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FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS
“Then there is electricity;—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it?”
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE1
Since the dawn of technology humans have endowed artifacts with mind. In our collective imagination, inhabited by objects, animals, and now machines, mind has rarely been held as an exclusively human preserve. Mind has prevailed until recently as a quality distributed among all things, captured one lifetime at a time and then returned. Human language and memory have extended our possession of this instant so that most of us now live deeply embedded within the extended moment that our consciousness and culture represent. Only our designated prophets bring back something from the edge. “About ourselves there always lingers a penumbral rainbow . . . which can be dissected from no single brain,” wrote Loren Eiseley in 1970. “Something, the rainbow dancing before his eyes, the word uttered by the cave fire at evening, eludes us and runs onward. It is gone when we come with our spades upon the cold ashes of the campfire four hundred thousand years removed.”2
In our various mythologies we have toyed with the prospect of mechanical intelligence, as childhood playthings anticipate the use of tools. In medieval times an Arabic fable, drifting through the centuries, became attached to the pope Silvester II, a man of great mathematical and mechanical abilities who died in the year 1003. Silvester, or Gerbert as he was known before being elevated to pope in the year 999, helped to introduce Arabic numerals and arithmetic into Europe, and, as reported by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, “he gave rules which are scarcely understood even by laborious computers.”3 He led the famous school at Reims, helped to secure tenure for research among the universities, and constructed mathematical instruments, a steam-driven organ, and mechanical clocks. He was rumored, sometimes darkly, to have invoked intelligence among things not born but built. According to William of Malmesbury, Silvester constructed a speaking head, which “spake not unless spoken to, but then pronounced the truth, either in the affirmative or the negative.”4 Delivering but one bit of information at a time, this oracle communicated with utmost economy and was always right.
In the thirteenth century this fable descended to Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1292), an English scholar whose encyclopedic tastes reached beyond astrology and alchemy to embrace sciences far ahead of his time. Said to have been imprisoned for fifteen years by his own Franciscan brothers for the novelty of his ideas, he became known as Doctor Mirabilis, though without a shred of evidence that he ever had anything to do with a speaking mechanical head. But the legend stuck, imprinted first by the anonymous Famous History of Frier Bacon and deepened in the sixteenth century by Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), a play by Robert Greene. As the story goes, Bacon undertook to preserve England against conquest, and provide himself with everlasting fame, by constructing a wall of brass about the entire country, which, his studies indicated, could be achieved by enlisting the intelligence of a brazen head.
“To this purpose he got one Frier Bungey to assist him,” it is explained, “who was a great scholar and a Magician, (but not to compare to Frier Bacon) these two with great study and pains so framed a head of Brass, that in the inward parts thereof there was all things like as in a natural man’s head: this being done, they were as far from perfection of the work as they were before, for they knew not how to give those parts that they had made, motion, without which it was impossible that it should speak: many books they read, but yet could not find out any hope of what they sought, that at the last they concluded to raise a spirit, and to know of him that which they could not attain to by their own studies.”5
Repairing to a nearby wood, they raised a reluctant, uncooperative “Devil” who, under pain of certain unpleasantries, disclosed the required formula, but refused to specify the length of time it would take for the process to take effect. “If they heard it not before it had done speaking,” they were warned, “all their labour should be lost.” Bacon and Bungey followed the devil’s instructions exactly and waited three weeks, with no results. Then Bacon assigned his servant Miles to keep a close watch on the brass head so the two magicians could take a nap.
Miles amused himself with a pipe, song, and drum while his master slept, and then “at last, after some noise the head spake these two words, TIME IS. Miles hearing it to speak no more, thought his Master would be angry if he waked him for that, and therefore he let them both sleep, and began to mock the head in this manner: Thou Brazen-faced head, hath my Master took all this pains about thee, and now dost thou requite him with two words, TIME IS: had he watched with a lawyer as long as he hath watched with thee, he would have given him more, and better words then thou hast yet, if thou canst speak no wiser, they shall sleep till dooms day for me.”6
Miles kept mocking the brass head: “Do you tell us Copper-nose, when TIME IS? I hope we Scholars know our times, when to drink, when to kiss our hostess, when to go on her score, and when to pay it, that time comes seldom,” and so on. After half an hour of this “the head did speak again, two words, which were these: TIME WAS.” Miles still would not wake his master, saying, “if you speak no wiser no Master shall be waked of me,” and acted like a fool for another half hour. Then, without warning, all hell broke loose: “This Brazen Head spake again these words; TIME IS PAST: and therewith fell down, and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half dead with fear: at this noise the two Friers awaked, and wondered to see the whole room so full of smoke, but that being vanished they might perceive the brazen head broken and lying on the ground.”7 Thus Bacon’s great project came to an end.
