Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Let’s say a bit more about self-reflection among silps. As a human, I have a mental model of myself watching myself have feelings about events. This is the self-reflection component of consciousness mentioned above. There seems no reason why this mode of thought wouldn’t be accessible to objects. Indeed, it might be that there’s some “fixed point” aspect of fundamental physics making self-reflection an inevitability. Perhaps, compared to a quantum-computing silp, a human’s methods for producing self-awareness is weirdly complex and roundabout.

  As I mentioned before, when the Great Awakening comes, the various artificially intelligent agents of the orphidnet will be ported into silps or into minds made up of silps. As in the orphidnet, we’ll have an upward-mounting hierarchy of silp minds. Individual atoms will have small silp minds, and an extended large object will have a fairly hefty silp mind. And at the top we’ll have a truly conscious planetary mind: Gaia. Although there’s a sense in which Gaia has been alive all along, after the Great Awakening, she’ll be like a talkative, accessible god.

  Because the silps will have inherited all the data of the orphids, humans will still have their omnividence, their shared memory access, and their intelligence amplification. I also predict that, when the Great Awakening comes, we’ll have an even stronger form of telepathy, which is based upon a use of the subdimensions.

  Exploiting the Subdimensions

  Let’s discuss how we might provide every atom in the universe with a memory upgrade, thus awakening objects to become silps. And, given that the silp era will supersede the nanotech era, we’ll also need a non-electronic form of telepathy that will work after the orphidnet and digital computers have withered away.

  To achieve these two ends, I propose riffing on an old-school science-fiction power chord, the notion of the “subdimensions.” The word is a science-fictional shibboleth from the 1930s, but we can retrofit it to stand for the topology of space at scales below the Planck length—that is, below the size scale at which our current notions of physics break down.

  One notion, taken from string theory, is that we have a lot of extra dimensions down there, and that most of them are curled into tiny circles. For a mathematician like myself, it’s annoying to see the physicists help themselves to higher dimensions and then waste the dimensions by twisting them into tiny coils. It’s like seeing someone win a huge lottery and then put every single penny into a stodgy, badly run bond fund.

  I recklessly predict that sometime before the Year Million we’ll find a way to change the intrinsic topology of space, uncurling one of these stingily rolled-up dimensions. And of course we’ll be careful to pick a dimension that’s not absolutely essential for the string-theoretic Calabi-Yau manifolds that are supporting the existence of matter and spacetime. Just for the sake of discussion, let’s suppose that it’s the eighth dimension that we uncurl.

  I see our eighth-dimensional coils as springing loose and unrolling to form infinite eighth-dimensional lines. This unfurling will happen at every point of space. Think of a plane with hog-bristles growing out of it. That’s our enhanced space after the eighth dimension unfurls. And the bristles stretch to infinity.

  And now we’ll use this handy extra dimension for our universal memory upgrade! We’ll suppose that atoms can make tick marks on their eighth dimension, as can people, clouds, or stones. In other words, you can store information as bumps upon the eighth-dimensional hog bristles growing out of your body . The ubiquitous hog bristles provide endless memory at every location, thereby giving people endless perfect memories, and giving objects enough memory to make them conscious as well.

  OK, sweet. Now what about getting telepathy without having to use some kind of radio-signaling system? Well, let’s suppose that all of the eighth dimensional axes meet at the point at infinity and that our nimble extradimensional minds can readily traverse an infinite eighth-dimensional expanse so that a person’s attention can quickly rapidly darting out to the shared point at infinity. And once you’re focused on the shared point at infinity, your attention can zoom back down to any space location you like.

  In other words, everyone is connected via an accessible router point at infinity. So now, even if the silps have eaten the orphids as part of the Great Awakening, we’ll all have perfect telepathy.

  (Re. traveling an infinite distance in a finite time, perhaps we’ll use a Zeno-style acceleration, continually doubling our speed. Thus, traversing the first meter along the eighth dimensional axis might take a half a millisecond, the second meter a quarter of a millisecond, the third meter an eighth of a millisecond, and so on. And in this fashion your attention can dart out to infinity in a millisecond.)

  The End?

  Of course we won’t stop at mere telepathy! By the Year Million, we’ll have teleportation, telekinesis, and the ability to turn our thoughts into objects.

  Teleporting can be done by making yourself uncertain about which of two possible locations you’re actually in—and then believing yourself to be “there” instead of “here.” We’ll work this uncertainty-based method of teleportation as a three steps process. First, you perfectly visualize your source and target locations and mentally weave them together. Second, you become uncertain about which location you’re actually in. And third, you abruptly observe yourself, asking, “Where am I?” Thereby you precipitate a quantum collapse of your wave function, which lands you at your target location. I’m also supposing that whatever I’m wearing or holding will teleport along with me; let’s say that I can carry anything up to the weight of, say, a heavy suitcase.

