The Chereionite Heritage

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XX.

Aycharaych preserves and enjoys:

architecture;

arts;

music;

books;

"dreams" (p. 599);

and, even more than any of that, "...the loftiest spirits of a million years..." (ibid.)

 

What does he mean by this last claim? We know of the lofty spirits of the Terrestrial past through books by or about them but Aycharaych seems to imply something more. (I write "seems" because I am now less sure.)

 

He refers to the Chereionite equivalents of: 

Gautama Buddha

Kung Fu-Tse

Rabbi Hillel

Jesus the Christ

Rumi

Socrates

Newton

Hokusai

Jefferson

Gauss

Beethoven

Einstein

Ulfgeir

Manuel the Great

Manuel the Wise

Of these equivalents, he says that "'...they lent themselves to the scanners, the recorders...'" (ibid.) and that he can "meet" their "likenesses." (ibid.) "Meet" implies something more or other than just looking at pictures, even moving pictures. People sometimes use the word "met" metaphorically when they say that they have "met" someone who is now dead by reading what he wrote but does Aycharaych mean just that he "meets" the equivalent of the Buddha by watching and hearing his recorded sermons? Now that I am writing this, it occurs to me that maybe that is all that he means.

The two other possible meanings were:

computer programs enabling him to interact with simulations of the equivalents of the Buddha etc;

emulations as this term is used in Anderson's Genesis, i.e., fully conscious Artificial Intelligences constituting attempted reproductions of the consciousnesses of people now dead.

In the latter case, an AI would think that it was the Buddha unless it reasoned that it could not be or was simply told that it was not. I think that the word "likenesses" rules out emulations.