Darwin Among the Machines

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Darwin Among the Machines Page 36

by George B. Dyson


  7. Stapledon, “Experiences,” 362.

  8. Olaf Stapledon to Agnes Miller, 22 October 1918, in Crossley, Talking Across the World, 332.

  9. Stapledon, “Experiences,” 372.

  10. Olaf Stapledon to Agnes Miller, 26 December 1917, in Crossley, Talking Across the World, 264–265.

  11. Lewis Richardson, as quoted by Ernest Gold, “Lewis Fry Richardson, 1881–1953,” Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 9 (November 1954): 230.

  12. Olaf Stapledon to Agnes Miller, 12 January 1918, in Crossley, Talking Across the World, 270.

  13. Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922; facsimile reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1965), 219.

  14. Olaf Stapledon to Agnes Miller, 8 December 1916, in Crossley, Talking Across the World, 192–193.

  15. Olaf Stapledon, Death into Life (London: Methuen, 1946); reprinted in Olaf Stapledon, Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fantasy (Los Angeles: Fantasy Publishing Co., 1949), 130 (page citation is to the reprint edition).

  16. Olaf Stapledon, The Star Maker (London: Methuen, 1937); reprinted in Last and First Men & Star Maker (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 263–264.

  17. Stapledon, Last and First Men, 119.

  18. Ibid., 117–118.

  19. Ibid., 118.

  20. Ibid., 129.

  21. Ibid., 142.

  22. Frederic W. H. Myers, Phantasms of the Living (London: Trübner, 1886), lxv.

  23. Frederic W. H. Myers, Science and a Future Life (London: Macmillan, 1893), 50.

  24. Stapledon, Last and First Men, 222.

  25. Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (London: Heinemann, 1957; reprint, Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1960), 158 (page citation is to the reprint edition).

  26. Irving J. Good, “The Mind-Body Problem, or Could an Android Feel Pain?” in Jordan M. Scher, ed., Theories of the Mind (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 496–497.

  27. Irving J. Good, personal communication, 12 July 1994.

  28. Irving J. Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Advances in Computers 6 (1965): 35–36.

  29. Paul Baran, “Is the UHF Frequency Shortage a Self Made Problem?” address to Marconi Centennial Symposium, Bologna, Italy, 23 June 1995.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Lewis Thomas, “Social Talk,” New England Journal of Medicine 287, no. 19 (9 November 1973): 974.

  32. Olaf Stapledon, Nebula Maker (Hayes, Middlesex: Bran’s Head Books, 1976); reprinted in Nebula Maker & Four Encounters (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1983), 47–48.

  33. Stapledon, Star Maker, 332.

  34. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 12

  1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851, The House of the Seven Gables, centenary ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 264.

  2. Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 21.

  3. William of Malmesbury, ca. 1125, in J. A. Giles, ed., William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the Kings of England; from the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen (London: Henry Bonn, 1847), 174.

  4. Ibid., 181.

  5. The Famous History of Frier Bacon, Containing the wonderful things that he did in his Life; Also the manner of his Death, with the Lives and Deaths of the two Conjurers Bungey and Vandermast. Very pleasant and delightful to be read (London: T. Passenger, 1679), 12–13.

  6. Ibid., 15.

  7. Ibid., 17.

  8. Warren S. McCulloch, “Where Is Fancy Bred?” in Henry W. Brosin, ed., Lectures on Experimental Psychiatry (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), reprinted in Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 229.

  9. Olaf Stapledon, Nebula Maker (Hayes, Middlesex: Bran’s Head Books, 1976); reprinted in Nebula Maker & Four Encounters (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1983), 38.

  10. Robert Davidge, “Processors as Organisms,” University of Sussex, School of Cognitive and Computing Science, CSRP no. 250, October 1992, 2.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Samuel Butler, Luck, or Cunning, as the main means of Organic Modification? (London: Trübner & Co., 1887); reprinted as vol. 8 of The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 58.

  13. W. Daniel Hillis, “New Computer Architectures and Their Relationship to Physics, or Why Computer Science Is No Good,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, nos. 3–4 (April 1982): 257.

  14. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trübner & Co., 1878), 128–129.

  15. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Methuen, 1930); reprinted, from the U.S. edition of 1931, in Last and First Men & Star Maker (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 226.

  16. William H. Calvin, “Fast Tracks to Intelligence (Considerations from Neurobiology and Evolutionary Biology),” in George Marx, ed., Bioastronomy—The Next Steps: Proceedings of the 99th Colloquium of the IAU (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 241.

