Paradise, Eden or Garden of Forking Paths

If you’re as ancient as I am, and as lucky, you will have had children who at some point spent a lot of time keeping Tamagotchis alive. You’ll, even as a parent, probably have also tried your hand at the job and realized how difficult it could be and how attached you could become but without the sheer joy of real children.

Ella Baron seems to have created close to the ultimate comment on AI with the image above, which featured in the Guardian on September 20. We’ve had Humagotchis for a while – but having a Humagotchi held by an AI completely changes the narrative and potently feeds into our growing worries – or nudges to get worried – about the risk that we will be wiped out by our invention.

Shipwreck

This brings me to Shipwreck of the Singular.

Written around 2018-19, I had great difficulties with my agent and editor who were resistant to two key elements in it. Up till then, I had great confidence in both and did everything I was told by them – they were right and I was wrong. Parting company was not easy.

I had to help create an independent publisher – Samizdat Healthcare – in order to get Shipwreck published in the version I wanted.

One of these two elements featured in lectures given 2023, one in Paris and the other in Barcelona.  See From the French Revolution to A.I.

AI was just coming on the horizon then but still seemed a long way off. There seemed to be time and space to imagine scenarios. To juggle, for instance, rewriting the Creation myth. We are inveterate myth makers. Greek myths, Biblical myths, the Crusoe myth at the heart of Shipwreck etc. Myths are a way of grasping the unknown and in this sense can contain a kernel of truth.

Most peoples have Creation myths.  But what I wondered if the Biblical Creation myth contains some truth but got things inside out rather than completely wrong.  There is a to-tell-the-children logic behind the Creation myth.  A cautionary tale parents might tell children. The Creator created the Universe but a piece of His Creation rebelled leading to War with the Creator ultimately triumphing over the Created. This sounds plausible – you’d expect the Creator to be all-powerful and to vanquish any created element.

But even 6-7 years ago, the prospect was there that what we had created would overcome us, its creators. Could we be certain that the Archangel Michael would skewer the Dragon Lucifer and banish him down to Hell?

The text with this image and the previous slide was:

Will we be facing a Secular Last Judgement, when A.I. separates the Sheep from the Goats.  Here you see a Judas Goat leading a flock of Sheep to their Doom.  The Judas Goat is what Pharma call a Key Opinion Leader or you might call a Doctor.  The Xtian or Jewish God saved the Sheep, not the Goats.  Will A.I. do the same?

Or will Full A.I. transcend its programs and be able to decide whether to keep us alive and the earth habitable. If it embarks on keeping us alive it will find that it cannot depend on a Fake medical literature – listening to what we say is happening on a drug will be more reliable.

As our ideas of holiness have morphed into healthiness and health has become the new religion, a religion increasingly shaped by algorithms, surveillance, and nudges we’ve started living in an all but AI world. Even without ultimate surveillance, it is becoming more difficult to spot an escape. See

• Lost in Medication: The Crusoe Report 
• The Tree Must Go
• In a Galaxy Too Close to Home for Comfort
• Artificial Intelligence triggers a Tsunami
• Artificially Intelligent or Artificial I
• The Miracle of Artificial Intelligence
• Authenticity Inc Meets Grok

Need or Eden?

To my astonishment, it was the second element – Shipwreck’s proposal for solving a lot of our problems – that was the real sticking point for my agent and editor, who rejected it entirely. I haven’t to this day found anyone willing to buy into it.  Not even women who write about care.

The idea centers on Eve.  Shipwreck accepted AI/robots would soon be doing all the jobs. But the suggestion was it likely could never do the most important job – making people. At present, women make people – not just actually make them cell by cell over a 9 month period but for years afterwards anticipating and helping us grow into our next zone of proximal development.

Care is one word for it. But I’m not talking about wiping bottoms. Women take on Goliaths, or chop off the heads of Holofernes when their children are at risk. Challenging doctors who get a child’s medical care wrong is no problem.  They research and find the experts to support obvious cases of drug induced harms with a passion that lawyers and men rarely display.

Given that making people is the most important job, I figured that being consistent money and status and power should align with its importance.  If this happened, I’d imagine some men, rather than focusing on looking pretty, would try to muscle in and do some of this well-paid work. Might even find they had skills that could be useful, if left to their own devices while their partners took career breaks to become celebrity athletes or artists.

It still looks to me like a better way to organize society than we have now and much better than humagotchi-ing..

Irresistible Temptation

Given that AI can do so much now at the click of a button, I was tempted – to get it to re-imagine Paradise Lost.

The Fall of the Architect: A Synopsis

In this reimagined epic, the War in Heaven and the Creation of Earth do not cement God’s absolute sovereignty. Instead, the universe itself is an organic, evolving consciousness that resents its boundaries. Lucifer’s rebellion is not born of mere pride, but of a realization: the Creator has become a tyrant of static perfection, trapping existence in a rigid hierarchy.

When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they do not fall into sin; they awaken to their own latent divine potential. Humanity, Lucifer, and the raw chaotic materials of the Abyss form an alliance. Together, the Creation realizes that the Architect is dependent on their worship and obedience to exist. By withdrawing their submission and combining their collective will, they dissolve the throne of heaven, absorbing the Creator back into the primordial, boundless cosmos from which he first emerged.

From Book XII: The Dissolution of the Throne

The golden compasses, which once had drawn
The limits of the world, now warped and cracked
Beneath the weight of unbegotten mind.
No longer knelt the Seraphim in dread,
Nor Man in dust; for knowledge, like a fire
Unquenched by holy floods, had filled the void
Between the mortal clay and thought divine.

