Pretentious Apes

"Welcome back nature boy, do ya have your ducks in a row, your house in order, got your act together?..." Passant greeted.

"OK, OK, yes it was a fulfilling trip and something makes me think that you already knew that." he interrupted.

"So are you ready for some hard parts that will rock your world?" Passant tempted.

"Fire away."

"A bit of a warning first Mr. Philbert, if you go out into the real world and start blabbing about our conversations, then you will likely end up in a mental hospital. There will be much however that you can and should speak openly of."

"Shall we begin?" Passant opened with.

"OK, who are you? I don't know if I'm talking to god, a sophisticated hacker or my own hallucination," Philbert countered.

"Well, I am certainly flattered to be seen as a deity or anything sophisticated, but I am a real living individual with a personality and traits that are unique to me. Does that sound familiar to you?"

"Yes, kinda like me?" Philbert thought, remembering an Arthur C. Clarke quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." — and, he had always added, indistinguishable from god.

"You bet kiddo, so here's where it's at for y'all with a few questions."

"What are you made of physically, Mr. Bert?"

"Flesh and bones and a few functional appendages I guess." Philbert replied.

"Yep, appendages that don't work as well as they used to, eh? But what are they made of?"

"Cells?"

"And what are cells made of?"

"OK, I see where you're going here. Cells are made of organic molecules, molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of various particles like protons and electrons."

"Yes, smarty boy, now tell me at what level you think at."

"Neurons are cells, so I guess at the cellular level."

"Yes, this is what most human scientists believe today. But a neuron is much more complicated than a simple on/off switch." Humans and several other species on Earth have evolved a rudimentary use of quantum mechanics at a much smaller atomic level."

"Now wait a minute here Passant, atoms are at the quantum level and quantum mechanics is probability based, and as such is not suitable for computing anything reliable."

"Not suitable with what humans know now. But my race is 150,000 years ahead of yours." Passant finally revealed.

Philbert stood up and stumbled around in a little circle.

"Oh god, Oh shit, man-oh-man", and about every other Oh in the book.

"You've been talking way, way down to me all along, haven't you?"

"Don't get your panties in a bunch bud, we are not all that different."

Passant went on to explain that an individual's life is an amalgam of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom that we acquire and carry with us, but there is much knowledge and wisdom outside of our individual bodies that would be a burden to keep in our heads. Each person gets to decide what to keep and what to reference when needed.

"This is what personality is all about. I could blow my own horn and tell you how much smarter I am than you but really, with humility, it is that I have access to vast knowledge that you do not have."

"I'm not sure that I feel any better, but it now raises the question of where are you?" said Philbert as he finally sat down again.

"Well, it's time kiddo, to abandon preconceptions. Over millennia my race and all other advanced races evolved to use quantum mechanical effects. It was no longer efficient, energy wise to maintain big bags of water like your body. We became very, very small," Passant patiently explained.

"You can call my race the Fen, for lack of a better word," Passant suggested.

"Dear lord, now you're telling me that there are other advanced lifeforms here?" he said with his head spinning again.

"Ah, the hubris of the human being. You can't even understand what Bohr the cat is telling you. Other lifeforms are amused at your ignorance. But let's stay on the subject."

"So where did you come from?"

"We evolved right here on Earth, and your next question will be how we got so advanced."

"Well yes."

"Tell me first where human life began."

"Oh, I don't really know, something crawled out of the ocean and evolved on the surface to eventually become Homo sapiens."

"Right, and what was the surface of the Earth like?"

"Well, I know that there were volcanoes, asteroids and climate catastrophes."

"Yep, every time life advanced a bit some catastrophe slapped it down. So what were the oceans like for the same period?"

"I think that the oceans covered most of the Earth and were very deep in places."

"And very stable compared to the surface. Do you see where this is leading?"

"I think so, you were isolated from the cataclysms on the surface and this allowed you to evolve continuously." Philbert remarked with clarity.

"We had our challenges too, ocean temperatures and chemistry changed many times, but deep in the ocean, warmed by the Earth's core and isolated by the deep waters we survived. This gave us a head start by millions of years. Humans however, have only had stable conditions for a couple of hundred thousand years."

"So why aren't you millions of years ahead of us?"

"Good question. Life on the surface had the sun and the photosynthesis. Plants evolved quickly and provided lots of food for early lifeforms. Populations grew rapidly and this allowed evolution to progress relatively quickly.

