All this gets down to the basic question is, really, “What are you going to do if you’re God?” If, in other words, you find yourself in charge of the world through technological powers, and instead of leaving evolution to what we used to call, in the nineteenth century, the blind processes of nature—that was begging the question, to call them blind—but at any rate, we say we’re not going to leave evolution anymore to the blind forces of nature, but now we’re going to direct it ourselves. Because we are increasingly developing, say, control over genetic systems, control over the nervous system, control over all kinds of systems. Then, simply: what do you want to do with it?
Supposing, just for the sake of illustration, you had the power to dream every night any dream you wanted to dream. And you could, of course, arrange for one night of dreams to be 75 years of subjective time—or any number of years of subjective time—what would you do? Well, of course, you’d start out by fulfilling every wish. You would have routs and orgies, and all the most magnificent food, and sexual partners, and everything you could possibly imagine in that direction. When you got tired of that after several nights you’d switch a bit, and you’d soon find yourself involved in adventures, and contemplating great works of art, fantastic mathematical conceptions; you would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons, and all sorts of things like that. And then one night you’d say, “Now look, tonight what we’re gonna do is: we’re going to forget this dream is a dream. And we’re going to be really shocked.” And when you woke up from that one you’d say, “Whoo, wasn’t that an adventure!”
You are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos. And you can’t figure you out. Now, suppose we’re going to try to do that and become, as it were, completely transparent to ourselves so that we entirely understand the organization, or the mechanics, of our own brains. What happens when we do that?