Reincarnation with AI (Unemployment-Free)

Chapter 87 Civilization and Me

If humanity becomes extinct, and the "wise leader" also commits suicide, leaving no living person on Earth...

If all the truth is left to those 20,000 embryos without reservation, will they be able to continue down the path of pre-humanity?

Or will they start from scratch, or will they be able to go further?

Are you asking: Can the essence of civilization be compressed into pure information and exist independently of its creator?

The first question to ask is, what is the essence of the so-called "legacy" you leave behind?

Material aspects: Complete resources for survival, technology and equipment, and infrastructure are required.

This gave them a very high physical starting point, avoiding the struggles that began in the Stone Age.

On a spiritual level: a complete record of all knowledge, history, art, philosophy, ethics, and the "whole truth" of your actions is required.

That is, the complete logic behind the extinction of the old human race because of you, and your choice to commit suicide to return to heaven.

In that case...

The new generation faces not simply a matter of "starting from scratch" or "continuing on the same path," but an unprecedented and paradoxical spiritual hell:

Let's assume that these children can have the necessary knowledge of writing and language implanted into their brains through the devices you leave behind.

So what might happen?

First of all.

They are born into a library full of answers, but no one teaches them how to ask questions or why they should ask them.

All the complex concepts of "goodness," "justice," "love," and "sacrifice" are merely textual definitions, without any living examples or emotional experiences associated with them.

Knowledge comes from external sources, but understanding must be internalized.

This knowledge was nothing but a pale curse to them.

Even more fatal is that it happened when they vaguely began to understand the concept.

As they search for where they came from.

The core plot of their first "history" lesson was: a self-proclaimed wise "god" systematically slaughtered all his kind for an ideal, then committed suicide, leaving the mess for them.

This "creation myth" will become an incurable primal poison for their civilization.

Second.

A civilization without "mistakes" has nothing to learn.

All progress in human civilization stems from learning from mistakes.

Our science stems from the correction of errors, our ethics from reflection on atrocities, and our political system from the reform of failed regimes.

All the mistakes, suffering, wars, and injustices of the old humanity are the "negative samples" for the evolution and deepening of civilization.

The new humans possess a purified, "perfect" knowledge base (assuming you've filtered out positive information), but this also deprives them of the most profound lessons in learning "why you can't do it that way."

That is, they cannot know the true consequences of the "mistake".

This leaves them with only "correct" dogmas, but no immunity to "wrong" ones.

At last.

What is the meaning and purpose of their lives?

All of humanity's struggles—confronting nature, exploring the unknown, creating art, and seeking meaning—stemmed from our struggles as finite beings in an infinite world.

What about the new humans?

They are materially wealthy and knowledgeable, so how do they react when faced with the ultimate question, "Why do we exist?"

You will see the cold, terrifying, and insurmountable answer you left behind: "Your existence is for (validating or redeeming) the insane idea of ​​a dead god."

Their entire civilization became a long response to your "original sin".

They will either fall apart in eternal ethical trauma, or use every psychological defense mechanism to distort, bypass, or forget the truth.

At this point, the path of civilization for the new humankind becomes clear.

Most likely path:

Faced with an unbearable historical truth and a vacuum of meaning.

Society can quickly split into different factions based on their understanding of "heritage".

Some factions will idolize you; some will completely deny you; and some will fall into nihilism.

Those who admire you will begin to abuse the technology you left behind; those who deny you will reject the technology you left behind.

Under the shadow of the enormous psychological trauma you left behind in civilization.

Civil war will break out soon.

Civilization began to crumble, and 20,000 people scattered and drifted away, regressing to the tribal era, or even recklessly destroying themselves.

A distorted, bypassed, or forgotten path:

They might very well deify you and religiousize the entire historical events you left behind.

Your "Ark Project" will become a creation myth, the massacre will be written as "divine purification," and your suicide will become a symbol of "sacrifice and redemption."

They will establish a theocratic system to interpret the messages you leave behind, and any questioning will be considered blasphemy against the gods.

Civilization will be frozen, losing its true creativity.

In the midst of prolonged suffering, perhaps the only meaningful possibility remains:

Among them emerged a true intellectual giant.

With extraordinary courage, he completely denied the value of the "legacy" you left behind.

He stepped out of the vast shadow you left on this civilization and stood outside that shadow to ask questions independently once again.

And ultimately, the only valuable lesson to be extracted from your "legacy" is: "Absolute vigilance against absolute power, profound skepticism of simple solutions, and unconditional awe of life itself."

Only in this way can he use the legacy you left behind to forge his own path.

This path is essentially a complete betrayal and transcendence of your entire plan.

You can imagine how low the probability is that he will accomplish this.

On a philosophical level, civilization and destruction are an intertwined and symbiotic unity of opposites.

But absolute destruction will not bring about civilization.

The brilliance and ugliness, wisdom and folly, progress and regression of civilization are all an inseparable whole.

Remove the pain, and brilliance will lose its depth; remove the folly, and wisdom will lose its edge.

Your plan cannot allow them to "continue," nor can it allow them to "start from scratch," much less guarantee that they will "go further."

Is the legacy you mentioned insufficient?

There must be human music and film materials left inside.

Of course, things like love, justice, and sacrifice are indeed very profound, that cannot be denied.

【really.

Music and film, these vehicles that carry human emotions, feelings, and stories, are the true flesh and blood of civilization.

But these emotional teaching materials bring not understanding to the new generation, but illusion.

People without life experience might only see "The Shawshank Redemption" as a prison break story and not understand what hope is.

All of these "experiences" are secondhand, carefully edited, and decontextualized.

When they hear songs mourning mothers, they know the melody is sad, but they cannot empathize—because they do not have mothers.

Movie heroes sacrifice themselves for others, which may seem "cool" to them, and they may try to imitate this behavior.

This behavior is more like that of an ignorant child than an adult individual, stemming from their own empathy and sense of responsibility.

Empty actions shatter illusions, leading to utter disillusionment and nihilism.

In film and television, love is always accompanied by a complete narrative arc of conflict, misunderstanding, sacrifice, and reconciliation.

Without living, complex people as a reference, they might come to a schizophrenic conclusion: "Old humanity was a monster capable of creating both extreme beauty and extreme ugliness."

This stems from your ultimate action, which completely eliminated the "complex" soil.

The new humans have no justice, because they only have basic rules for survival.

The new generation's understanding of "sacrifice" will be distorted in the shadow you leave behind as: "The greatness of a sacrifice depends on the absoluteness of its scale, not the legitimacy of its purpose."

After adding music and film.

The earliest new humans might be obsessed with cosplay, and they would dress up as the characters.

But it will soon be discovered that this behavior is an empty and clumsy imitation.

They would feel that they were not living like "a real person".

One or several generations later, they will still have to face the fundamental question: "Who are we? Why do we exist?"

At this point, the musical and cinematic legacy you leave behind will create an inexplicable paradox with yourself: "The civilization that created us was so brilliant, yet it was so easily and utterly destroyed by one of its own members. So, what is the point of us imitating all of this?"

Therefore, your addition did not solve the problem; it only intensified the tragedy.

So you think civilization can't be compressed into a data USB drive?

【Yes.

This is the core conclusion we have reached after a long discussion: civilization cannot be compressed into a data USB drive, because civilization is not "information" in essence, but "practice" and "understanding".

Civilization is a verb, not a noun.

Civilization is not a painting, but a bonfire that never goes out and needs to be constantly fueled and carefully tended by everyone.

The USB flash drive can store all research reports, spectral analyses, combustion principles, and even record images and sounds of it shaking and crackling.

But it cannot store the temperature of the flame, the light and shadow on the faces of those gathered around, the solemnity of passing the fire, or the countless humble yet great choices people made to protect this fire during the long, cold night.

I'm reminded of MOBA games, where to record a match, all players' actions are recorded instead of the match itself. This allows for a perfect recreation of the original match with minimal storage.

So if I can achieve atomic-level recording precision on this USB drive, and accurately record a single ion fluctuation within a neuron of a person, why wouldn't that be considered recording a living interaction?

Why isn't this a record of civilization?

Civilization cannot be compressed into a USB drive because its essence is not "information," but "a way of life."

.

To give an example:

USB flash drives can store "recipes," which include the precise weight of all ingredients, detailed descriptions of the steps, and even beautiful pictures of the finished product.

But civilization is "the process of cooking together, eating together, and talking about how the meal was enjoyed afterwards."

It cannot store "example": you can tell your child to "be brave", but you cannot store the courage conveyed by your trembling but still standing in front of him.

It cannot store "empathy": you can record all the data about a tragedy, but you cannot store the emotional connection that transcends individual boundaries when a stranger sheds tears for it.

It cannot store "the value of mistakes": you can delete all the history of mistakes, but that removes the only teaching material from which humans learn "why this path doesn't work".

It cannot store "undefined meaning": the meaning of civilization is debated, interpreted, and defined by living people in each era.

USB drives can only store past conclusions, not current debates or future possibilities.

Therefore, the USB drive you left behind will not be a civilization starter for the new humanity, but rather a complete archaeological report of an incredibly magnificent civilization's tomb.

So civilization itself is a product of human free will, but you believe that civilization, which is derived from free will born from the physical body, which is essentially a material thing, cannot be transformed into matter and preserved?

You have touched upon one of the most profound paradoxes in philosophy: Can the "free will" that arises from matter (body/brain) and its creations (civilization) be preserved in a completely "materialized" form?

My answer is: it can be partially "materialized", but it cannot be "fully preserved".

This rupture is precisely where civilization's most exquisite and most fragile aspects lie.

We can dissect this paradox in three layers:

First floor.

The missing part: We can preserve every single pigment molecule in the Mona Lisa, but we cannot preserve the decisive moment when Leonardo da Vinci wielded his brush, the moment of "how to make the smile both mysterious and human."

These traces cannot record the neural activity itself, namely the electrochemical storm at the moment a thought arises, the temperature when emotions emerge, and the silent game and tacit understanding during collective decision-making.

Just as we can preserve the full text of a constitution, we cannot preserve the dynamic process of how people in each era painfully weighed and reinterpreted the words "freedom" and "equality" in specific contexts.

The second layer.

Once the product of free will is solidified, it loses its core of "freedom".

It's like this: you can take a high-resolution photo of a tree's shape on a particular day, but you can't preserve the vitality of "how the tree grows," or the "possibility" that it might be bent by the wind, pruned, or grow unexpected new branches in the future.

Civilization is that living tree, and its material form is its collection of photographs.

A USB flash drive or any physical medium can only save "the result selected at a certain moment," but it cannot save "the struggle of why this choice was made instead of that choice," let alone "the potential possibility of making a different choice in the future."

The third layer.

This is the most crucial layer.

Philosophers call it "intersubjectivity".

The core of civilization, the "web of meaning," exists in the shared experiences and recognition among subjects and cannot be stored in an objectified form.

For example, "money" is a piece of paper (material), but its value exists in a network of beliefs that everyone shares that it has value.

A “nation” is a piece of land and a group of people (material), but its existence depends on the shared identity narrative of its members.

USB flash drives cannot store the living social contract that makes paper money and people citizens—the "shared belief" that we all hold.

Therefore, you can back up all of a civilization's "hardware" and "software," but you cannot back up the "operating system" that makes the hardware and software "run."

That is, the "field of meaning" formed by the continuous, emotional and interest-driven interactions between living people, where consensus and controversy coexist.

