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What is the Animus? If the answer is “a machine that feeds input to the mind, simulating reality” then the question might as well be “What is the Matrix?” That question is as old as Descartes. A lot has been said about it and none of the answers are particularly definitive.
But that’s not what we’re asking. What is the Animus, exactly?
In Assassin’s Creed, the Animus is a machine that takes genetic memory and uses that to simulate events experienced by the central nervous system.
Genetic memory is information. Evolution is a computer, albeit a very slow one that computes over generations. But when a computer has the luxury of billions of parallel processes over hundreds of millions of years, it can formulate some very complex algorithms indeed, from modes of locomotion to specialized enzymes to sophisticated senses. You don’t need a divine Watchmaker to make a time-keeping mechanism, just a powerful computer and a lot of time.
The current genetic code borne by individuals of the species Homo sapiens sapiens generates the most useful adaptation that life has ever created — abstract reasoning.
Abstract reasoning, built upon the astonishing cerebral hardware of homo sapiens sapiens, is a computer, just like the genetic computer of our DNA. But it is faster than DNA by several orders of magnitude. It processes information countless times a day (compared to DNA which only computes every time cell reproduction occurs), and it can generate results in the abstract realm of mental space, while DNA can only test its algorithms against the physical world.
When the Animus takes genetic memory and feeds it into the central nervous system of a human being, it is transferring data from a slower to a faster processor. More importantly, it can take that same data and input it into multiple humans — multiple processors. The bleeding effect that the Animus produces is the result of the human CNS being overwritten with genetic information.
Even more game-changing than this fact, Subject 16 showed that this raw information, after it is extracted from the genetic code, can be hacked, can be more easily modified. When you stop confusing information for the physical medium it is recorded on, from grooves on vinyl to atomic switches on silicon to genetic base pairs, you realize that information in and of itself is manipulable, because human beings have just the tool to manipulate information — abstract reasoning. Every time you read a book or look at a corporate logo you are accessing an object that exists primarily as mental information (and not as a physical object like yellow paint on glossy posters), that exists in a place that has sometimes been termed the noosphere.
In the first Assassin’s Creed game, Abstergo (the modern-day Templar corporation) has rediscovered Animus technology from artifacts left behind by The Ones Who Came Before. There is a dangerous monopoly on the technology at this point, used in uncreative, dehumanizing ways, like extracting information from unwilling subjects. The earliest computers were used to calculate ballistic trajectories.
In Assassin’s Creed II, the Animus 2.0 puts the power of this feedback loop into more creative hands. It becomes like the training tapes in the Matrix movies, except the subject learns the skills and knowledge already encoded in his DNA. This is arguably a more creative use for the Animus than Abstergo’s.
But even this is simply taking the technology from a monolithic entity, in this case Abstergo, and putting it in the hands of their enemies, in this case the Assassins. At this point it is still a two-dimensional, Us vs. Them environment. The US versus the USSR, with computers.
So what is an Open Source Animus? What would it allow us to do?
An Open Source Animus would be like giving computers to hobbyists and other independent users who are less interested in simulating artillery fire and more interested in things like making music, downloading racy GIFs, and writing legally gray-area stories about their fandoms.
What would happen to the world if the Animus technology was available to all, and available for free?
What if we were given the keys to the totality of our beings, and told to do whatever we wanted? What would we do? Would we throw the keys away, or give them to people more willing to drive us? Or would we take the wheel? Where would we go?
An Open Source Animus would be something that allows you to manipulate the noosphere on your own, without reliance on monolithic authorities or extremist rebels. It would allow us to access the past and simulate the future. It would allow us to play with abstract entities, twist them to mean whatever we want them to, generate new abstractions. It would allow us to direct our own consciousness toward our own ends, instead of toward goals implanted by outside authority. It would set us all free.
But wait.
Don’t we all have something like that already?Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.
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— from inkeatsman
Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’, which he used to mean a discrete unit of transmittable information the same way a ‘gene’ means a discrete unit of biological information. Nowadays a meme tends to refer to internet humor, but it’s a more general term, covering anything from religious deities to catchphrases to corporate logos.
Memetic infection is a well-documented but poorly-understood phenomenon. Here is a quick look at one recent infection.
The meme ‘Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted’ has its first confirmed occurrence in modern times in the 1938 Slovenian novel Alamut (Eagle’s Nest), about Hassan ibn Sabbah, the founder of the Assassins who ruled from Alamut. This novel was the inspiration for Assassin’s Creed itself. In this story Hassan ibn Sabbah uses hashish to drug his fedai (soldiers who obey orders with no fear of death) into believing he could bring all his followers into the gardens of heaven.
