Collected Essays (58 page)

Objection 2
. What’s so special about the Web? Couldn’t you use a very fat book with a lot of footnotes to present a similar kind of branching hypertext?

Answer 2.
Indeed you can make a printed model of a big hyperlinked Web site. You might, for instance, print out the text content and the images, and use footnotes for the hyperlinks. But it would be hard to maintain and cumbersome to read. This question suggests an interesting analogy. A good Web model of, say, Johnny X, would be something like
The Encyclopedia of Johnny X
, with lots of cross-references from article to article. How might Johnny X generate the content and the links for such a book? We’ll discuss some science-fictional methods for this next month.

Objection 3
. A Web site is static. The essence of your mind is that it is continually changing and reacting to things.

Answer 3
. If a Web site were really to be like a mind it would have to have a certain self-animating quality. It should “browse itself” and let you watch or, better, it should let you input things into it and watch it react. If you had the content and the links for a mind-sized website in place, writing some driver software in Java wouldn’t actually be that hard. Imagine, for instance, a background search engine that would keep popping up new associations to things on the screen.

(An aside. A product I’d really like to see is a
Beavis and Butthead
filter or a
Mystery Science 3000
filter or a
Popup Video
filter. You’d hook this thing up to your TV set, and it would say funny things about whatever you were watching.)

Objection 5.
The Web is all interconnected. So actually it is more like one mind than like a lot of minds.

Answer 5.
You could indeed think of the Web as society’s mind. And then the most frequently visited sites are the public mind’s obsessions. But there will be individual pieces of the Web that correspond more to one individual’s mind.

Moving on from the notion of the mind being like the web, we get to the more general idea of the mind and software. And this leads to a contemporary science-fictional dream sometimes called “uploading.” It happens a lot in my
Ware
novels, that is, in
Software
,
Freeware
,
Wetware
and
Realware
. You somehow put a copy of your brain’s software into a computer and this gives you a kind of immortality. The reason this is still science-fiction is that we don’t have the foggiest notion for how such a process might work. And thinking of the Web as a model for the mind seems like a good place to start.

But there’s something not quite right about buttons on the web page as a model for the mind. We need something that is a little more strange, or fractal to make it work or like the mind.

Let’s try a little introspection. Look at something and think, “What does that remind me of ?”—and that’s a the link from that item. And then think about the link and see what intermediate links might branch off of that, just keep doing that with things, asking what comes off the line of the link. Try to think about how you could do that as a web page.

The interface-design point to make here is that the Web would be a better match for the mind if the links were somehow set up in a different way. If one simply has pages leading to pages leading to pages, then we have a structure that’s a little like a tip-branching tree. A true fractal should branch all over. The difference between the two is that the trunk of the tip-branching tree is a featureless line, while the trunk of the branch-branching tree is as woolly as the rest of the figure. Only the latter is fully self-similar, i.e. only the latter has the property that each of its parts resembles the whole.

In some sense you never can get started drawing a true fractal, because you always have to put in another bump before the bump you want to get to. And this is similar to the experience you have when you try to fully explain any aspect of your mindscape.

This is similar to what happens in your thought process, you start to think of something so have a sort of hyperlink to it, but if you want to explain how you get from here to there, there is a detour that you have to take, and then you want to explain how you get to the detour and there is another detour.

Of course we do in fact manage to think things and to say things without stumbling over crippling infinite regresses. So the instant jump of a web hyperjump is not wholly unrealistic. I think the fit between Web and Mind would be better if, let us say, every hyperjump button had the ability to display a list of the items on the page you might go to. Thus, you might click on a button labeled, let’s say,
Peter Bruegel
. And rather than jumping right away, the program might offer you some suboptions, and when you highlight one of those, you get subsuboptions and so on. I’m imagining a sequence like this:

Peter Bruegel

Go to Peter Bruegel

Detour to Painters

Detour to Netherlands

Detour to Sixteenth Century

Go to Sixteenth Century

Detour to Inquisition

Detour to Shakespeare

Detour to Renaissance

Go To Renaissance

Detour to Perspective

Etc.

Online Immortality

I’ve talked about the idea that the Web has a branching, fractal structure reminiscent of the patterns of the human mind. There are two topics that come out of this: first of all, might we hope to somehow replicate a human mind as a Web site, and secondly, might the Web itself someday “wake up” and start behaving like a huge planetary mind?

As I already mentioned, the first topic, which we might call cyberimmortality, has to do with the dream of getting a software representation of a human mind. This process is often called uploading—the idea is that someone might hope to upload the software of their personality to the great Net God of the ether.

Let me briefly summarize my thoughts on cyberimmortality. My feeling is that in order to get a software model of some person’s mind—let’s call the person Sid in honor of the lamented Sid Vicious (and wasn’t
The Filth and the Fury
a fun movie?)—you’d need to get several levels of information about Sid. At the highest level, you’d want to build up a database of Sid’s memories. Sid might carry around a little interactive audio device that I call a
lifebox
. Over the course of a few months Sid would tell the lifebox all the stories about his life that he could remember. The lifebox would organize the fractal flow of information into something like a web page, occasionally prompting Sid for new links and new topics.

And then would come the tasty, monster-SF part. To really get a good model of Sid’s mind we might well want to get an electrical, physical and chemical map of his brain. This could involve non-invasive things like PET scans and SQUIDs and computer tomography or, more graphically, it could involve
slicing up Sid’s brain
. And then running it through a blender to get out all the chemicals. Though of course it may well be that by the technique becomes practical you won’t really have to slice up the uploadee’s brain, let alone chew it up with your power mechanical android jaws.

