it is of the human nature to seek the hormones to keep itself alive. the feeling of attainment on a certain objective releases dopamine to the brain, meaning it's one of the best healthy feelings we can conceive. this constant seeking, however, also plays into a much bigger factor: the hunt for the peak of human performance. perfection. it is natural for us to seek our prime, the state of perfection within us. this constant feeling of being no longer a beast but no less than imperfect is something that plagues our mind, an understanding that we must come to accept but not to the extent of our deterring.
the limit imposed in the body of the homo sapiens sapiens does not accompany its mind. we, beings capable of such abstract and powerful thoughts, are imprisoned in the state of which we are. and for millennia, humanity has tried to push itself further and further to this godlike state: perfection. i believe this thirst and this quench for every drop of knowledge is simply something that comes with the mind. in my life, i have not met a single person who takes the world as it is without a single ounce of curiosity. why do we think? why are the skies blue and the fields green? what is there inside a singularity? what else can we create? such questions fuel a particular one to push themselves further, and this cycle continues until the end of time.
i once read a particularly interesting webstory[1] about three sentient space probes who observed humanity after an impossible event in which every human alive gained immortality. its name 17776, and i believe that it illustrates perfectly this active chase for perfection. in the story, humans are able to create nanomachines[2] capable of saving themselves from every possible natural injury and hurdle. food is not a problem, thirst is not a problem, death is not a problem. they had explored space and found nothing, however. no signs of life beyond their limits. they still weren't perfect, but they had felt so. and thus, the scarcity and mysteries of earth had vanished. and the story tells us how they feel with this: bored. and so, they spend their times dabbling in inconsequential activities rather than exploring. their home was free of questions. they stopped questioning. ambition only existed in futility, but they had no remorse. to them, this was all but wasted time. after all, what time is there to waste if it is near endless?
i've been thinking about this story ever since. about this feeling of existentialism that we feel in our inconsequential state of being. we're nothing in comparison to the universe, and yet we take pride in seeing all that we can. this acceptance, that we cannot discover everything but that we must discover to the fullest, is what fascinates me. this feeling of peace that still hopes for the better and the best. we cannot and will not ever become perfect, but we will become sufficient. and in that sufficiency, we'll find a new form of perfection: us.
ever since we created computers, our lives have never been the same. seemingly impossible answers, a mastery to any logical skill and solutions to problems thought to be unsolvable were now completely able to be done. google developed an AI capable of solving chess better than the official chess.com Stockfish 17. humanity had stopped beating super engines by the end of the 90s and the game of checkers had been fully solved by machines. the reality was clear: there now existed computers that trained on themselves to become this super species capable of being better than a human. after all, they had no limitations. they didn't have emotions, they didn't really have bodies. they were just information. all of the information we know over hundreds of thousands of years. and they finally did what we couldn't - absorb everything without exhaustion. we were truly beaten by the purest form of logic, now incapable of stopping this monster we had created. and yet, this didn't deter us whatsoever. in fact, we went above and beyond purely because of this new form of perfection: the human limit.
on september 9th 1983, the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES released in Japan. two years later, it would release to the rest of the world. the game is relatively simple: you go through 32 levels separated in 8 worlds and reach the flag pole at the end of the level to complete it. on every last level of a world, you defeat a copy of the villain of the story, Bowser, until you beat the real him in world 8. for being an old game, it had many interesting features that made doing a run of the game a lot faster. and thus, 40 years later, we had an answer. Super Mario Bros. had been solved. 4:54.262 was the fastest time for completion, programmed by a human in a machine that executed each frame perfectly. and even when the game was "solved", it hadn't really been perfected. though the feat of the computer and the skill to program was rewarded its given merit, we hadn't perfected it yet. and so began a hunt that is happening over the course of years. at the time of writing this, the fastest time achieved has been 4:54.415, 9 frames short of perfection. and so, we're close. we've proven that we are capable of not only being close but of one day achieving. years of dreaming and doing. years of ambition.
we have climbed the tallest mountains, explored the farthest regions and made beautiful landscapes. we discovered the primordial aspects of existence and have now been able to use them for our advances. the creation of the machine, as demonstrated by the above example, didn't even stop us. because the machine still didn't know what it was like to have passion. to have the art and the craft to make something. it only made with instructions, not with soul. the search for the improvement of every single one of our skills was still unstoppable. we want to be, and by god we will. until perfection is achieved. that is ambition.
humanity is far from many aspects of perfection. limitations on the mind, on the body and on the soul are always there. we are anything but perfect, but we are capable of dreaming. we are capable of our perfection. perfect is always a subjective term, but i believe that our perfection is the human limit. and when we reach it, we still won't be able to do everything, to be everything that we once thought we could be able to become. but we will be perfect. truly perfect never, that'd be inhumane. but humanly perfect is what we strive to be. our perfect. thank you for reading.
[1]a story read through the internet.
[2]extremely small machines, impossible to see through the naked eye.