Now, here is the gist of what links multimedia, the spread sheet, biological cells, mystic stuff and the Web together.
Within the RAM space allocated to an empty multimedia player (stub movie) we can create objects using the code which comes as the engine of the multimedia document player.
Combining many of these objects together with media we can create highly complex virtual objects - which we are going to call avatars. With access to the Web we can call upon documents, objects and media from any part of the Web to create avatars of almost unlimited complexity.
As you will find in the latter part of this book, it is even possible to give these avatar objects software control mechanisms which act very much like senses and emotions. In some ways allowing them to act uncannily like humans.
This may seem an outrageous statement to make until you take a less subjective and more pragmatic view of feelings and emotions.
Consider, as an example, a very simple object whose on screen image approaches another's on the screen. It is a trivial programming task to measure the distance apart between the two objects and use this value to regulate the speed of approach and under certain conditions use the value to reverse the direction of movement. A very simple programming task - but if the object could reason it would be wondering about the mysterious force which causes it to act in this way to prevent it getting too close to other objects.
Imagine dozens, maybe hundreds, of similar little software mechanisms, being included into the design of one avatar. Wouldn't that avatar appear to have a very complex set of responses? Wouldn't it appear to have a sense of reasoning if it had to decide between these responses when they were in conflict? It is this sort of avatar which we shall be developing in this book.
Now imagine that the object is linked to a vast complexity of other mechanisms and objects on the Web such that the object to be able to question the reason for it's screen image's reaction to another on the screen.
Before the absurdity of this thought occurs to you, think about what we are considering here. We are thinking about an avatar created in RAM which has access to potentially every Web page in existence. As you will discover later, any Web page can be a used as a sophisticated object template: containing complex programming instructions.
Objects can be treated as neurons, Web pages as synapses. The ability for all the components to communicate allows infinitely variable connections. Even as the Web is today, it represents a capacity to create a structure every bit as complex as the human brain.
Certainly no complexity of this order of magnitude will be consciously designed by the human brain, but, just as the human brain has evolved in nature, there is every chance that such an intelligence will evolve of its own accord.and if such a structure were ever designed it would be available to every single avatar to appear on every single client computer on the Web.
Now imagine this super intelligent avatar questioning why it has a strange emotion to move away from another object if it gets too close. How would you answer it in a way which the avatar would be able to understand?
What if the avatar asked you about its birth and what happened when it died?
Now, go to your local library and get out one of those weird Eastern philosophy books and read it while thinking in terms of the Buddha's and the Zen masters being humans, and the unenlightened people being avatars created in computer Ram.
See if what you had thought previously to be utter nonsense now begins to make sense?
If it does, you are going to enjoy the rest of this book.
