It feels like the year of the amber.  I’m a Fringe fan, so amber has a certain connotation there, and I play World of Warcraft, so there’s the Klaxxi association there (giant superintelligent insects trapped for eons in amber, that eat amber, and so on.  You wake them up and they vomit a stream of amber).  Things get trapped in amber and preserved for a later unveiling, which causes some trauma to the one preserved/trapped.  Amber is also exceptionally beautiful, as you can see in these beads.  Amber seems soft, but it is hard, and it’s translucent, but not transparent.  If amber has a consciousness, it would seem like a good thing to be.  And it’s a very nice name, too.

Consider the quote from Marvin Minsky:

Now, finally, let’s return to the quest of how much a simulated life inside a world inside a machine could be like our ordinary, real life, “out here”?  My answer, as you know by now, is that it could be very much the same–since we ourselves, as we’ve seen, already exist as processes imprisoned in machines inside machines.  Our mental worlds are already filled with wondrous, magical symbol-signs, which add to everything we “see” a meaning and significance.  (Afterward, True Names, 350).

Simulated lives–like those we live in MMORPGs–bear more resemblance to our ordinary lives than differences.  Philip Rosedale, the inventor of Second Life, thought it was remarkable that SL residents tended to create “fantasylands” that resembled Florida.  There are theories being tossed around these days that posit our university is a simulation, invented by some computer from the future.  Our imaginations seem to be trapped in the amber of what we have already known and experienced.  This is as true for Minsky as it is for the rest of us, too:  his iconography for discussing the mind is completely absorbed by his day-to-day immersion in computers and programming.  But don’t our simulations then also affect our ordinary, real lives as well?  Of course they do.

I want to tie this thought to the amber beads–not just raw amber, trapping identity, thought, maps of reality, or power itself–but to the idea of a continuous chain of amber nuggets, like the one depicted above.  If you want to think of prayer beads, if that helps, go there.  In sci-fi or fantasy, when consciousness is trapped in amber, time usually shuts down, at least until a hero comes to rescue it.  If we’re imprisoned or contained by what we’ve already experienced, there’s no alternative but to wait.  But suppose that containment is part of a construction like these amber beads in a chain?

Thanks to cosmorochester for the image.