As I mention elsewhere in this volume, the last thought brings back a fond memory of careening down an Austin street with John Shirley, and John leaning out the window to holler, “Y’all ever ate any
live brains
?”

Could a computer program ever be alive?
Yawn
. Of course it could. This question’s been a dead issue for years. For those who slept through the second half of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel proved that although we can’t explicitly describe a computer program as intelligent as ourselves, we can indeed set up a situation in which an intelligent program can evolve.

What about the feeling that there’s more to your consciousness than the software of your brain? Well, that feeling you have is, in my humble opinion, the simple experiencing of raw existence. Aquinas once said, “God is pure existence unmodified.” Everything that exists shares in this feeling. As the Zen guys put it, the universal rain moistens all creatures. Nothing stays “dry.” Everything in the world is lit up, each object is just another illuminated bit of stained glass, with the great SUN shining upon us all from some higher dimension. And that’s about as lucid as I feel like being on this subject today.

The topic of whether the Web might ever be like a mind falls under the heading of “emergent intelligence.” It’s a somewhat hoary SF theme, the idea that some day the Machine will Wake Up. Often the new planetary computer mind is thought of as having fairly sinister intentions. But why should it, really?

After all, the computer
already
dominates Earth. So there’s really nothing to overthrow, no power to seize. We’re the cells the computer is made up of. You don’t take over your body and say, “All right, I’m going to kill all of you skin and muscle and bone and nerve cells so that I can reign supreme!” Your body IS your cells. By the same token, the planetary computer intelligence IS the machines on our desks that we are continually feeding with bits and gobbets of info.

Continuing the analogy, it is true that we try and encourage some kinds of cells at the expense of others. We want more muscle and brain and less fat and tumors. Might the planetary Web mind decide to freeze out certain elements? Indirectly this already happens: Spammers get their accounts cancelled, not because of anything they stand for, but because they are bad for the efficiency of the Web. Pages that stick to outdated HTML coding standards become obsolete and unvisited, because they don’t support the evolution of the Web.

That’s enough deep thinking for today. Now for something trivial.

Anyone who owns a computer has noticed the insane number of connector wires that he or she has under the desk. When I got my first computers I was kind of happy about all the wires, and proud that I knew what they were all for. It made me feel high-tech to plug them in.

Now, what with a variety of additional peripherals kicking around, I have so many wires that it almost seems like the wires, in and of themselves, might someday break into emergent intelligence. Twining around my ankles and pulling me beneath the desk.

Is there some kind of fundamental principle at work? Well, each new device you get will usually require a power wire and at least one data wire leading to another devices. A few devices (like a keyboard) don’t have their own power wire. But other devices (like a scanner with a pass-through port to the printer or a telephone which connects to the wall and to your computer) will have an extra data wires. And once you get to enough power-driven devices you need to add extra wires in the form of multiple-outlet extension cords. So let’s say there’s an average of 2.5 wires per device.

Looking around my desk, I see a printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, laptop computer, main computer, three speakers, a speaker controller, external modem, two uninterruptable power sources, two phones, and an answering machine. That’s seventeen devices, which, according to my formula, makes for forty-two and a half wires. And looking at the snake-pit under my desk, that’s indeed what it looks like.

Will the coming of wireless devices clear away the wires? Maybe—but at what cost? Don’t you have the feeling that all this radiation might be bad for you? I remember years ago reading a Heinlein story that argued that the ambient radio-frequency radiation would lead to a gradual degeneration of the human race. And that was written well before the era when you can soft-boil your brain with your cell-phone. Ever notice how the warnings that come with your cell-phone mention a danger of
burning
yourself if the naked metal of the antenna touches your skin?

The New Century

Just now I started eating a peach and I noticed it has a Web address on it. The URL is on a little sticker; it urges me to go to e-zrecipies.com and find instructions for peach pie. And this sets me thinking to the fact that, yes, this really is the 21st Century.

When I go in to teach my classes at San Jose State University, I see students with their head shaved on the sides but hair on top, the side parts with a red stripe, the hair on top raspberry and moussed into spikes like Jughead’s crown. These are just regular students. These are the hairdos I used to see in comic books that tried to show the 21st Century. But now they’re here and nobody questions them. It’s time.

In the Old Navy store near Union Square in San Francisco they have twenty pairs of mechanical legs hanging from the ceiling, marching in place, wearing Old Navy pants. All the belts and gears of the devices very visible. And in the Levi’s store a block or two away, you move from level to level in a giant open-mesh industrial elevator, also with all its gears and cables exposed. Gears and machinery are quaint and nostalgic for the 21
^st
Century. We’re all through
trying
to be21
^st
Century. We
are
21
^st
Century.

I bought a 21st Century toilet a couple of months back. It looks quite a bit like a toilet I would have bought last year. But now it’s the year 2000, and the only kind of new toilet I can buy anymore is, by definition, a
21st Century toilet
. We’re in science-fiction land.

What ever happened with the Y2K crisis anyway? What a hoax, what a scam, what a rip-off. Where are all those self-appointed experts now? Off counting their money. You can sell people anything if you tell them it’s for public safety. Did you notice that nothing at all happened to the Third World countries that didn’t bother having a Y2K-preparedness program?