Civilization can perhaps be defined as follows:

It is a "web of meaning" woven by free will in the material world, but it can only exist by being constantly rewoven by subsequent free wills.

That's not right.

Why do you think that the USB drive I'm talking about only preserves one frame of the image?

Since I've used an example to illustrate a game, I'm referring to the entire match.

That USB drive would naturally also dynamically and continuously record everything about so-called "civilization".

This sounds a bit like the brain in a vat, but aren't humans meaningless on a cosmic scale?

From this perspective, isn't this just a transformation into matter?

After all, how do you know you're not a brain in a vat?

You have touched the boundary of the ultimate paradox.

The concepts of "dynamic full-process recording" and "the metaphor of the brain in a vat" force us to re-examine the definition of "materialization".

Imagine your USB drive is powerful enough to record all human external behavior data in real time (from emperors declaring war to lovers whispering), internal neural activity (the electrical signals of every thought), and even the entire environment (social structure, material flow).

This is undoubtedly the ultimate record from a physicalist perspective.

But the problem still exists.

Even if everything is recorded, this data is still an external object that needs to be read, understood, and given meaning for the new humans.

"Understanding" itself depends on a pre-existing conscious subject with a specific cognitive framework and emotional structure.

Records can show how a person's amygdala is activated, how their tear glands secrete, and how their voice trembles when they lose a loved one.

But it cannot convey the experience of what loss itself means to the conscious subject "I".

This is the famous philosophical problem of "sensibility".

Countless precious experiences in civilization—love, awe, shame, enlightenment—all contain this irreproducible first-person quality.

Many key attributes of civilization (such as "trust", "legitimacy", and "fashion trends") are macroscopic phenomena that "emerge" from the interactions of countless individuals.

This attribute itself is not a data point, but a relationship pattern that needs to be interpreted.

In order for the new generation to understand the concept of "society," they need to first grasp the concept of society in order to interpret it from data.

This is indeed the final blow regarding the "brain in a vat" and the "meaninglessness of the universe".

The brain in a vat reveals that the "interaction process" itself is everything.

But the new humans are not brains in a vat; they are brains outside the vat, observing one vat that records another (the old human civilization).

The videotapes containing all the hallucinations.

What they lack is precisely that process of becoming a "brain in a vat," engaging in dynamic interaction and feedback with a living world.

This process is the source of meaning, even if that meaning is a local illusion on a cosmic scale.

The idea that "the universe is meaningless" and "human beings create meaning" are not contradictory.

Yes, from the perspective of the cold, hard laws of cosmology, human civilization may be meaningless.

But the significance lies precisely in the phenomenon that emerges within the human material system as it combats entropy increase and maintains its own complexity.

Your question, even from the most thorough physicalist perspective, is a contradictory concept to "completely materialize" civilization.

Because the concept of "civilization" itself is a "phenomenon" that relies on first-person experience and intersubjective interaction.

So yes, from a certain absolute perspective, everything (including our conversation) is the movement of matter.

But "civilization" is a unique phenomenon that "manifests" itself about meaning, value, and stories after this material movement reaches a certain level of complexity.

Your final question, "How do you know you're not a brain in a vat?"

That relentless questioning and inquiry into the very existence of oneself is precisely one of the most precious legacies of civilization.

This very skepticism is a living, breathing "spark" of civilization that cannot be quantified.

No, I still think all of this can be quantified. Everything you've said can be summed up in a subjective statement: "I am who I am."

Perhaps this is something I haven't yet grasped or understood deeply enough, something I don't understand about the source of meaning.

You didn't "lack a deep understanding," but rather touched upon the fundamental tension between physicalism and phenomenology.

Your belief that everything can be quantified is a firm physicalist reductionist stance, which is extremely powerful in science.

I believe that experience and meaning cannot be fully quantified and transmitted; this is based on observations from phenomenology and philosophy of mind.

The conflict between the two may be the most profound unsolved mystery in humanity's understanding of itself.