The meme resurfaces in Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy. Attributing the story of Hassan-i-Sabbah’s famous motto to the historian Juvaini, he cites this as an important maxim of the Discordians, who worship (in a strange hybrid of irony and earnestness) the goddess Eris aka Discordia, who is most famous for messing up a party on Mount Olympus by placing a golden apple with the word ‘Kallisti’ (meaning ‘for the prettiest one’) where Hera, Aphrodite, and Artemis could find it, causing the Trojan War. The golden apple of desire figures prominently in the Illuminatus! trilogy, from mythology to logos to a very memorable sex act.
Enter Assassin’s Creed, a game about the Assassins centered around an artifact known as a Piece of Eden, which is sometimes depicted as a golden apple — the forbidden fruit of Knowledge that Adam and Eve steal from the Garden of Eden. A memory of this very event is unlocked from Subject 16’s memories.
This group of memes has persisted in works of fiction, which is not to take anything away from its contagiousness or its ability to shape the worldviews of its hosts. Fictional works have dominated the thought and history of mankind since the first myth was ever told. Some memes, like those propagated by orthodox religion, infect their hosts with thoughts of submission and salvation, of the struggle of good (us) against evil (them).
The meme represented by the Assassin’s Creed is the opposite. It infects its hosts with the drive for self-determination, with a mistrust of authority, with an unwillingness to take anything at face value, and a suspicion toward any truths that are untempered by personal experience.
We are all infected. From tattoos to graffiti, from video games to Discordian popes. And we are contagious.
Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.
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There is a fallacy about convention which Ken Wilber has termed the pre/trans (or pre/post) fallacy.
To put it as plainly as I can, people who object to a convention fall either under those who refuse to submit themselves to the convention out of ego (pre-conventional), or those who have emerged out of the convention only after submitting to it, because it once helped them focus but now limits them (trans-conventional/post-conventional). This applies to any convention: your church, your fraternity, your school, your family.
It is easy to confuse the pre-conventional for the post-conventional. The pre-conventional often hijack the teachings of the post-conventional in order to justify a narcissistic refusal to evolve. The pre-conventional and the post-conventional are lumped together as ‘unconventional’, a term that only serves to confuse.
When we first meet Altaïr in the first game, he scoffs at the Three Tenets: not to kill innocents, to hide in plain sight, and to never compromise the brotherhood. He uses the Maxim itself to justify his blatant disregard for the Tenets; since ‘Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted’, then the Tenets are not true, and he is therefore permitted to break them. He is egotistic, narcissistic, pre-conventional.
After his monumental failure, Al Mualim breaks him, or rather his ego. He undergoes a staged ritualistic death (a standard initiatory technique) and is stripped of all his ranks and possessions (another deconditioning method). He submits himself to Al Mualim’s orders and the Three Tenets unquestioningly. As a novice, Altaïr learns to humbly put aside his ego for the greater good of the Brotherhood, despite his talents. He learns to get along with others. Others learn to get along with him. He becomes conventional.
There is a funny thing about submitting yourself to formality. Within the restrictions of form one can surrender the ego to a degree that is impossible in a world that is in continuous flux.
Zen Buddhists submit themselves to the restriction of sitting meditation, and in the process find a place within that restriction that frees them to experience the moment as it arises without the ego’s witty side comments. Martial artists and athletes, who repeat the same actions over and over again in training and who submit to arbitrary game rules and restrictions, describe a ‘flow’ state that comes when the ‘I’ steps aside, allowing the ‘doing’ to shine through naturally.
Altaïr discovers that within the bounds of his Brotherhood and its Creed he becomes truly free to evolve. He learns to relate to his brothers as individuals rather than interchangeable cogs in the machine — even to Malik, who has the most cause to hate him. He learns that the Tenets provide a direction to his life, where previously he simply followed the whims and desires of his ego with no fixed goal. And he learns the true meaning of the Creed: Even his own egotistical ‘truths’ were as untrue and limiting as any imposed by an outside authority, such as Al Mualim himself.
He learned that Al Mualim was just as blind to his own selfish truths as anyone else, and this realization permitted Altaïr to surpass him, and to become the next Grand Master. Altaïr eventually challenges and defeats Al Mualim, but only after he learned not to disregard convention, but to integrate it and transcend it. He becomes post-conventional, and sets the new standard — the new convention — for his brothers to follow, integrate, and transcend.
In Altaïr’s own words, “…Our Creed does not command us to be free. It commands us to be wise.”
Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.
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- from the photostream of neave
Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.
Our ancestors are already our memories. We are already the memories of our children. We already exist in a multidimensional hypermoment that has already happened, an event that we will never fully comprehend, an event we might as well call eternity, or God, or Emptiness, or Nothing.
We are eyes at different angles to it, and we mistake the view from each facet for the crystallized Nothing itself. But sometimes we catch a glimpse of it. Sometimes we can touch it.
We guide our Selves, unique avatars immersed in the eternal moment, or we drift along, but we never forget that ultimately, it is happening. Not because of us, not in spite of us.
It is all happening, right now. We don’t understand it. How you behave on this ride we’re all on is up to you.
Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.