  17. George Dyson, Grenade Fighting: The Training and Tactics of Grenadiers (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1917), 11.

  18. George Dyson, Grenade Warfare: Notes on the Training and Organization of Grenadiers (London: Sifton, Praed & Co., 1915), 6.

  19. Ibid., 8.

  20. Ibid., 7.

  21. Ibid., 11.

  22. Garet Garrett, Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (New York: Dutton, 1926), 51.

  23. Sir George Dyson, “Fred Devenish and Others,” R.C.M. Magazine 51, no. 2 (1955): 36.

  24. Sir George Dyson, Fiddling While Rome Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 30–31.

  25. Sir George Dyson, address to the Royal College of Music, September 1949; reprinted in Christopher Palmer, ed., Dyson’s Delight: An Anthology of Sir George Dyson’s Writings and Talks on Music (London: Thames Publishing, 1989), 80.

  26. Dyson, Fiddling, 32–34.

  27. W. Daniel Hillis, “Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior; or. The Songs of Eden,” Daedalus, (winter 1988) (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 117, no. 1), 177–178.

  28. Felix Mendelssohn to Marc-André Souchay, 15 October 1842, in Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, ed., Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy from 1833–1847 (London, 1864), 23–24.

  29. John Wilkins, Mercury; or, the Secret and Swift messenger: Shewing, How a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any distance (London: John Maynard, 1641), 141, 143.

  30. J. B. S. Haldane, “Man’s Destiny,” Possible Worlds (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 303.

  31. Garrett, Ouroboros, 19.

  32. Ibid., 24.

  33. Ibid., 100.

  34. Ibid., 92.

  35. Ibid., 51.

  36. Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. The Fourth Edition, Corrected (London: William Innys, 1730); reprinted, with a foreword by Albert Einstein (London: G. Bell, 1931; New York, Dover Publications, 1952), 370 (page citation is to the 1952 edition).

  37. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 56 (June 1862): 665.

  INDEX

  A

  Aberdeen (Md.) proving ground, 79–80

  absolute addressing, 114

  Accidents and Emergencies; A Guide for their Treatment before the arrival of Medical Aid (Smee), 45

  adaptation, 6, 113, 114

  and evolution of software, 57, 185

  without natural selection, 176–77

  addition, modulo, 66

  Adleman, Leonard, 165

  AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), 77, 91, 102, 118

  Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 131–32

  agents (software), 182, 185, 189

  Air Force, U.S., 76, 144–45, 152, 178–80, 183. see also nuclear weapons; RAND; SAGE

  air pump (Boyle), 3, 134

  Alamogordo (New Mexico) bomb test, 78

  alchemy, 214

  Alexander I (Czar), 141

 
Alexander, James, 96

  algae, 112, 129

  algebra, 43. see also Boolean algebra; philosophical algebra

  algorithms, 54, 58, 158

  for binary arithmetic, of Leibniz, 37

  packet switching, 12, 42, 151

  and punched-card data processing, 83–84

  alphabet, 49, 62, 132, 137–38, 140, 225

  binary coding of, 61, 132–33, 143

  genetic, 27, 118

  of ideas, and Leibniz, 36–38

  of machine instructions, 118, 121

  and Turing machine, 55

  Ampère, André-Marie (1775–1836)

  and cybernétique, 6, 141, 161–162

  and game theory, 6, 153–54

  on telegraphy and electrodynamics, 141

  “Analogy Between Mental Images and Sparks” (Richardson), 87

  analytical engine (Babbage), 38–43, 59, 68, 103

  AN-FSQ-7 computer (Army-Navy Fixed Special eQuipment), 179–81. see also SAGE

  architecture, computer. See computer architecture

  architecture, naval, 161

  architecture, network, 2, 12, 157, 167, 168, 205, 208. see also neural networks

  Argonne National Laboratory, 98, 107

  argument from design, 18, 116, 185–86, 188–89

  arithmetic, 120, 135, 156, 168, 178, 212, 214. see also binary arithmetic; Boolean arithmetic; political arithmetic

