"Has anyone here ever played 'Core Wars'?"
It wasn't the weirdest question our lecturer had asked the class, but it was close. Professor Artemisia Berman had finished the syllabus for RE211 Comparative Religion and Metapsychology last week; this final lecture of the term was listed as "Coda: Conspiracy Theories".
"It's an old computer game", she continued, "where the players write software programs that all reside in the address space of a single simulated computer. The goal of each program is to eliminate the others by overwriting their memory, and to maximise its own survivability by replicating to control the shared address space. This is directly analogous to religions and other metacognitive entities."
A murmur ran around the room. This was a little more off the wall than usual.
"As you'd know if you've read my book 'The Origin of Metaconsciousness in the Arthropoidal Hivemind', it is my thesis that metacognitive entities such as anthives and beeswarms made the leap to mammals around a hundred and fifty thousand years BCE. Religions were the first metacognitive entities to run on the mammalian brain; since then joined by nation-states, corporations, conspiracy theories and political parties."
I was sitting up straight now. I'd heard of the epithet "Bizarro Berman" applied to Dr B and her off the cuff closing lectures covering extrasyllabic material. The University had tried to stop these, but tenure still meant something at The Big U.
Berman continued: "The common goal of all these entities is survival. And like in core wars the way to do that is to expand territory and eliminate competitors."
"This semester we have reviewed the major religions that are still executing on human brains today. We've seen that these all feature a characteristic fictive origin narrative. For example Judaism purports to have begun around 2000BCE yet the entire text of the Pentateuch in fact dates to no earlier than 300BCE, Christianity has no evidence for the historicity of its founder, with gospel texts unable to be substantiated before the second century of the common era, and some not before the tenth. Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and all the others we've studied consist of a narrative that, looking back, shades into myth somewhere in the first quarter of their purported histories."
"Why do religions do this? Camouflage! A metacognitive entity executing on a hundred million brains for several centuries has sufficient spatiotemporal baseline to manifest a very small retrotemporal instantiation—say a virus or a tumor—in one brain. But if the founder is lost in mythical nonhistory, retroassassination becomes a crapshoot."
"The same is true today, Bermuda Triangle, Roswell Incident, MAGA, Facebook, all these metacognitive entities transition from fiction to actual history /somewhere/ in their development but their survival in part depends on concealing the phase-change from competitors."
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot
