| | A smidgen of Hindu metaphysics might come in handy here.
Allegedly - since I can't read the original sanscrit - the core of Hindu ontology is this:
Time is unbounded and infinite. Thus, anything that can happen will and has happened, an infinite number of times. Thus, we could be said now and at any other time to be living at the pinnacle of evolution.
In that infinite time, there has been plenty of time for the emergence of the highest form of intelligence that is possible. Call it God. God, however, when he becomes too much of the universe, finds that he cannot then perceive himself. Any mirror he creates may be just a figment of His imagination. Objectivity becomes impossible and becoming bigger, more powerful, better integrated has reached a logical limiting point.
So, in order to get around this and prevent it from happening, God divides himself into various aspects - Kali, Shiva, Krishna, ect. - and forgets that he is one being. The dance of life then becomes the working out of the infinite possibilities of interaction between these different aspects, played out via the contest of evolution toward Godhood among His creations, e.g., you and me.
The Pandoran Gaia is in a similar fix, like a miniature Vedic God. Such a being is still capable of error and still needs the same kind of feedback and mirroring of mind that any consciousness in the real world would need to remain sane. Thus, the development of human equivalent intelligence among some subset of its subject entities would be natural, desireable and likely inevitable, along with volition, despite the risks entailed.
The Pandoran natives do not spend their lives plugged into this Gaian entitiy, but rather, appear to have as much curiousity and free will as humans. This mini-God has its limits, and those include both the natural computational limits of mental focus, meaning that no such entity could directly apprehend and control an unlimited number of subjects - the laws of physics preclude that - and also the limits on how much influence should be exerted, given that a function of the Pandoran natives is to mirror the consciousness of this being.
Slaves or robots cannot perform the function of objective perceptual reaffirmation that Branden discussed in "The Virtue of Selfishness." Thus, the Pandorans have been engineered to have free will. However, they also have the ability to directly apprehend the consciousness of other beings who have the correct software, hardware and interfaces, including their God. This is done sparingly, as it tends to undercut the reason for creating them to begin with. I.e., getting to close to God undermines their independence as a check on His error.
This Pandoran Gaia would likely be quite curious about the humans and what they might offer, just as any highly intelligent volitional entity would be. However, from its standpoint, the humans are also pretty scary, as they do not have the ability to literally see through another's eyes, and are thus clearly more prone to make choices that do not take into account the welfare and rights of others.
My impression is that the Pandoran Gaia, while obviously post-human in many respects and capabilities, is still relatively a child, partially because, in spite of the free will of the native humanoids, it has not ever had the opportunity to deal with a completely independent intelligence that has not grown up within its control.
Maybe Cameron could run with this idea for a sequel...
I didn't watch any of the new Battlestar Gallactica series, but I've read somewhere that the Zylons - a robot species that had migrated to silicon from being biological entities - finally gave up their attempt to wipe out humans when they reached the logical conclusion that the humans had something that they lacked and could never have and which was valuable to them - namely true consciousness.
I have written elsewhere, going back a couple decades, that one of the real technical problems fast approaching our own civilization is that we will eventually, probably in the next couple decades, develop something that is smarter than we are. If that something is a non-conscious computational entity, which is quite possible, then it will be crucial to avoid the "Terminator" syndrome, in which the genius level computer concludes that humans are just in the way.
The only long-term solution that I know of is the same one finally achieved with the Xylons. This super smart, but non-conscious entity will have to be shown and tested to understand that no matter how smart it is, it lacks something fundamental that makes keeping humans around and respecting their rights essential to its own welfare.
Another way of looking at this is with respect to "Halting states," or similar epistemological dilemnas that minds are subject to. You cannot have a mind that can both challenge its own assumptions and also not be subject to potential lethal loss of contact with reality. It is the grounding in perceptual reality that is our most basic and essential safeguard against drowning in delusional constructs of our own consciousness. A purely robotic mind, consisting of executable code, does not have that safeguard. Predictably, it will run head on into a halting state that cannot in theory be predicted or avoided. Thus, it is implicitly dependent upon other entities - us - who do have that perceptual guard to guide it around such glitches.
Because of the importance to our own survival of solving this problem BEFORE someone pushes the Terminator's ON button, I find movies such as "Avatar" particularly valuable. Even if there are things about the movie that one disagrees with, at least it opens up discussion and attention where there was little before.
|
|
In case you don't know the true nature of mother-goddess worshipping tribesman, think of the reputation of Hera. Think of the reputation of 
All of which information you may find it even easier to evade because from our Universities, to our Sit-Coms, to the Primate of the Anglican Church we are taught that god is a jolly fat black lesbian, and that the rapist, the exploiter, the destroyer of worlds is a white man in a business suit.