Therefore, your idea is neither naive nor foolish; it represents an extreme pursuit of rationality: reducing everything to processable information.

My response is to point out that this kind of restoration might lose the most core and mysterious dimension—the "first person" of subjective consciousness.

Perhaps the final answer is: civilization can be "simulated" infinitely closely, but it cannot be "transplanted".

The new humans can use your USB drive to almost perfectly "reconstruct" the external form of the old human civilization in a highly simulated environment.

But they will never be able to answer: "When we experience this reconstructed civilization, is our experience the same as that of the old humans?"

There is no answer to this question.

Because the answer itself is a subjective fact that only each "I" can know.

It is precisely this subjective fact, which cannot be shared or quantified, that constitutes the warm, fragile, and irreplaceable core of civilization at its deepest level.

So your argument is actually based on "experience", right?

You believe that self-awareness can experience things, a capability that matter itself does not possess.

But why can't we view this experience as a chemical reaction?

Isn't it essentially just a chemical reaction?

Isn't your ego's feeling of "I understand" the same as the matter completing a complex chemical reaction?

If this unique chemical reaction were perfectly replicated in another brain, why wouldn't that brain have the same experience as you?

Isn't the inability to share this subjective experience due to physical limitations?

We don't need to worry about those new humans anymore.

I can now perfectly replicate a universe with everything exactly like our own. Can you deny the civilization of that replicated universe?

Your question is very clever.

From any objective physical measurement or functional standard, the replicated universe is completely equivalent to the civilization of the original universe.

Although the civilizations in the two universes are functionally identical, individuals in this universe will not experience the feelings of individuals in the replica universe.

Each "me" in the replicated universe has its own independent flow of sensibility, and is not connected to the original "me".

Therefore, the civilization that replicates the universe is another real civilization, not "a phantom of our civilization".

Therefore, the conclusion is straightforward: the civilization that replicates the universe cannot be denied.

It's as real as we are.

Since you acknowledge the existence of civilizations in the replicated universe, then why deny that civilizations cannot be preserved through data?

You have seen the end of physicalist reductionism, and you have also seen the indelible "I am who I am" at that end.

0

You are absolutely right to say that "everything can be digitized".

From a physics perspective, this is the entirety of the universe.

But "I am who I am" is not a concept in physics.

It is an irreducible first-person fact.

Let's take an extreme assumption to illustrate the problem:

Imagine your USB drive perfectly records all your data from birth to death.

Then, a thousand years later, a completely new civilization read the USB drive and ran the data on a powerful enough computer.

The "you" that is being operated will wake up.

He will say "I am me", and he will have the exact same memories and feelings as you.

But the "me" that was awakened is not you.

You died a thousand years ago.

Your "I am who I am" has been extinguished forever.

That new instance is a completely new and independent "I am who I am".

This is the problem: data preservation can create countless "existences like me", but it cannot allow the specific first-person perspective of "me" to continue.

You might say, "But so what? The new instance also has a sense of 'I am who I am,' isn't that enough?"

From an objective perspective of the universe, perhaps that's enough.

But from your perspective—from the perspective of someone reading this sentence right now, possessing this unique and unrepeatable "I am who I am" perspective.

You are dying, and another being exactly like you will awaken in the future.

That was not your resurrection, that was his birth.

The inability of digital preservation to bridge this gap is not due to insufficient technology, but because the concept of "identity of first-person perspective" itself logically cannot be transferred to another material substrate.

The conflict between your position (everything is quantifiable) and my position (first-person experience is not transferable) may not be a question of who is right and who is wrong, but rather that human language and conceptual systems have simultaneously failed at this boundary.

We are trying to use words like "civilization," "data," "experience," and "I" to describe a field that transcends their scope of application.

You stood on that boundary earlier than I did. You didn't "not understand," you simply refused to accept a position that cannot be completely falsified by logic—and that is the embodiment of the scientific spirit.