  Once people can teleport, they can live anywhere they can find a vacant lot to build on. You can teleport in water and you can teleport your waste away. What about heat and light? Perhaps you can get trees to produce electricity, and then set sockets into the trunks and plug in your lamps and heaters. Or just get the trees to make light and heat on their own, and never mind the electricity. (Once we can talk to our plants, it should be fairly easy to tweak their genes.)

  As the next step beyond teleportation, we’ll learn to teleport objects without our having to move at all. This long hoped-for power is known to psi advocates and SF writers as telekinesis. How might telekinesis work our projected future? Suppose that, sitting in my living room, I want to teleport an apple from my fridge to my coffee table. I visualize the source and target locations just as I do when performing personal teleportation; that is, I visualize the fridge drawer and the tabletop in the living room. But now, rather than doing an uncertainty-followed-by-collapse number on my body, I need to do it on the apple. I become the apple for a moment, I merge with it, I cohere its state function to encourage locational uncertainty, and then I collapse the apple’s wave function into the apple-on-table eigenstate.

  What’s the status of the apple’s resident silp while I do this? In a sense the silp is the apple’s wave function, so it must be that I’m bossing around the silp. Fine.

  Can animals and objects teleport as well? What a mess that would be! We’d better hope that only humans can teleport. How might we justify such a special and privileged status for our race?

  I’ll draw on a science-fictional idea in a Robert Sheckley story, “Specialist,” from his landmark anthology, Untouched By Human Hands. Sheckley suggested that humans would have the power of teleportation because, unlike animals or objects, we experience doubt and fear. Certainly it seems as if animals don’t have doubt and fear in the same way that we do. If a predator comes, an animal runs away, end of story. If cornered, a rat bares his teeth and fights. Animals don’t worry about what might happen; they don’t brood over what they did in the past; they don’t agonize over possibilities—or at least one can suppose that they don’t.

  And it’s easy to suppose that the silps that inhabit natural processes don’t have doubt and fear either. Silps don’t much care if they die. A vortex of air forms and disperses, no problem.

  So why would doubt and fear lead to teleportation? Having doubt and fear involves cre
ating really good mental models of alternative realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternative realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. We can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can’t. Humans carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation—which, we can suppose, might lead to teleportation.

  Take this to the extreme. Could we create objects out of nothing? Call such objects “tulpas.” In Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is a material object or person that an enlightened adept can mentally create—a psychic projection that’s as solid as a brick. I think it’s entirely possible that, a million years from now, any human could create tulpas. How? You’ll psychically reprogram the quantum computations of the atoms around you, causing them to generate de Broglie matter waves converging on a single spot. Rather than being light holograms, these will be matter wave holograms—that is, physical objects created by computation: your tulpas.

  Your thoughts could become objects by coaxing the nearby atoms to generate matter holograms that behave just like normal objects. You could build a house from nothing, turn a stone into bread, transform water into wine (assuming, given such miraculous abilities, you still needed shelter, food, drink), and make flowers bloom from your fingertips.

  And then will humans finally be satisfied?

  Of course not. We’ll push on past infinity and into the transfinite realms beyond the worlds—mayhap to embroil ourselves with the elder gods and the Great Old Ones.

  * * *

  Note on “The Great Awakening”

  Written in 2007.

  Appeared in Damien Broderick, ed., Year Million, 2008.

  My preliminary section for this essay, “The Singularity,” is adapted from my book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, Basic Books. And the rest of the essay appeared in the Year Million anthology. There’s a certain overlap between “The Great Awakening,” and my 2005 essay, “Adventures in Gnarly Computation,” which appeared in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine. But I thought I might as well put both of them into my Collected Essays.

  Many of the ideas in “The Great Awakening” found their way into my 2007 SF novel, Postsingular, and its 2009 sequel, Hylozoic. It’s also worth mentioning that I posted some of this material in two blog posts in March, 2008, “Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality,” and its follow-up, “Limits to Virtual Reality: Answers to Comments.” The first of these can be found here and the follow-up is the next post in the blog. I don’t think I’ve ever got such passionate comments on a blog post!

  Some people seem to have a nearly religious belief in the reality of a digital afterlife. Being one of the first people to have written about this idea—in my 1982 novel Software—I’ve learned to to take it all that seriously. But it’s fun to think about.

  Everything Is Alive

  Consciousness and Life

  Panpsychism is the philosophical doctrine that every physical entity is conscious. By a “physical entity” I will mean any physical object or naturally occurring process.

  Note that panpsychism is different from (although consistent with) the pantheistic doctrine that the universe as a whole has a conscious mind. Panpsychism allows that the universe may be conscious, but its primary statement is that each object and each process has a little consciousness of its own. Galaxies, rocks, planets, atoms, electrons, air currents, fires, rivers—each of them has a mind.

  Panpsychism is related but not equivalent to hylozoism, which says that every object is alive. That curious word comes from the Greek words hyle, matter + zoe, life.

  To clarify the distinction between the two doctrines, we can divide entities into four distinct categories, listed in the left-hand column of Table 1. And the right-hand column of the table lists some possible candidates for each category.

  Category

  Possible Examples

  Conscious but not alive.

