marginal advantage, on the natural assumptions that Tessels would excel in intelligence, that is known to be desirable in sexual selection. I used an experiment to advantage my genetics based on that assumption. Right out in the open.
“If it worked, of course. My partial clone Tessel could have been autistic, one of the standard problems of older parents. Autistics don’t often breed.
“In the actual event, it was an enormous advantage, so far more of my genes will be present in people of the future than anyone outside of our group of people whose genetics composed a male Tessel. The women who composed female Tessels didn’t get our male advantage, Tessels have no advantages over normal women beyond excellent health, and a woman can’t mother as many children as a man can father. (I thought it was the reason for them becoming the parent of male Tessels via normal children contributing cells to a Tessel. That is an interesting optimization problem for X chromosomes in an 8-parent chimera.) The parents who contributed one of their children’s stem cells to the mix advantaged their kids, but not directly themselves.
“Who is hurt by that? Many more were helped. Because Tessel’s high intelligence resulted from mixing genetics, a new form of hybrid vigor, we fathers were mixed in race and ethnic groups. So Tessels produced far more mixing of genes from around the world than would have occurred otherwise, thus more hybrid vigor which produces a more resilient population wrt disease. For the families that raised the Tessels, that included protection against social manias such as ideologies. That gave them an advantage in evolving their families and businesses, because mixing cultures produces more points of view in more minds. Human health continues to improve around the world because of more mixing of human genes. That will continue.
“Finally, nature didn’t give me much choice, so far as I know. There may be better ways of producing super-human intelligences of the kinds the Tessels have, or even better intelligences. But I don’t know them, I don’t know anyone who does.
“There may be better tests of the effects of old vs young pluripotent stem cells in chimeric humans, but I don’t know them, I don’t know anyone who does. Suggestions have always been welcome, but the question was always ‘who’, not whether we would do it. We needed to know how chimeras attained their hybrid vigor, the kinds of problems that could be corrected. We thought there was a chance my older cells would dis-advantage the child at some point in their life, he was an experimental subject.
“In addition to all that, my version of genetic immortality is a lot more humane than Genghis’s was, you must agree. It is all voluntary, nobody has to get pregnant by a Tessel. They are very attracted to Tessels because Tessels are superior genetics.”
“How can you claim ‘superior genetics’? A bunch of random researchers invent a new technology and produce a new kind of human being, a mix of cells in the embryo that builds a chimeric individual. OK, smart people, all of them, but individually not obviously special, the usual flat feet and crooked teeth and social awkwardness. Brains is all they can certify. ‘Superior genetics’? By what criterion?” I fumed. “Such hubris!”
He had practiced this, also, delivered it like a well-rehearsed speech “Superior genetics result from the process of choosing the parents for the Tessels. We self-selected, every one of us doing an experiment in our genetic line’s selective breeding program. We all liked intelligence, so we were all intelligent. We were all good judges of physical beauty, were average or above in physique and features. In personality, all were active explorers and generalists. It turns out, the personalities that matched in our case, something about early adopters they speculate, were all at the high end of sexually active and unusually potent, had gotten a lot of women pregnant in their individual lives. Standard alpha male primates, we were. Female Tessels were composed of women who self-selected for the characteristics of high-ranking female primates.
“Who could have guessed? Our combined judgments in who to engage in our selective breeding programs for our lineages produced impressive chimeric organisms, with characteristics far beyond any individual composing them.
“So that is one measure. But by the only measure that really counts, our genes being propagated into future generations, we were doing very well. The families that coalesced around raising the Tessels, the model since adopted nearly everywhere, are large families, producing many of offspring of mixed parentage. All of these families are successful at the level of supporting themselves and providing life-satisfaction. Marriages including Tessels are by far the most successful in accumulating social credit and very nice lives.
“Those families are economically and socially valued! Thus, their offspring are favored in business and as mates. The Tessels turned out to be a big advantage for their parent’s genetics, the males especially were excellent propagators of genes. Our individually joining a Tessel was very effective strategy, a new technology providing an advantage as large as the original out-of-Africa hominids in the earliest bands had.
“All that means the Tessel’s families are increasing their genetic contributions in the human population, increasing the entire world’s hybrid vigor, just as had each of the hominid species originating in Africa as they spread through their predecessor hominids around the world. That and the accompanying social and business reformations shaped a world stable evolutionarily and ecologically for the human population.