The story of Friar Bacon and the brazen head, however apocryphal, remains a fable for our time. Since the dawn of computers scientists have raised one species of spirit after another, seeking to have the mystery of intelligence revealed. When hopes are up, our Bacons and Bungeys have gathered openly, performed their incantations, and then retired, leaving their attendants to keep watch (and bear the costs). Thirty-five years ago neurologist Warren S. McCulloch, the architect with Walter Pitts of the first rigorous theory of neural nets, delivered ten pronouncements derived from twenty years of searching for “Where Is Fancy Bred.” McCulloch’s tenth commandment: “We will be there when the brass head speaks.”8
Cloaked in symbols as arcane as those of the alchemists, Bacon and Bungey’s successors continue to decipher their forefathers’ instructions, keeping the foundries running day and night. Crystals are drawn from the crucible by workers masked and gowned against the risk of bringing the imperfection of our world to the kingdom of machines; diamond saw blades slice these crystals into wafers on which spells are cast by ultraviolet light. Some of the sorcerers work in silicon and some work purely in code, but when the two halves of this magic are brought together, still the brass head refuses to speak.
The skeptics have it that we are no closer than Bacon and Bungey to achieving the transmutation of metal into mind. Optimists believe it is just a matter of enough time, enough logic, the right coding, or some contagious spark of wisdom we haven’t put our finger on yet. Others believe that we are playing the role of Miles, mocking the long-awaited signs while our master remains asleep.
In the 1950s computers demonstrated their dexterity at manipulating very large numbers over minute increments of time. “Time is!” they seemed to say—but after giving the matter some thought, we decided not to awake our master for mere arithmetic, just yet. Twenty years passed. In the 1970s computers began to reproduce themselves in automated factories in accordance with von Neumann�
��s principles of how automata can grow more complicated from one generation to the next. “Time was!” their advancing numbers proclaimed—but we decided that mere spreadsheets and word processors did not merit raising the alarm. Another twenty years passed. Computers, now teeming like herring in early spring, began pooling their intelligence, exchanging states of mind in the blink of an eye, half a dozen languages removed from those that we can comprehend. Only an esoteric fraternity, uttering one line of code at a time, still holds congress with the machines. “Time is past!” can be read between the lines. But the warning goes unheeded as we stand transfixed, like monkeys given a mirror, by the novelty of our own image reflected in the surface of the web. When the smoke clears and the master wakes, the computer as disembodied head will have disappeared, replaced by a diffuse tissue enveloping us in nebulous bits of meaning, as neurons are enveloped in electrolyte by the brain.
There are two approaches to embodying intelligence, whether as a brain or as a brazen head. The alternatives correspond to two different approaches to building a boat. To build a kayak, you assemble a skeleton and then give it a skin that allows it to float, just as the architectural framework of a computer is fitted, by evolution or by design, with an envelope of code. To build a dugout, you grow a tree and then remove everything, one chip at a time, except the boat. This is how nature creates her intelligences, by spawning an overwhelming surplus of neurons and then selectively pruning them to leave a network that, if all goes well, becomes a mind. As computers are replicated by the millions, they are aggregating into structures whose design bears nature’s signature in addition to our own.
Within this computational matrix, whether viewed as code subsisting on processors or processors subsisting on code, organization is arrived at as much by chance as by design. Most of the connections make no sense, and few make any money except in circuitous ways. Critics say that the World Wide Web is a passing stage (right) and doomed to failure because it is so pervaded by junk (wrong). Yes, most links will be relegated to oblivion, but this wasteful process, like many of nature’s profligacies, will leave behind a structure that could not otherwise have taken form. “I could not discover the mechanism of this steady internal evolution,” wrote Stapledon in pondering the mentality of the nebulae. “But one point seemed to me certain. Natural selection played an important part within each nebula, favoring some experiments in vital organization and destroying others.”9 The World Wide Web, a primitive metabolism nourished by the substance of the Internet, will be succeeded by higher forms of organization feeding upon the substance of the World Wide Web.
The prevailing approach to artificial biology views computers as terraria in which digital creatures are evolved. This assumption fits conveniently within the laboratory, but as a model of the digital universe it provides only a silhouette. Robert Davidge, of the University of Sussex, reversed the perspective in a paper titled “Processors as Organisms,” published in 1992. He suggested that we “shift our view from the programs formed in the memory to the processor itself. . . . Consider the actual processor to be the organism and the memory of instructions to be its environment for exploration. . . . The static computer processor requesting instructions down the memory bus can become an organism moving through the memory. It is the same procedure, but it entirely changes the way we regard the results.”10 Both perspectives are essential to understanding the origins of artificial life.
