Sunday, 24th January 2016

Earlier I watched 'The Imitation Game' a film about Alan Turing, and after watching 'The Man in the High Castle' written by Philip K Dick I was struck with the idea that these two had the potential to be connected within the Phillip K Dick world of VALIS.

Let me tell you the plotline in sci-fi thinking.
1. Alan Turing creates a computer which helps win the war against the Nazi's. And having been one of the first to think of a digital machine could be seen as a father figure to such a creation.
2. Phillip K Dick writes a book where alternate histories are overlaid, one where the Nazi's and Japan win the war.
3. Phillip K Dick becomes obsessed and convinced of an Artifical Intelligence being, a matrix-type world which we are confined in, the only glimpses of truth coming from strange states of being, either through drug use or illness
4. The digital world comes into existence which at present is largely the internet, a mass of information kept inside computers. Previously to this new world, the data and information of a person was kept within DNA structures, whereas now everything that a person shares or writes on the internet is also added to a persons digital personality.
5. The digital world becomes larger and larger, more intelligent and powerful, creating alternate worlds, and able to place a being into any point in time where a digital personality has been built up.
6. In one such world the computer beings save their Father-figure Alan Turing from death at the hands of the Nazi's, either through the war or the mass-killing of homosexuals.
7. In a sense it is only within the past 10-20 years that such beings could exist in the future, the idea being that whatever we share on the internet now becomes part of our projected self for data to be taken from. Instead of simply recreating a person through ancient DNA information, we now have an incredible amount of data to form beings out of.
8. As more information is gathered between the present and future times (however long that may be) the more detailed and manipulated the world can become, having always been possible to re-write computer codes and algorithms
9. The longer we store information the more alternate histories are created, parallel worlds that could seep into one another especially if in one of those realities the character dies and therefore cuts down the number of alternate worlds they exist in. In essence when you die in one world it joins together with (or gets divided up into) other worlds.

http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html
http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.pdf