Collected Essays (64 page)

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 creating 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.

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 of 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.

My
antithesis
in the book’s dialectic triad, expressed by the word “soul,” is the existential observation that consciousness doesn’t
feel
like a computation. We have an innate sense of awareness that we express by the phrase, “I am.” One has a feeling that being conscious involves merging into the world, which doesn’t seem like something a computation would easily do. Our experiences with sensual qualia give us a sense that consciousness has a texture not captured by computation. Dreams and religious visions also give us a feeling of having a higher consciousness that’s not captured by computations.

My
synthesis
in this dialectic triad is to claim that naturally occurring computations can in fact have the richness of consciousness, for the reason that they are
gnarly
computations
. Furthermore, I argue that all naturally occurring processes are in fact complex enough to be gnarly computations.

I’ll say more about gnarly computations in the next section, but for now suffice it to say they are complex and unpredictable. In my book’s title, I use the word “seashell” to represent the notion of gnarly computations because certain seashell patterns are believed to be naturally occurring computations of this complex sort. (See Figure 21.)