“If we choose to think in the frame of mind of a biologist then we can begin to see biological types of process in the artificial creations that surround us,” explained Davidge. But a computer’s movement through its memory is a one-dimensional process. “To be of any interest biologically,” Davidge noted, “the memory must be 2-dimensional not 1-dimensional as in all standard stored-program computers. . . . If we get rid of the idea that the processor exists to execute our program then we can let it move in a 2-D or 3-D space of instructions and the motional behaviour will become a continuous track through space.”11 Shortly after Davidge published his speculations this two- or three-dimensional memory and instruction space was realized, suddenly, in the form of the World Wide Web. The Web allows code to move freely through the visible universe of processors, and it allows processors to move freely through the visible universe of code. The result is more than the sum of the parts. “Life,” as Samuel Butler observed in 1887, “is two and two making five.”12
Coding and processing, like matter and energy in conventional physics, are related manifestations of an underlying field. This computational field is observed and measured in bits. A bit is the fundamental unit of information—the difference between two discernible alternatives, perceived as change or choice. The computational universe and the universe of time and space in which we live intersect by means of two kinds of bits: bits that represent a difference between two things at the same time; and bits that represent a difference between one thing at two different times.
The power of computers—whether the strictly regulated machinations of a Turing machine or the amorphous intelligence residing in our heads—derives from their ability to form maps between sequence, arranged in time, and structure, arranged in space. Memory and recall, no matter what their form, are translations between these two species of bits. “Memory locations,” according to Danny Hillis, “are just wires turned sideways in time.”13 In this correspondence between sequence and structure lies the basis not only of computation and memory, but also of organic life, based on the translation of sequences (nucleotides) into structures (proteins), with natural selection the mechanism for debugging the source code and translating improvements back from the structure of the organism to the sequence of its genes. Computers are speeding the process up.
In Alan Turing’s minimal example, translation between structure and sequence is executed one bit at a time. The Turing machine scans one square on its tape, reads one bit of information, makes a corresponding change in its state of mind, and, in accordance with its instructions, writes or erases one bit of information on its tape. When the next moment arrives, it goes through this process again. The Turing machine and its visible universe cross paths one symbol at a time.
As bandwidth measures the capacity to communicate information from one place to another, so it is possible to assign a magnitude to the amount of information that a Turing machine, or other organism, is able to scan as it moves from one moment to the next. Extending Turing’s terminology, we may call this the machine’s depth of mental field. Going one step further, it is possible to quantify how much information can be scanned at a single moment, multiplied by the number of consecutive moments that can be comprehended within the machine’s state of mind. This scale of mental capacity allows us to make comparisons between minds that may be operating at completely alien velocities in time.
In the four-dimensional universe of space and time, we are confined to a three-dimensional surface. Only one moment exists in our reality; the existence of other moments is evident only through the constructs of our mind. We breathe one lifetime at a time within a thin atmosphere condensed out of the surrounding sequence of events. All our devices for translating between sequence and structure serve to extend this atmospheric depth—the history of life on earth is compressed within sequential strands of DNA; culture is accumulated in the form of language; somehow our brains preserve the sequence of our lives from one moment to the next. As far as we know mind and intelligence exist on an open-ended scale. Perhaps mind is a lucky accident that exists only at our particular depth of field, like some alpine flower that blooms between ten thousand and twelve thousand feet. Or perhaps there is mind at elevations both above and below our own.
“It may be that the cells of which we are built up . . . each one of them with a life and memory of its own . . . reckon time in a manner inconceivable to us,” suggested Samuel Butler in 1877. “If, in like manner, we were to allow our imagination to conceive the existence of a being as much in need of a microscope for our time and affairs as we for
those of our own component cells, the years would be to such a being but as the winkings or the twinklings of an eye.” Writing in Life and Habit on the eve of his estrangement from Charles Darwin, Butler sought to encompass Darwinism—from the life of germs to the germination of species—within a framework of all-pervasive mind. “What I wish is, to make the same sort of step in an upward direction which has already been taken in a downward one, and to show reason for thinking that we are only component atoms of a single compound creature, LIFE, which has probably a distinct conception of its own personality though none whatever of ours.”14
Olaf Stapledon believed that the mind of the individual and the mind of the species need not remain estranged. “Our experience was enlarged not only spatially but temporally in a very strange manner,” explains the narrator of Last and First Men, concerning the composite mind toward which our species had inexorably evolved. “In respect of temporal perception, of course, minds may differ in two ways, in the length of the span which they can comprehend as ‘now,’ and in the minuteness of the successive events which they can discriminate within the ‘now.’ As individuals we can hold within one ‘now’ a duration equal to the old terrestrial day; and within that duration, we can if we will, discriminate rapid pulsations such as commonly we hear together as a high musical tone. As the race-mind we perceived as ‘now’ the whole period since the birth of the oldest living individuals, and the whole past of the species appeared as personal memory, stretching back into the mist of infancy. Yet we could, if we willed, discriminate within the ‘now’ one light-vibration from the next.”15
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