  floating point, 68, 106

  and incompleteness, 49, 50, 54

  and logic, 7, 36, 38, 44, 50

  and mind, 6–7, 39, 109, 110

  powers of, and Vannevar Bush, 61–62

  arithmetic engine (Hooke), 135

  armada, Spanish, 5, 133

  Arms and Insecurity (Richardson), 87

  army, French, in World War I, 86, 193–94

  army, U.S., 67, 79, 80–81, 91, 145

  art, and imagination, 222

  artificial intelligence, 59, 128, 177, 179, 189, 211–14

  alien, in origin or time scale, 187–88, 217, 224

  and Babbage, 35, 41–42

  and Butler, 24–26, 28, 33–34, 188

  cautions against, 16, 24–26, 33–34, 192, 224, 226–27

  collective, 7, 10–11, 13, 34, 72, 109–110, 172, 187, 192, 203–204, 209–210, 214

  emergence of, 9, 11–13, 168, 172, 187, 204, 209–210, 211, 224, 228

  and Gödelian incompleteness, 50, 70

  and I. J. Good, 72, 170–71, 177, 203–204

  and Hobbes, 2–3, 6–7, 35, 50–51

  and Leibniz, 7, 35–36, 50–51, 73

  and mathematical logic, 7, 157, 183

  and meaning, 7–8, 171

  paradox of, 182

  and Smee, 46–48

  and Turing, 53, 66–67, 68, 70–73, 117

  unfulfilled promises of, 121, 157, 213–14, 218

  and von Neumann, 108–10, 125, 157, 168

  artificial life. see also symbiogenesis; Tierra

  and Barricelli, 111–19, 121, 124–25, 128–30

  and Butler, 15, 24–26, 28, 31, 33–34

  cautions against, 24–26, 33–34, 127

  and Hobbes, 1–2

  origins and evolution, 9, 30, 32, 121–23, 125, 128–30, 172, 177, 202, 215–16, 228

  and von Neumann, 76, 125, 155, 175, 190

  Ashby, William Ross (1903–1972), 175–77, 184

  AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph Co.), 9, 149, 152, 180

  Atlas (computer, Manchester University), 118, 119

  Atlas (intercontinental ballistic missile), 145

  atoms, not indivisible, 198

  Aubrey, John (1626–1697)

  on Hobbes, 5, 160

  on Hooke, 134, 135–36

  on Petty, 160, 161

  autocatalytic systems, 29, 113, 189

  automata, 1–2, 47, 89, 157. see also under von Neumann

  cellular, anticipated by Lewis Richardson, 197

  proliferation of, 2, 108–110, 125, 214

  Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), 67–69

  automobile, and Erasmus Darwin, 22

  Aydelotte, Frank, 95, 99

  B

  B-mathematics (Barricelli), 120

  Babbage, Charles (1791–1871), 35, 38–43, 48

  and Augusta Ada, countess of Lovelace, 41

  his calculating engines, 38–43, 59, 68, 103

  on infinite powers of finite machines, 40, 42–43

  his mechanical notation, 38–39, 49, 128

  on natural religion, 35, 41–42

  on packet-switched communications, 42, 81

  back-propagation, in neural and financial nets, 169

  Backus, John, 122

  Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 132

  Bacon, (Friar) Roger (ca. 1214–1292), 212–14

  Ballistic Missile Early Warning system, 146

  ballistic missiles, 75, 76, 144–47, 180

  Ballistic Research Laboratory, 80, 81

  ballistics, 75, 79–80, 220

  and evolution of digital computing, 75, 79–82, 224

  and evolution of mind, 82, 219, 224

  Bamberger, Louis, 95

  bandwidth, 132, 147, 148, 216

  and digital ecology, 206–207

  and intelligence, 203–205, 209

  Bank of England, 45, 162, 171

  banks and banking, 11, 62, 159, 162–65, 167, 170, 171

  Baran, Paul, 146–52, 168, 206–208

  on cryptography and security, 152

  on the Internet as a free market economy, 168

  and packet switching, 146–52, 206–208

  and RAND, 146–52

  on wireless networks, 206–208

  Barricelli, Nils Aall (1912–1993), 111–21, 124–25, 129. see also symbiogenesis

  on evolution of evolution, 128, 191

  on Gödel’s incompleteness proof, 120

  and IAS computer, 113–18, 121, 124–25, 129, 192

  on intelligence and evolution, 115, 187–88

  on languages, 120, 123

  on origins of genetic code, 129

  on punched cards, 120

  and von Neumann, 125

  batch processing, 180

  Bateson, Gregory, on information, 167

  Baudot, Jean Maurice Émile, 65, 143

  Baudot (teleprinter) code, 65, 105, 143

  Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827), 222

  “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (Wiener, Rosenblueth & Bigelow), 101