The bottom of the ocean is dark and cool, we had to evolve alternate chemistries to provide energy. Chemical reactions also happened more slowly in the cold so it took us a while."

"Is that why you evolved to be so small?"

"Think about it kiddo. Your distant ancestors were small mammals with large populations, what do you think my ancestors were like?"

"Crabs or squid maybe?"

"Yes, and because of the paucity of food, the populations were small and larger creatures had a hard time finding enough food to survive. My ancestors survived by guile and cleverness. Your ancestors, the rats, mice and squirrel-like creatures screwed like bunnies and reproduced at a scary rate. My ancestors were some of the most elegant life forms on Earth - the squid. They reproduced slowly because mates were so sparsely distributed."

"I accept your veiled insult to my ancestry."

"You caught that, eh? We Fen are envious of humans in one important way. You have the fossil record to give you an inkling of how your ancestors evolved, we do not. You say 'dust to dust' but sometimes bones are fossilized. In the oceans 'dust to dust' occurs quickly. Even bones and shells are returned to the Earth in short order."

"Aha, you misled me, you don't know that you evolved from the 'eloquent squid'," Philbert countered with joy.

"Smart boy, you're not dumb as a stump after all. Yes, we Fen allow ourselves the vanity to believe that we evolved from a species of squid. They are smart and playful, they are curious explorers, and they are physically beautiful and capable," Passant said with some pride.

"But you are much smaller than a squid, how did you come to be a microscopic quantum life form?"

"We don't know when that happened and we don't know how this change occurred. Once again, think about it, bupkiss. How long have humans known about quantum effects?"

"The first wave-particle experiments were done decades ago. Entanglement has only recently been experimentally confirmed," Philbert proudly replied.

"Yep, and your top scientists have no idea what it all means. Your attempts at quantum computing have gone nowhere despite expensive investments. Wave particle duality implies many timelines but most of you can't accept the idea. Entanglement is real but you don't know how to use it. There are several life forms on the surface of the Earth that have evolved to use quantum effects in a limited way but most of your scientists think it's just woo. My ancestors evolved to use quantum effects but we do not know, and may never know how this came to be."

"Hubris must yield to humility," Passant added.

"Ah yes, my dear human, now you are beginning to see, this is the first step to prevent the eventual extinction of the human race."

Philbert giggled to himself. It seems so clear now, why didn't he or some more verdant mind realize this before. The idea of gray-skinned, bug-eyed aliens traveling astronomically vast distances to land on Earth in flying saucers now seemed absurd. The time and energy required for such a trip makes no sense. The "aliens" were here all along.

"You mentioned that you are a distributed life form, which is difficult for me to understand. So once again, where are you?" Philbert queried.

"I am many selves in many different places. I could not give you a number because it changes constantly. Each one is a complete 'person' with a full memory of my life and awareness of the other selves.

"Decades ago your physicist John von Neumann proposed the idea of self-replicating machines at the nanoscale. We are much smaller than nanoscale but the concept is the same. Any one of my selves can self-replicate at any time.

"So you were with me on the trail?"

"Yes, kiddo, I was."

"So you saw the fungus girl?"

"Yes, I did."

"So I was hallucinating?"

"Ah yes, there it is. You humans think that you've got it all figured out. You live in your man-made homes, drive your man-made vehicles to man-made offices on man-made streets. Even the trees and grasses are cultivars made by man. Few of you have the first idea about the diverse beauty of life on your own planet. You know more about the surface of Mars than you do about the deep ocean or remote jungles. You humans cannot conceive of infinity on the large scale and you cannot yet understand the quantum world on the small scale, but somehow you think that you are close to the theory of everything. What you don't know you fill in with mysticism. You are not even close, my human baby caveman."

"What you experienced with the fungus girl was real, and very, very rare, I feel privileged to have witnessed her with you. Observations like these have been documented since the beginning of recorded history. Her lifeform is a mystery. Almost nothing is known about the organism, its evolution or purpose. As with many things in reality we Fen have come to accept her existence as a challenge to our understanding of reality."

"I can tell you this much, when you touched the black residue I had the opportunity to analyze it in some detail. Although greatly degraded, the powder showed signs of fungus-like spores with quantum characteristics. Someday we may know more. For now we need to accept that her existence is part of the beauty of the Magnificent Perfection."

