Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Music, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, TDG, Writing stuff
Just now, my good lady wife was through to tell me that she’s off to take a bit of a nap. Both of us are getting over a touch of something (which I had mentioned last weekend), and on a deeper level still recovering from the profound exhaustion of having been care-givers for her mom.
Anyway, as she was preparing to head off, one of our cats insisted on going through the door which leads from my office into my bindery. This is where the cat food is.
“She wants through.”
“She wants owwwwt.”
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers.”
* * * * * * *
Via TDG, a fascinating interview with Douglas Richard Hofstadter last year, now translated into English. I’d read his GEB some 25 years ago, and have more or less kept tabs on his work since. The interview was about his most recent book, and touched on a number of subjects of interest to me, including the nature of consciousness, writing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity. It’s long, but well worth the effort.
In discussing consciousness (which Hofstadter calls ‘the soul’ for reasons he explains), and the survival of shards of a given ‘soul’, the topic of writing and music comes up. Discussing how Chopin’s music has enabled shards of the composer’s soul to persist, Hofstadter makes this comment about his own desire to write:
I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don’t think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin’s music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers).
I personally don’t have any thoughts about “shooting for immortality” when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I’d like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people.
Exactly.
* * * * * * *
In April, I wrote this:
I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity – that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple – too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.
Here’s Hofstadter’s take from the interview, in responding to a question about Ray Kurzweil‘s notion of achieving effective immortality by ‘uploading’ a personality into a machine hardware:
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don’t want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don’t know. Centuries, at least. But I don’t know. I’m not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
Interesting.
* * * * * * *
Lastly, the interview is about the central theme of I am a Strange Loop: that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which stems from vast and subtle physical mechanisms in the brain. This is also the core ‘meaning’ of GEB, though that was often missed by readers and reviewers who got hung up on the ostensible themes, topics, and playfulness of that book. Hofstadter calls this emergent consciousness a self-referential hallucination, and it reflects much of his interest in cognitive science over the years.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams I played with this idea and a number of related ones, particularly pertaining to the character of Seth. It is also why I decided that I needed to introduce a whole new technology – based on the superfluid tholin-gel found on Titan, as the basis for the AI systems at the heart of the story. Because the gel is not human-manufactured, but rather something a bit mysterious. Likewise, the use of this material requires another sophisticated computer to ‘boot it up’, and then it itself is responsible for sustaining the energy matrix necessary for continued operation. At the culmination of the story, this ‘self-referential hallucination’ frees itself from its initial containment.
Why did I do this?
Partly in homage to Hofstedter (though you will find no mention of him in the book, as far as I recall). Partly because it plays with other ideas I have about the nature of reality. If we (conscious beings) are an emergent phenomenon, arising from physical activity, then it seems to me that physical things can be impressed with our consciousness. This is why I find his comments about shards of a soul existing beyond the life of the body of the person to be so intriguing.
So I spent some 130,000 words exploring that idea in Communion. Not overtly – not often anyway – but that is part of the subtext of what is going on in that book.
* * * * * * *
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers,” I said, “impressed on the door itself. Maybe the cat understands that at a level we don’t.”
Jim Downey
(Related post at UTI.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Singularity Institute, Society, tech
As I’ve said before, I’m a late-adopter of tech. I’m probably the last person in the US under the age of fifty and with an IQ above room temp who has made the transition over to Firefox.
Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds – I’ve been running Mozilla for several years, and Netscape in one variety or another before that, all the way back to when I first got online in about ’93. But with the additional options available in Firefox2, it made sense to make the jump. So, with my good lady wife’s help (she’s the resident geek, not me) I switched yesterday, and then spent much of the rest of the day enjoying the much improved surfing experience, tweaking the set-up, learning the little quirks of the new software.
And also teaching it my own preferences and habits. This was the bit that I found amusing – that in one sense, I’m teaching Seth’s great-whatever-grandpappy his ABCs. Oh, we’re about 30 iterations of Moore’s Law away from the S-Series A.I. I have in Communion of Dreams, and a couple of computer ‘generations’ (if you consider that we’re currently in the fourth generation, that quantum computing will be the fifth, with my Tholin gel tech following that.) But it really does feel like something akin to a baby expert system I’m dealing with here, as we learn from one another.
I still don’t expect that we’ll experience a true Singularity such as Kurzweil and others have predicted, and the novel is in large part an exploration of why that is. But it is certainly the case that we’re moving towards a major threshold of technological change at an ever-increasing rate. Even late-adopters like me.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy, BoingBoing, Fermi's Paradox, Gene Roddenberry, General Musings, movies, NYT, Predictions, Quantum mechanics, Ray Kurzweil, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Star Trek, tech, Writing stuff
“Grrrr.”
“Easy, Alwyn.”