  “being digital,” Turing on, 69

  Bell, E. T., 36

  Bell Telephone Laboratories, 61, 144, 179

  Berkeley, Edmund C., 108

  Berlin, University of, 78

  Bernal, J. D., (1901–1971), 13

  Bigelow, Julian

  and ancestry of microprocessors, 203

  and founding of cybernetics group, 100–101

  and IAS computer project, 100–107, 111

  on purposive systems, 170

  and von Neumann, 101, 102

  and Wiener, 100–101

  Billings, John Shaw (1839–1913), 60

  BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer), 91

  binary arithmetic, 7–8, 37, 44, 66, 89, 103, 106

  biology, coined by Lamarck, 20

  bits (of information), 7, 73, 106, 113, 180, 205, 216

  nature of, 158, 216

  origins of term, 61, 99

  strings of, 32, 90, 104, 119, 129, 144, 150, 185

  Black Cloud, The (Hoyle), 204

  Blackwell, D. H., 146

  Bletchley Park (code-breaking facility), 9–10, 63–67, 69, 72, 75, 88, 90, 104, 170, 204, 205. see also Colossus; Enigma; Fish

  blind watchmaker, 116, 186, 189

  Bombe (cryptanalytic machine), 64, 67

  Book of Numbers, 142

  “Book of the Machines” (Butler), 24, 26

  Boole, George (1815–1864), 41, 43–45, 49

  Boolean algebra, 43–44

  Boolean arithmetic, and Colossus, 10, 65–67

  Booth, Rob
ert, 17

  Borel, Émile, 154

  Boulton, Matthew (1728–1809), 21, 22

  Boyle, Robert (1627–1691), 3, 6, 75, 134

  brain. see also neural networks; neurology

  capacity of, 136, 222

  complexity of, 45, 71, 109, 158

  and digital computers, 89–90, 108, 155–57

  evolution of, 81–82, 218–19

  as evolutionary system, 109–110, 156–57, 176, 187, 188

  initial randomness of, 12, 71, 170, 175

  and mind, 5, 45–48, 72, 87, 89, 109–110, 136, 155–59, 168, 176, 204, 214–15, 219, 225

  and pulse-frequency coding, 156, 169, 225

  statistical nature of, 45, 156, 168–69

  Brainerd, John Grist (1904–1988), 81

  Bramhall, John (bishop of Derry, 1594–1663), 4

  brass head, legend of, 212–14, 224

  Bricklin, Dan, 122

  British Museum, 135

  British Tabulating Machine Company, 64

  Brodrick, Sir Alan, 161

  Brookhaven National Laboratory, 118

  Budapest, University of, 78, 89

  Buffon, Georges Louis (1707–1788), 17, 20, 27, 154

  Bungey, Friar, 212–14

  Bureau of Standards, U.S., 79, 107

  bureaucracy, and formal systems, 47, 49, 129

  Burks, Arthur W, 77, 90, 93, 98, 99–100, 102–103, 121

  Bush, Vannevar (1890–1974), 61–62, 80

  Butler–Darwin quarrel, 17–18, 23–24, 26–27, 186–87

  Butler, Dr. Samuel (1774–1839), 15

  Butler, Reverend Thomas (1806–1886), 15, 24

  Butler, Samuel (1835–1902), 15–18, 23–28, 31, 32–34

  on artificial intelligence and artificial life, 15, 24–26, 28, 31, 33–34, 119, 191

  and Charles Darwin, 17–18, 23–27, 186–87

  on collective intelligence, 31, 34, 168, 187–88, 217–18

  on evolution, 17–18, 23–28, 30, 119, 186–87, 217

  on intelligence of evolution, 18, 27, 115, 124, 186–89

  in New Zealand, 15–17, 24–25, 32–34

  on origins of life, 28, 188, 216

  on species-level intelligence, 18, 27, 116, 187–88

  foresees World Wide Web, 33–34

  Buxton, Harry Wilmot, on Babbage, 39–40

  Byron, George Gordon Noel (1788–1824), 41

  C

  C.M. (anonymous telegraphist), 140

  Cairns-Smith, A. Graham, 119, 202

  calculus, 36, 39

  logical, 7, 36–38, 43, 89

  calculus ratiocinator, 36, 48

  California Institute of Technology, 173

 

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