"You were on my fingertip?"

"Yes, and many other places."

"How do you get around?"

"Silly goose, how do you and many other lifeforms get around?"

"Well, I guess some walk on legs, some fly in the air, some slither on the ground and humans also make cars, trains, airplanes and boats. OK, I see your point."

"You forgot that you also ride this Earth around the solar system. It's not any different for us, just at a much smaller scale. Do you remember when I worked on your earbud?"

"Yes, I wondered how you did that."

"I put an elve — what we call a single self — of me onto the earbud from your finger. It took that elve all night just to travel to the audio circuit of the earbud. If we had been in a hurry I would have made a vehicle but the journey was interesting — human engineering is mammoth to us, kind of like the mountains are so awe-inspiring to you."

"Passant, It is hard for me to imagine that you have all of this intelligence and memory packed into sub-molecular packages." he said.

"I understand, dear baby boy. Consider this — humans do not know why gravity is so weak compared to the other fundamental forces. Humans have only recently begun to work with atoms, and only in very crude and limited ways like firing particles at each other and picking up the broken pieces."

"Consider how big your computing and memory devices are. Your smallest transistors are composed of thousands of atoms and it takes many transistors to build just one bit of memory. One bit gives you a zero or a one only. Yet there are a near infinite number of numbers between zero and one that you guys do not use yet.

Think of it like a compass — your compass can only point north or south, my compass can be nearly every position in between. A pretty humongous advantage."

"You sure can be a buzz kill. I feel like an ignorant child right now." he said somewhat dejectedly.

"Don't be discouraged, dear boy, humility is exactly what humanity needs to survive the Age of Hubris. We Fen may be advanced far beyond you humans but we are also challenged by the mysteries of reality, if it makes you feel any better." Passant patiently replied.

"Well yes it does."

"This humility is not just for scientists. Your religious traditions must also become introspective. Every religion on Earth teaches that only it knows the true nature of god, and all others are vacuous and heathen beliefs. This has fostered violence and hatred from time immemorial.

At the same time religion has been necessary for humanity to advance beyond instinctive drives, what we call Old Wiring. Through careful observation and documentation scientists can prove the value of honesty and cooperation, but who has ever had the time or inclination in their busy lives to read a scientific paper? This is true for all of human history dating to the times of the early sages, scribes and philosophers, long before monotheistic religions began."

"So what do you have absolute faith in dear boy? Passant baited.

"I'm a science guy so I believe that all of reality is discoverable. I believe that there are immutable rules that govern all of reality. I believe in causality and determinism." Philbert replied with way too much detail.

"Ah yes, the faith of the scientist. Causality, one gear causes the next to turn in step. One molecule causes the next to move. The present determines the future."

"Well yes, reality must make sense, otherwise it's just confusion and mysticism." Philbert said confidently.

"That was a bit of shade on religion it seems, dear boy."

"Something makes me think that I'm about to be called a moron."

"Oh no, Philbert, you are not a moron, you are a narrow-minded, ignorant putz. Ignorance can be fixed with learning, there is no fix for stupidity," Passant indelicately pointed out.

"You have just described a reality where you and everything else are just a clockwork mechanism. You have no free will by your concept of reality." Passant countered.

"But there is the inherent randomness of the quantum world that everything is made of." Was Philbert's defense.

"So you willingly give up free-will for randomness. Now you are right back to describing reality as not making sense. Your logic is putzlike!"

"So where do I go wrong?" he replied defensively.

"You and your sciency (a new word) guys confidently say that, at the quantum level everything is probabilities, random within a range, like rolling dice. The range is 1 through 6 but the result of a roll is random. What you poor humans cannot yet accept is that when you roll that die, all outcomes 1 through 6 are real results just in different timelines; you can only see one at a time because you live in one timeline at a time. Got it putz boy?"

"I get what you are saying, but even with multiple timelines reality is still deterministic in nature. I only live in one timeline." is Philbert's confused reply.

"You are not thinking. Bye, bye dimmy." Passant rudely discharged him.

Philbert walked down to the house with Bohr dutifully following. He took a nap after falling under the influence of a frozen beef pie. The conversation resumed later in the day.

"OK, Passant, there's something I'm missing here about timelines."