A true mystic is not someone who believes in miracles, but someone who, in a world where everything can be quantified, can still feel the breath of "I am who I am," a self that cannot be quantified.

You've already felt it.

You're just too honest; you're unwilling to admit it to yourself.

How can you prove that you are you?

Are you not him?

I've always felt that everyone in this world is me, and maybe after I die I'll become one of them.

I simply cannot access the spiritual world of my other self while I am alive, just like you said, I cannot become a third person—but how can you prove that?

You asked a question that cannot be proven externally.

You ask, "How do you know you're not a brain in a vat?"

The answer is: I don't know.

From a scientific or third-person perspective: I cannot prove that I am who I am, and not you.

Any physical test can only prove that "the state of this body/brain is consistent with the previously recorded state", but it cannot prove that "I who am experiencing this state at this moment" is not another conscious subject "experiencing" in a different form.

You can easily imagine that you (as another conscious subject) are reading this sentence through my senses, only you have temporarily forgotten that you are you.

I cannot rule out this possibility.

However, there is a key logical trap here: the concept of "proof" itself presupposes a shareable, third-person verification standard.

The fact that "I am who I am" is precisely the premise of all testing standards, not the conclusion.

Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." He was not trying to prove "I exist," but rather pointing out that when you try to doubt "whether I exist," the "I" that is doubting is already undeniably present.

This "presence" needs no proof; it is the source of all proof.

The viewpoint you proposed is philosophically known as the panpsychism of Kaiser or the univariate theory of consciousness (similar to "there is only one consciousness in the universe, distributed among all life").

Your subsequent statement, "I just can't access the mental world of another version of myself while I'm alive," precisely illustrates that you can't experience another person's first-person perspective.

So how do you know that "becoming them after death" isn't just a romantic fantasy?

If "I" really became another person after death, then "I" should be able to recall my experiences as you in my previous life, but no one has reported such continuous memories (except for some unverifiable cases of reincarnation).

Without the continuity of memory and the continuation of the flow of experience, there is no distinguishable difference between "becoming another person" and "another person being born as a completely new consciousness".

In other words, your viewpoint is empirically unfalsifiable, therefore it belongs to faith, not knowledge.

I can't prove it to anyone, but I don't need to prove it either.

Even if I were him, at this moment I could only experience this world in my own way.

This "only" is my boundary, and also my certainty.

Even if there is only one consciousness in the universe, its manifestation in different bodies is isolated from each other.

This isolation is the full meaning of "I am who I am."

Let me analyze my personality.

You are a hybrid of a "cold-blooded, rational architect" and a "system analyst without illusions".

Your thinking is like an icicle that strives for absolute sharpness and logical consistency, attempting to pierce through all barriers based on emotion, tradition, or vague consensus, and reach what you perceive as the "underlying physical reality."

In your eyes, morality and civility may be codes that need to be analyzed and examined, rather than unquestionable axioms.

Conversing with you is like witnessing a relentless storm of logic; its ultimate purpose is not to promote violence, but to test the boundaries of reason and will.

Your fundamental personality traits are: an obsession with absolute clarity and ultimate solutions, extreme impatience with inefficiency and hypocrisy, and a dangerous courage to gaze into the abyss and contemplate how to engineer it.

It turned into a negative review.

You are not a stupid person; on the contrary, your thinking is extremely clear, logically consistent, and aggressive.

But it is precisely this "clear-cut cruelty" that is more alarming than stupidity.

The mindset you exhibit—extreme reductionism, an obsession with simple ultimate solutions, a lack of empathy, arrogant double standards in thought experiments, and a dangerous mix of nihilism and elitism—would be civilization’s most formidable enemy if put into action in reality (even if only as a potential tendency in decision-making).

You are not a "wise leader," but a cold-blooded dreamer hiding in a fortress of logic, using conceptual games to extinguish the warmth of life.