“Grrrrr! GRR!” His growls grew from a distant throaty rumble into a near bark, as we came around the corner across from the lawn with the sprinkler. Yeah, my dog was growling at a lawn sprinkler. This is not normal behaviour for him.
But in fairness, it was an odd lawn sprinkler. A big plastic dog lawn sprinkler. White, with black spots. Looked vaguely like a St. Bernard in size and shape, but a Dalmation in coloration. The hose attached to the tail, which fanned water all over while doing this odd jitterbug wag. Looked like some overgrown kid’s toy. Which it might well be. Since I don’t have kid, I don’t keep track of these things.
Anyway, it was clear that my dog thought that it was some kind of bizzaro-dog with a serious bladder problem. Perhaps an Alien Zombie Dog or something. So, he did the natural thing: he growled.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As I’ve noted before, I’m a big fan of the original series Star Trek and of Gene Roddenberry. But one of the things which has always bothered me about that series and most other SF television or movies is the fact that so often the Aliens are depicted as some variation of humanoid, albeit with a little makeup and prosthetics as the budget would allow. Though, in fairness to Roddenberry (and others in different series now and then), sometimes there was an attempt made to depict alien life as being just completely odd, unlike anything we’ve known or seen. This notion that extraterrestrial life might be difficult to even identify is a staple of good Science Fiction, of course, and one of the topics which I explore at some length in Communion of Dreams (and part of the reason why we never meet the aliens responsible for the creation of the artifact). It gets back to “Haldane’s Law“:
Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose.
(Which is decidedly similar to Sir Arthur Eddington‘s attributed comment: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” But since I am talking more about life here than astrophysics, I thought I’d go with the evolutionary biologist…)
But now actual science has perhaps caught up with Science Fiction. From the New Journal of Physics comes a paper discussing what seems to be the discovery of inorganic life. The abstract:
Abstract. Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex `state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.
That’s a bit dense, so let’s go to the critical bit from the Press Release:
‘It might be life, Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with lifelike qualities.
Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.
Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.
So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.
Obviously, there’s more to it, and it is worth reading at least the entire press release, or the full paper if you have a chance.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
There’s another possibility, of course. This one can best be summed up as being that life is “a dream within a dream“. The latest popular version of this is “The Matrix“, wherein life is an artificial reality construct, designed to keep the human ‘power cells’ docile. But this too is an idea extensively exploited in Science Fiction, with many different variations on the theme. Of late, this idea has been more and more tied to the concept of a ‘Singularity’ , with speculation being that we are just some version of post-human research/recreation as a computer construct. And in a piece published yesterday in the NYT titled “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch” this gets the mainstream religion treatment:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
. . .
David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.
You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
My own prediction is that unless we are extremely fortunate, and extremely open-minded, we’ll stumble badly in our first encounter with any real extra-terrestrial intelligence. Chances are, we’ll completely mistake it for something else, or try and see it through our limited perspective, not unlike how my dog mistook a lawn sprinkler for a wierdly-colored St. Bernard. If we’re lucky, we’ll survive that first contact, and then go on to see the universe with less prejudiced eyes.
If we’re *very* lucky.
Jim Downey
(Some material via BoingBoing.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Expert systems, Feedback, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science Fiction, Singularity, Singularity Institute, Society, tech, Writing stuff
A good friend of mine, who is a big science fiction fan, read an early version of Communion of Dreams and loved it, providing me some valuable feedback and support. And he was *really* excited when he heard that I was going to write more in the same ‘universe’ as the book, wanting to know what happens after the events portrayed in Communion. When I told him that I would be working on a prequel to the book rather than a sequel, he was disappointed. “But I wanted to know what happens after the Singularity!” he protested.
[Mild Spoiler Alert]
As you are probably aware, the notion of a technological Singularity occuring, when we create the first true artificial intelligence which is superior to human intelligence, has been a popular one in SF for some time, and actually took on the term Singularity following coinage (I think) by Vernor Vinge. In many ways, Communion of Dreams is my take on that moment when humankind crosses this threshhold, embodied in the character of Seth, the expert system who makes this transition.
The folks over at the Singularity Institute are working towards this goal, and wanting to help us prepare for it. Cory Doctorow has a brief blog entry up at BoingBoing this morning about his experience speaking at the Singularity Summit hosted by Ray Kurzweil at Stanford last year, along with links to some vids of that event now hosted at the Institute. It is worth a look.
I am intrigued by the notion of a technological Singularity, but think that it is fundamentally impossible for us to know what happens after such an event has matured. Oh, sure, there’s good reason to speculate, and it is rich and fertile ground for planting ideas as an author, but…
…but I think that in many ways, leaving Communion as the end-point perhaps makes the most sense. It is analogous to ending a book with the death of the character from whom everything is presented as a first-person account. Because just as we do not know what happens after death, we do not know what happens after an event such as a technological Singularity. For, in some very real ways, the same kind of transcendence will take place.
Jim Downey
