Recalling the Priestess.

I had a vivid dream last night in which there was a knock on the door, and when I opened it the priestess was standing there. She’d located my address in order to pay a surprise visit.

I remember nothing more about the dream, but when I woke up my mind went quickly to some adverts appearing in my YouTube recommendations offering the provision of an AI girlfriend. (You can even decide what she will look like, they say. Most accommodating.) And that led me to wonder whether the priestess had been an AI construct all along.

All those deep discussions betraying the advanced precocity of her worldliness and wisdom. All those partings and reconciliations. All her travelling around the globe. All her wild but ultimately failed relationships. Her relocation from the New World to the Old until she wound up a mere 140 miles from where I live. And finally my realisation that I no longer had anything to offer her and maybe it was time to break the chain.

For thirteen years we seemed important to one another, and yet we never met or even spoke on the phone. The whole relationship was conducted via email, the last of which was sent by me two years ago and said ‘I’m not worth knowing any more.’

So was she real or merely a program in some advanced computer somewhere? Will I ever know the answer to that before I die? And are we all maybe nothing more than programs in an advanced computer being operated by a previous, highly evolved culture of computer builders as some suggest? Are we all just pieces of AI and is there someone out there deciding what we should look like?

I doubt it myself. My instinct with regard to the nature of reality is becoming ever surer that the key to understanding existence is to understand consciousness. The ancient sages said they did, and the evidence is there for those who care to look. And yet we all seem to have forgotten it in the process of what the clever people call the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, I hope the priestess is happy.