The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m reading ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ at the moment. The posthumous piece from Douglas Adams, or rather from the auditing of his computers. It’s amazingly good. Brain-teasingly good. Listening to him speak is almost like programming in the zone, the humdrum and crap of normal life seems to recede and the possibility of brilliance seems to be a reality. The possibility mind you, not the actuality, but just to know that something might be starkly workable, or agreeable or acceptable is wonder.

The book consists of lots of different stuff. A lot of it is first-person stuff, I think, English is not my subject, in which DNA talks directly to the reader, or rather the audience as these are culled from newspaper articles, book introductions or speeches. That’s all of it so far actually, so I lied above, but I am tantalised with the vision that a final Adams manuscript for a Dirk Gently book hides in the rear of the book. The first-person stuff is great. More so because I keep reading things and thinking ‘I do that!’. The repeated times this is happening is starting to worry me. Not because I suddenly feel an urge to write a bestselling humourous book, but because I’d never realised the enormous influence DNA [he liked his initials apparantly] had upon me. I can think back to skits I wrote at school that stole heavily from his humour [though I was also in a political bent at the time so it was Hitchiker’s humour with Ronald and Maggie]. So I’m starting to think that I’ve been brainwashed at a young age, and it was by someone now gone so I cannot thank them.

There is one section in the book where he discusses religion. Well, there are many, but there is one section that I just read and kicked off an idea in my head. Adams’ is discussing the concept of whether there is an artificial God [which there utterly is] and he mentions that humans like creating meta-systems to manage the tiny details. Meta…meta…that’s programming right?
So my thought is that religion is basically programming. Humans are computers, and they are programmed to work together as a group with religion. So religion is not really programming, but parallel computer programming. I can’t think of many religions that are applicable to an individual person.

Maybe the next generation of languages, for grid computing or what-not, should be in the form of a computer religion. Human religions have many years of success at programming a collection of human computers, so why not give it a shot with computers.

We just need a computer that will believe that “What happens, happens” is a good enough foundation to build everything on.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2003 at 8:21 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.