We call it Project Consciousness and our basic tools are the carefully selected clones, our Doppelgangers. The motivator is frustration; thus we design into our system false goals and things which will go wrong. That's why we chose Tau Ceti as the target: there is no livable planet at Tau Ceti.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

The holoscan you are watching at this moment is of our Bickel model, our most successful "Organ of Analysis." He is charged to explore beyond the imprinted patterns of consciousness which humankind inherits with its genes.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

What matters most is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground—and, dreaming, must invoke ever-new dreams.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

The legal status of the clone as property cannot be questioned. This is a decision we have taken as a species for the survival of the species. The clone is a spare-parts bank and much more. The clone falls outside the legal prohibition against experiments upon humans without their informed consent. Clones are property and that's that.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

The thing about computers—it's like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention.
--Interview with John Bickel (original) at La / Paz

Every symbol has hidden premises behind it. Every word carries unspoken assumptions buried in the history of the language and the conditioning experiences of the speakers. If you snatch those buried meanings out of your words, you spill a whole stream of new understanding into your awareness.
--Raja Lon Flattery, The Book of Ship

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror . . .A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain.
--Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Of all the Earthling's crew, Raja Lon flattery has been provided with the most accurate information, suitably weighted, of course. This was necessary because he had to be provided with a secret terminal in his quarters through which he can monitor the mood of ship and crew. A primary fuse has to be connected to the system, and flattery is that fuse.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

The universe is derived from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness, the one and only existent from eternity. Accepting this, you became an affirmer of The Void, which is to be understood as the Primordial Nothingness; that is, the raw stuff out of which all is is created as well as the background against which every creation can be discerned.
--The Education of a Chaplain/Psychiatrist (Moonbase Documents)

The Chase has fascinated humankind from the beginning, and with good reason. What many failed to understand, however, was that there could be the excitement of the chase even where the only thing you were chasing was an idea, a concept, a theory. As awareness developed, it became apparent that this was the most important chase of all, the one upon whose outcome all of humankind survives or falls.
--Raja Lon Flattery, The Book of Ship

Symbolic behavior of some order has to be a requisite of consciousness. And it must be noted that symbols abstract-they reduce a message to selected form.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

DEMAND: Define God.
OMC: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
DEMAND: How can God contain the universe?
OMC: Study the hologram. The individual is both laser and target.
--Fragment from Message Capsule #4 thought to have originated with Flattery (#4B) model.

We understand synergy to mean the fortuitous working together of a set of components which we have assembled in our attempt to achieve artificial consciousness. Working together, the components produce more than . . .
--Prudence Lon Weygand (#3) Incomplete segment from message capsule

The Zen master tells us that an omnipresent idea can be hidden by its own omnipresence-the forest lost among the tress. In our normal daily behavior we are most estranged, most in the grip of an illusory idea of the self. Every enchanting inclination of pride and its ego, of convention and its master-social training-conspires to maintain the illusion. The semanticist calls it the inertia of old promises. And this is what holds our analyses of consciousness within fixed limits.

Computers are just systems with a great amount of unconsciousness; everything held in immediate memory and subject to programs which the operator initiates. The operator, therefore, is the consciousness of the computer.
--Raja Lon Flattery, The Book of Ship

The high data-rate sense perception and identification abilities of the human system mostly bypass verbal/analytic awareness. We are generally conscious of a cognitive recognition after the fact. In this way, what we understand as consciousness has to be identified as a reflexive monitoring ability with quite limited application. To produce consciousness (artificial or otherwise) we are stepping down, not up.
--John Lon Bickel (#5) Message Capsule datum

"Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. . . .Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence. . . Satan had his companions, fellow devils to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred."
--Frankenstein's Monster speaks

Is consciousness merely a special form of hallucination?
--Prudence Lon Weygand (#5) Message Capsule fragment

The cell has energies that oscillate and pulse with the tumult of living. We see reflections of this root-activity in that coordinated cell structure which we commonly refer to as a human being. Have you ever watched a man tapping his finger nervously on a desktop? Have you ever timed the periodicity of the human eyeblink? Breathing has characteristic rhythms for different conditions of the total cell structure. You must keep this in mind when you design devices to be used and occupied by this human bundle of cells. You must always remember the pulse and the needs of the component cells.
--Vincent Frame; Biochemist/Designer

In a right-handed person, the so-called rational function operates mainly from the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex. The 'Intuitive' operation, however, lives mainly in the right hemisphere. There is strong evidence for positive feedback between the two hemisphere operating along the corpus callosum. The substance of this interchange remains largely a mystery, but there can be no doubt that it serves an important function in consciousness.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

"No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. . . A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses."
--Frankenstein's Monster speaks

Beyond the senses there are objects; beyond objects there is mind; beyond the mind there is intellect; beyond the intellect there is the Great Self.
--Katha-upanished Excerpt for instruction of Chaplain/Psychiatrists

I feel the duties of a creator toward this Artificial Consciousness. It seems to me that my primary goal must be to render this creature happy, to provide it whatever joy I can. Else this entire project seems pointless. There already are enough unhappy creatures in this universe.
--Raja Lon flattery; Private Communion with the Ox.

Over a long period of time, clones offer us an extremely valuable tool for determining genetic drift. It is clear that our cloning techniques at UMB permit us to clone a clone indefinitely. Ten thousand years from now we could possess genetic material which is contemporary with this very moment. . now! Perhaps this will be of greater service to humankind than the understanding of consciousness.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

There must be a threshold of consciousness such that when you pass it you acquire godlike attributes.
--Raja Lon Flattery; The Book of Ships

There's a trait called initiative which is balanced against caution. Too tight a balance and you get oscillatory inaction, but that balancing act rides the wave of consciousness. All creatures display it in some form, but the sophisticated, symbol-juggling form displayed by humans has to be related to the kind of consciousness-answer we seek.
--Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

"You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder if you could. . .destroy my frame, the work of your own hands."
--Frankenstein's Monster speaks

The correlation between chemistry and emotions is inescapable. Thus, with the chemical relationship between humankind and our mechanical simulators tenuous at best, an artificial consciousness. If it has emotions, may have emotions far outside the human range. Such emotions may appear godlike to the limited human understanding.
--Vincent Frame; Speculations

"The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed."
--Victor Frankenstein's lament

Anthropomorphic assumptions have tended to lead humankind far astray. The universe does not work by our rules.
--Raja Lon Flattery; The Book of Ships

Mundane existence is the source of renewed suffering. The human goal is to attain release from the bondage of material existence and, achieving release, to unite with the Supreme Self.
--Education of the Psychiatrist/Chaplain; Moonbase Documents