I wrote "Back to the Future" because I wrote the following over twenty years ago. The first two are excerpts from my book The Reality Mechanic. The last excerpt is from my screenplay Tuna in Pooderville. A little dated, but seems relevant, if not somewhat predictive, to today's emergence of ever more powerful A.I.
Excerpt One: Protagonist (if we can call him that) Sam Paradise discusses reality with teenage polymath, Wanda Willoughby.
Sam: “You see, Wanda, reality is alive. It is a living entity: an organism. But this organism is not made of organic molecules, it’s made of language. And by language, I mean any code or any system of referral in general. And as this system of referral expands, thus reality, being an epiphenomenon of this system of referral, expands too. Language and reality mutually expand. And language must flow or self and body cease. All mystics know this. And what I'm saying is that reality, being a living entity—an organism—like all living entities, tries to reproduce itself. And if you look closely at your world, and if you consider the phenomenon of virtual information, you will see that, in fact, this is true. In fact, Wanda, your planet, your Mother Earth as you call it, is currently in the throes of labor. It’s going to give birth to a baby reality. But there's one problem and it's a big one. This reality is a realm created by and for the Fallen Angel. Because a phenomenal world is the only place a Fallen Angel can live.”
--- The Reality Mechanic, page, 76
Excerpt Two: Sam discusses reality with his therapist, the young psychiatric intern, Dr. Eva Furman.
Sam “First of all, reality is about to undergo a radical transformation. An incomprehensible, hyper-complex, global semiosis will emerge in the form of an increasingly virtual cyber-environment as information and cyber-technology begin to self-reproduce exponentially. This is ho-hum news for many of you already. Anyway, to each individual mind, or ‘I,’ this global semiosis will appear as pure chaos because no human mind will be capable of grasping the vast complexity of its structure. Reality, from the view of each subjective ‘I,’ will become chaotic with no apparent context. Eventually all reality will appear to fall apart—and this will be especially painful for those who try to hold onto meaning. The only option will be to let go into the conditional semiotic turbulence. This will mean the death of the ‘I,’ the individual self, because the ‘I’ is a function of narrative gravity and at a certain critical point the velocity of information flow will be such that you will all be blasted from the confines of that gravity…all of you. See?”
“Ummm…are you Christ, or aren’t you?” asked Dr. Furman, giving up her notes and resting her chin on her fist.
--- The Reality Mechanic, page, 145
Excerpt Three: From my screenplay Tuna in Pooderville
Though TUNA is a character(s)-driven script, the family television also plays a central role. It resides in the Hartley's den like some clandestine, alien creature: colonizing and fragmenting consciousness with its mixed-up stream of absurd commercials, sobering news breaks, passing celebrities, and literati—all within some meshed nexus of 60s American cultural particulars. The channel-surfing, the self-absorbed talking heads, along with Tuna’s psychedelic imagination, and Bob’s strange “visions,” foreshadow our own, encroaching, device-driven fragmentation into collective psychosis.
---Tuna in Pooderville, Introduction.
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