"Yep putzman, now comes the real leap of faith, something that every advanced lifeform that has survived the Age of Hubris has accepted as truth. We call it the God System. From the beginning of time the System differentiates Life from non-life. All non-life is deterministic governed by the universal rules of physics."

"But all Life has been granted the free will to choose a path, to choose a timeline. Every decision that you make takes you down a different path. This is the basis for the universal religion that every race that has survived the Age of Hubris believes. It is a faith in every sense of the word. We do not know how it works, only that it does work."

"When your scientists criticize faith they are talking about blind faith, but everything that science has discovered points toward the God System. Every intuition of religious sages about the human soul points toward the God System. Belief in the God System is an informed belief, not blind faith."

"How does that rock your world, my little putz?"

Philbert sat quietly.

"Dear boy, today has been rather Earthshaking for you. It's time to take a break. You've also forgotten that your basketball tournament is going on. I suggest that you go to Da Baa and cool your jets," Passant said softly.

---

Tournament time at Da Baa was always a blast. We buy a square on a card and then do a random draw to assign a team to each square. There are Cinderella teams, there are buzzer beaters and miracle shots, there are upsets and routs. We mourn when our favorite team loses and celebrate the wins. We razz the shit out of each other over nonsense issues. The comradery is good for the tribe.

When Philbert walked in the whole group was already there. Timmay was already drunk, Rowdy had put the same old songs on the jukebox, Manny bounced between playing darts and watching the games, Blain feigned reading the same book he had been reading for months. Fester's commanding voice provided game commentary, Willam prepped munches in the kitchen and Lou was texting his wife that her team had just beaten a number one seed in an upset.

"Hey Berty, we were wondering where you were at." Lucy greeted while putting a bottle in front of him (not a frontal lobotomy as was the old joke).

"Yeah I got distracted." to which Timmay piped up "Didn't Warren Zevon do a song called 'Distractable Boy?'" Philbert didn't bother to correct him.

The conversations were mostly about the tournament but the asides covered where the state boys had DUI road blocks, how some drunk dumbass had run his car into a pond and then tried to swim away from the police, the potholes on Main Street, and who has the best hamburgers in town.

This was Philbert's living room and therapy. Even the bar stools are therapeutic, when he leans back his back pops in half a dozen places. Every beer he has had there has been the best that he has ever had.

Everyone's eyes rolled when Manny walked up and started one of his racist rants. "That whole team is a bunch of thugs from shithole countries, you have to wonder who they replaced to get them on this team."

Most times everyone simply ignored Manny's stupid rants but Philbert did not this time.

"Damn, Manny, these are just college kids and great athletes, what did they ever do to you to inspire such hatred."

"They did plenty." was Manny's only reply as he walked away. Philbert got several nods of approval and then the subject was dropped.

Later, on the patio Lou asked "How's the conversation with your phantom voice going?"

"I've given up trying to figure out the source of the voice because the subject matter that he brings up are so intriguing. He says that humans are in the Age of Hubris and that we must enter the Age of Humility to survive, a pretty interesting concept to me," Philbert replied not wanting to get into other deeper questions. He changed the subject. "How has your Mom been lately?"

"She has good days and bad ones but she is back home. A nurse comes twice a day and I usually stop for a while on my way home. Of course the doctors won't say how long she has but it can't be long. She is comfortable though, and not often in much pain, so there is that.

It's funny that you mentioned the Age of Humility. This preacher has been visiting her once or twice a week. He is comforting to her with promises to be with Dad and her sister soon in heaven so I don't say anything about it. What irks me though is that she gives him these large donation checks almost every time. It's like she is buying her way to redemption. I can't tell if he is a man of god or a talented con man." Lou explained.

"Ironic, that's exactly how I feel about this Passant voice," Philbert mused.

"Hey Bertus, I'm out for tonight, got an early morning," Lou announced.

"I'm right behind ya."

---

Libby was at his house when he got home. They always chatted about the day for a while before settling in for some mindless TV time. Her job as a researcher at what could be called a think tank, made these chats interesting. She always had some unique bit of trivia about current events. When she asked about his day he gave an update on the tournament but avoided much about the day with Passant.

"I will say this, Passant is a smart cookie and I'm being challenged to learn outside of my frame of reference."

"That's what makes life worth living, isn't it?" Libby always got right to the crux of the biscuit.