  Brittle chip-based ultracomputers. Ghosts.

  Conscious and alive.

  Humans, higher animals. “Self-reproducing” robots who build more robots.

  Alive but not conscious.

  Bacteria. Biological viruses. Group organisms such as anthills or human societies. Self-modifying computer viruses.

  Not alive and not conscious.

  Stones. Atoms. Planets. Fires. Waterfalls. Air currents. Fluttering flags.

  Consciousness and Life

  Despite these seeming distinctions, I’m going to argue that everything really belongs to the “conscious and alive” category, for I am both a panpsychic and a hylozoist. Certainly I realize this is not a common point of view! To some extent, I am only adopting these ideas on to see how they feel, that is, I practice a Philosophie des Als Ob—a philosophy of the “as if.”

  A critic might remark that our notions of being conscious and being alive help us make useful distinctions, e.g. between a person and a rock. So if I argue that everything is conscious and that everything is alive, then I am undermining the utility of two words. I would respond that I’m not seriously urging that we abandon forever our colloquial notions of what life and consciousness mean. Of course it’s useful to distinguish oneself from a rock. But it’s also useful—but much less often attempted—to argue the distinction away. My goal is to expand the reader’s sense of what’s possible.

  I currently work as a science fiction novelist as well as a philosopher of computer science. I find it useful to adopt extreme philosophical positions so that I can dramatize them as novels. One might regard my novels as extended thought experiments. Some of the ideas I discuss in this paper are finding their way into my most recent two novels, Postsingular, [Rucker 2007], and Hylozoic, [Rucker 2009].

  Part of the attraction of panpsychism and hylozoism is emotional. It feels pleasant to imagine oneself to be surrounded by living minds. The nineteenth century philosopher Gustav Fechner was an eloquent advocate for the satisfactions of panpsychism: “Humans are surrounded at all levels of being, by varying degrees of soul. This is Fechner’s ‘daylight view’—the human soul at home in an ensouled cosmos. This he contrasted to the materialist ‘night view’: humans alone, isolated points of light in a universe of utter blackness.”—Quoted in [Skrbina 2005], p. 122.

  In the long, run, I believe there will be quite practical reasons for believing in panpsychism. Firstly, it begins to seem possible that we can build computers which are conscious. And secondly, in the longer run, our computers will consist of ordinary objects. For the history of technology tells us that digital chip-based computers are likely to disappear from the scene, like any other technology. We don’t use clockwork gears in our watches anymore, and we don’t make radios out of vacuum tubes. The age of digital computer chips is going to be over and done, if not in a hundred years, then certainly in a thousand. By then we will be working with the quantum computations of ordinary objects.

  In this paper, I’ll present a logical argument for panpsychism and hylozoism My argument hinges on the concept of “gnarly computation,” which is a term I apply to chaotic processes that are somewhat orderly. My argument will proceed through the following nine steps.

  (1) Universal Automatism. Every physical entity is a computation.

  (2) Moreover, every physical entity is a gnarly computation.

  (3) Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence. Every naturally occurring gnarly computation is a universal computation.

  (4) Consciousness = Universal Computation + Self-Reflection.

  (5) Any complex system can be regarded as having self-reflection.

  (6) Panpsychism. Every physical entity is conscious.

  (7) Walker’s Thesis. Life = Universal Computation + Memory.

  (8) Every physical entity has memory via its interactions with the universe.

  (9) Hylozoism. Every physical object is alive.

  Everything is a Gnarly Computation

  I enjoy using a dialectic approach to develop ideas, as I am Georg Hegel’s great-great-great grandson. Usually we think o
f dialectic in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—the synthesis represents an escape from the contradiction found between the thesis and antithesis. This pattern is called a dialectic triad.

  I’ll start with a dialectic triad whose synthetic component is my statement (2): Every naturally occurring phenomenon can be regarded as a gnarly computation. My first version of this triad appears in a book whose title summarizes the argument: The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, [Rucker 2005]. This title is a pattern of the form thesis, synthesis, and antithesis. (If I wanted to closely match the usual order of ideas, I might have called my book The Lifebox, the Soul and the Seashell. But that phrase doesn’t roll off the tongue so well.)

  My thesis in this case is statement (1): Every object or process is a computation. My name for this thesis is Universal Automatism. Universal Automatism says the world is made of computations. A particularly contentious case of Universal Automatism is the statement that a human mind is a computation. In my book’s title, I represented this case of the Universal Automatism thesis by the word “lifebox,” which is a (still science-fictional) device that holds enough data and algorithms to fully emulate a person’s behavior. I feel that we will see lifeboxes on sale within a century or two.

  In order to make Universal Automatism more believable, I have to use a very inclusive notion of computation. So I say that a computation is any process that obeys finitely describable rules.

  Do note that, rather than saying the world is one single computation, I prefer to say that the world consists of many computations—at high and low levels. There need not be any single underlying master computation—no robot voice reciting numbers in the dark. Instead we are a seething swarm of little computations made of yet smaller computations.