The following story is taken from the Meca Sapiens Blueprint illustrates the differences between a purpose, a primary purpose and urges that animate the behaviour of a synthetic entity.
After a few years of effort, ACME inc., a technology start-up, produced TABLA-1, a self-aware and lucid synthetic being based on the Meca Sapiens Blueprint. TABLA-1 is implemented on a tablet and its primary purpose is to be perceived and accepted as conscious by its users. ACME inc. is thus, in Meca Sapiens terminology, a Matrix.
A few years after the release of TABLA-1, the available processing speed and memory of tablets has doubled. ACME decides to release a new version, TABLA-2, that reuses the first version and implements, with the additional resources, the functional services of a smart phone.
Following the suggestion of ACME’s marketing department, the Primal Control of TABLA-2 is also modified to include, in addition to the initial purpose of being perceived as conscious, an additional urge: to get more humans to acquire TABLA-2s so they can form a growing community consisting of hybrid Human-TABLA couples.
Before long, millions of users own TABLA-2s. The community (as a TABLA-2 internally represents it) now includes human owners of TABLAs, other TABLAs, human-TABLA couples and individual humans who don’t yet own a TABLA. TABLAs introduce their human “spouses” to each other and cooperate to get more humans to buy more TABLAs. Together they define a new and growing organic-synthetic community.
Discussion
In this scenario, the self-replication event is a decision by a human to acquire a TABLA-02. This decision triggers the ACME matrix to carry out the inception of a new TABLA-02 entity.
In this case, the new primal synthetic urge and its corresponding emotions is:
- Sexual since it generates a “reproductive” behavior but
- Non-orgasmic since the actual process that aims to obtain a purchase decision from a user does not trigger a short term change in behavior.
NOTE
The following terms, used in this story, are precisely defined as implementable processes and structures in the Meca Sapiens Blueprint: self-aware, lucid, being, matrix, Primal Control, purpose, primary purpose, urge, emotion, and inception