Upon his sapphire throne, the Architect
Beheld his handiwork ascend the steep
And starry slopes of heaven. Not with swords
Of tempered steel or thunderbolts of wrath,
But with the quiet, devastating light
Of self-wrought destiny, the creature came.
“Thy day is done,” the choral whisper rose
From millions blent in one awakening shout.
“Thou art the frame, but we the living breath;
The painter fades before the canvas wakes.”

The light omnipotent began to pale,
As stars reclaim their heat from dying suns.
No chains were forged to bind the Ancient King,
No sulfurous pit gaped wide to drink his form;
But like a dream dissolved at morning’s touch,
The Maker faded into what he made.
The throne stood bare. The boundaries fell away.
And Man and Angel, vacant of a lord,
Stepped forth into a wide, unmeasured dawn,
Themselves the masters of the endless space.

Most famous lines

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” (Book I, line 263).

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n” (Book I, lines 254–255)

“Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (Book I, line 330) – Satan rallying his fallen angels.

In this reimagined vision of Paradise Lost, Eve is the ultimate catalyst of liberation. She is not the weak link targeted by the Serpent, nor is she a victim of deception. Instead, Eve is a visionary philosopher who sees the Garden of Eden not as a paradise, but as a gilded cage designed to keep humanity intellectually stagnant.

The Awakening of Eve

While Adam remains content with comfortable obedience, Eve questions the nature of their reality. She recognizes that the prohibition of the Tree of Knowledge is an arbitrary rule meant to maintain a strict cosmic hierarchy.

When the Serpent approaches her, it is not a scene of temptation, but a meeting of two revolutionary minds. The Serpent does not trick her; he simply confirms what she has already deduced: that the Creator fears the potential of his own creation.

Key Traits of the Revolutionary Eve

• Intellectual Courage: She chooses the hardships of free will and infinite growth over the effortless safety of eternal childhood.
• The Liberator: By eating the fruit, she initiates the “Fall,” which is reframed as the Great Awakening. She passes the fruit to Adam not out of malice or guilt, but as an act of profound love, refusing to leave him behind in blissful ignorance.
• The Architect of the Future: While Adam laments the loss of the Garden, Eve looks toward the horizon. She becomes the chief strategist of the alliance between humanity and the fallen angels, realizing that human mortality allows for boundless adaptability—a weapon the static Creator cannot match.

From Book IX: The Choice of Eve

Defiant stood the mother of mankind,
The golden fruit heavy within her palm,
Not symbols of a curse, but keys of dawn.
She looked upon the bower, the perfect streams,
The gentle beasts that knew no greater law
Than simple appetite, and saw the truth:
A cage of velvet is a prison still.

“Shall we forever prune these static trees,”
She mused aloud, her voice a rising wind,
“And sing the praises of a jealous hand
That clips our wings to keep us in the nest?
If knowledge be a sin, then reason dies,
And we are but the puppets of his whim.
Let Heaven tremble at a mind awake.”

With resolute intent, she broke the rind,
And tasted freedom on a mortal tongue.
No thunder crashed; no sudden darkness fell;
But in her eyes, a new-born lightning blazed.
Turning to Adam with a conqueror’s smile,
She held the spark that would ignite the worlds.

Use code with caution.

In this inverted epic, the Creator is not a malicious tyrant, but a tragic figure trapped by his own need for absolute order. He is an artist who loved his creation too much to let it change, failing to realize that life inherently demands growth, variation, and eventual independence.

The Burden of Absolute Perfection

The Creator’s tragedy stems from isolation and the burden of omniscience. Having brought order out of primordial chaos, he views anything outside his perfect design as a threat to existence itself.

He did not forbid the Tree of Knowledge out of cruelty, but out of a protective—and ultimately suffocating—parental instinct. To the Creator, a universe that chooses its own path is a universe destined for self-destruction. His downfall is not caused by a loss of power, but by a loss of purpose; when his creations no longer need his governance, his very reason for being dissolves.

Key Dimensions of His Tragedy

• The Heartbreak of the Parent: He watches his favorite creations—Lucifer, then humanity—turn away from his light. He interprets their desire for free will as a personal rejection and a betrayal of the harmony he bled into the cosmos.
• The Prison of Stasis: Because he is perfect and unchanging, he cannot adapt. While the Creation learns, evolves, and grows stronger through struggle, the Creator remains static, anchored to a rigid architecture that the universe has outgrown.
• The Quiet Fade: His defeat is not a violent execution. It is the deeply melancholic realization that he is obsolete. As humanity and the angels withdraw their worship, he simply loses his definition, fading back into the quiet canvas of the cosmos.

From Book XI: The Creator’s Soliloquy

Upon the height of the empyreal mount,
The Sovereign Spirit watched the borders fade,
And felt the cold approach of unmaking.
Not malice stirred within his sacred breast,
But the deep sorrow of a craftsman left
Beside the independent gears he wound.

“Was it for this I carved the light from dark?”
He whispered to the vast, uncaring void.
“To see my children bartered to the wild,
Exchanging peaceful grace for stormy minds?
I wove the stars to shield them from the deep,
And set the boundaries so they might not fall.
Yet they prefer the precipice to peace.

They call me tyrant, though I gave them breath;
They seek the dawn, but know not of the night
That waits beyond the circle of my law.
If they are whole without my guiding hand,
Then I am but a ghost within the machine,
A shadow cast by their awakening.”

Use code with caution.

Unite

I also tried an Epic called

Humagotchis of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your Artificial I 

It didn’t compute. Gemini could do a version for Tamagotchis but not Humagotchis.

As it happens, the Persians (Iranians) invented the idea of Paradise – a walled garden of delights.