“How do you measure superior genetics?”
The disembodied soul and mind in my head had the best of the argument, it seemed.
“So all you had to do was get a few geeks together to implement a new technology, and your genes get to win world-wide on a scale that Genghis Khan would envy? What made you special?”
“It was a bit more than ‘get a few geeks together’. They were biologists, medical scientists, statisticians, for the most part, compatible professionally and personally. All with the kinds of personalities willing to work on big goals on the other side of large unknowns, to take personal risks for a better future.
“Otherwise, we weren’t special at all. We just did it first.”
Always abrupt, he ended our conversation and put out a ‘privacy’ flag.
My first thought was he hadn’t ever actually said whether that style of interrogation worked. Mine didn’t.
A day later, my question is “Any biologists out there that want to try out for Team Compatible?”
I know more of The Generalissimo’s technology underlying the Tessels than anyone in the world at this time. You need me on your team.
——
The Generalissimo left a note to remind you :
In psyops, the message is the op.
—-
*Also, not much to do with sex, and none of that explicit. Heavy psychology discussing, for example, human sexual superstimuli and how a genuine multi-cultural civilization might run things.
As an honestly honest member of the Honest Party, I must admit I removed those two sentences from the ‘warning *’ above to increase the probability that people will read The Generalissimo’s story, knowing people don’t read warnings but do read about sex. So I didn’t give you the information you might have been wanted, that this ‘porn’ did not involve sexual activity. But, hey, if anyone reads the definition or watches one of the example ‘porn’ videos, they must realize what is coming.
**I am a mere software engineer, sometime blogger, analyst and commentator on aspects of reality. My important role is amanuensis to The Generalissimo, currently a disembodied mind and spirit I encountered wandering in a fractal dimension of the historical continuum who has concented to share my brain. He describes himself as :
Generalissimo Grand Strategy, Intelligence Analysis and Psyops, Founder of the First Volunteer Panzer Psyops Corp. Cleverly Gently Martial In Spirit.
I can testify that The Generalissimo is systems architect and designer of civilizations and inventor of more technologies than most people can keep in their head. All of his work in the present time has come through my fingers. I have checked it carefully to be certain the science is solid, he isn’t a fraud. So far as my understanding can reach, the Generalissimo’s claims are plausible, his story isn’t mere Hollywood Science Fiction, with science and reality cut to fit the script.
Scherrhy is another disembodied identity the Generalissimo introduced me to, she also cohabits our brain and I am also assisting in writing her story. Hell of a woman, I am very impressed with her accomplishments. A heroine for our age.
***That cooperative-competitive strategy worked out well for the predecessors, the total amount of their genomes in living descendants is far larger than the total when they were most alive.
****Partial clone if the Tessel was formed from a pluripotent stem cell extracted from an individual ‘parent’,in which case the Tessel is a 1/nth identical twin-clone, child if from one of their children, normally a recently-born ‘siblings’ of the Tessel-under-construction and associated family, in which case the Tessel is 1/nth your child and your children siblings of various degrees with it. The N children + Tessel are a tight group, and a common case in the early days was for most of them to stay family core, with each of them marrying a partner who shares them all.
Evolution has designed sex as a way of mixing genes into new combinations, which also means losing them, so statistics are that it takes a lot of offspring to ensure that ALL of your unique genes get into the next generation. That is one definition of ‘genetic immortality’.
If you get enough genes into the human population that some of your genes or their mutated copies persist so long as there are humans or human descendants, that is genetic immortality. 100% in the total of humanity is not the ideal, some of your mutations are bad, and normal people have 100+ of them. The trick is getting the correct genes left out, a game of large numbers and a long time. For certain, the best bits of Genghis Khan’s genes are still around, and more than a few of the not-so-good ones.
Female Tessels have a harder optimization problem than males. Females can’t bear many children, and must split those between Tessels and normal children. If she has 8 parents, she is unlikely to have children by all of them.
However, her ability to bear large infants makes her the idea surrogate mother for a Tessel. That means the women contributing their genetics to a Tessel have reason to bear a Tessel’s children, to provide a surrogate womb.
thinkpatriot 