Collected Essays (63 page)

Ah, but what if the nanomachines first copy all the patterns and behaviors embedded in Earth’s biosphere and geology? What if they copy the forms and processes in every blade of grass, in every bacterium, in every pebble—like Citizen Kane bringing home a European castle that’s been dismantled into portable blocks, or like a foreign tourist taking digital photos of the components of a disassembled California cheeseburger?

But, come on, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already
is
an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. Nature embodies superhuman intelligence just as she is.

Why am I harping on this? It’s my way of leading up to one of the really wonderful events that I think our future holds: the withering away of digital machines and the coming of truly ubiquitous computation. I call it the Great Awakening.

I predict that eventually we’ll be able to tune in telepathically to nature’s computations. We’ll be able to commune with the souls of stones.

The Great Awakening will eliminate nanomachines and digital computers in favor of naturally computing objects. We can suppose that our newly intelligent world will, in fact, take it upon itself to crunch up the digital machines, frugally preserving or porting all of the digital data.

Instead of turning nature into chips, we’ll turn chips into nature.

The Advent of Panpsychism

In the future, we’ll see all objects as alive and conscious—a familiar notion in the history of philosophy and by no means disreputable. Hylozoism (from the Greek
hyle
, matter, and
zoe
, life) is the doctrine that all matter is intrinsically alive, and panpsychism is the related notion that every object has a mind. (See David Skrbina,
Panpsychism in the West,
MIT Press, Cambridge 2007) Already my car talks to me, as do my phone, my computer, and my refrigerator, so I guess we could live with talking rocks, chairs, logs, sandwiches, and atoms. And, unlike the chirping electronic appliances, the talking objects may truly have soul.

My opinion is that consciousness is not so very hard to achieve. How does everything wake up? I think the key insight is this:

Consciousness = universal computation + memory + self-reflection

Computer scientists define universal computers as systems capable of emulating the behavior of every other computing system. The complexity threshold for universal computation is very low. Any desktop computer is a universal computer. A cell phone is a universal computer. A Tinkertoy set or a billiard table can be a universal computer.

In fact, just about any natural phenomenon at all can be regarded as a universal computer: swaying trees, a candle flame, drying mud, flowing water, even a rock. To the human eye, a rock appears not to be doing much. But viewed as a quantum computation, the rock is as lively and seething as, say, a small star. At the atomic level, a rock is like a zillion balls connected by force springs; we know this kind of compound oscillatory system behaves chaotically, and computer science teaches us that chaotic systems can indeed support universal computation.

The self-reflection aspect of a system stems from having a feedback process whereby the system has two levels of self-awareness: first, an image of itself reacting to its environment, and second, an image of itself watching its own reactions. (See Antonio Damasio,
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
, Mariner Books, New York 2000.)

We can already conceive of how to program self-reflection into digital computers, so I don’t think it will be long until we can make them conscious. But digital computers are
not
where the future’s at. 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 the Year Million, we’ll be well past the Great Awakening, and working with the consciousness of ordinary objects.

I’ve already said a bit about why natural systems are universal computers. And the self-reflection issue is really just a matter of programming legerdemain. But two other things will be needed.

First
, in order to get consciousness in a brook or a swaying tree or a flame or a stone, we’ll need a universal memory upgrade that can be, in some sense, plugged into natural objects.
Second
, for us to be able to work with the intelligent objects, we’re going to need a strong form of non-digital telepathy for communicating with them.

In the next section, I’ll explain how, before we bring about the Great Awakening, we’ll first have to manipulate the topology of space to give endless memory to every object and then create a high-fidelity telepathic connection among all the objects in the world. But for now let’s take these conditions for granted. Assume that everything has become conscious and that we are in telepathic communication with everything in the world.

To discuss the world after this Great Awakening, I need a generic word for an uplifted, awakened natural mind. I’ll call these minds
silps
. We’ll be generous in our panpsychism, with every size of object supporting a conscious silp, from atoms up to galaxies. Silps can also be found in groupings of objects—here I’m thinking of what animists regard as
genii loci
, or spirits of place.

There seems to be a problem with panpsychism: how do we have synchronization among the collective wills involved in, say, rush-hour traffic? Consider the atoms, the machine parts, the automotive subassemblies, the cars themselves, the minds of the traffic streams, not to mention the minds of the human drivers and the minds of their body cells. Why do the bodies do what the brains want them to? Why do all the little minds agree? Why doesn’t the panpsychic world disintegrate into squabbling disorder? Solution: everyone’s idea of their motives and decisions are
Just So
stories cobbled together
ex post facto
to create a narrative for what is in fact a complex, deterministic computation, a law-like cosmic harmony where each player imagines he or she is improvising.

It takes some effort to imagine a panpsychic world. What would a tree or campfire or waterfall be into? Perhaps they just want to hang out, doing nothing. Perhaps it’s only we who want to rush around, fidgety monkeys that we are. But if I overdo the notion of silp mellowness, I end up wondering if it even matters for an object to be conscious. Assuming the silps have telepathy, they do have sensors. But can they change the world? In a sense, yes: if silps are quantum computations, then they can influence their own matter by affecting rates of catalysis, heat flows, quantum collapses, and so on.

Thus a new-style silp drinking glass might be harder to break than an old-style dumb glass. The intelligent, living glass might shed off the vibration phonons in optimal ways to avoid fracture. In a similar connection, I think of a bean that slyly rolls away to avoid being cooked; sometimes objects do seem to hide.

The remarks about the glass and the bean assume that silp-smart objects would
mind
being destroyed. But is this true? Does a log mind being burned? It would be a drag if you had to feel guilty about stoking your fire. But silps aren’t really likely to be as bent on self-preservation as humans and animals are. We humans (and animals) have to be averse to death, so that we can live long enough to mate and to raise our young. Biological species go extinct if their individuals don’t care about self-preservation . But a log’s or rock’s individual survival doesn’t affect the survival of the race of logs or rocks. So silps needn’t be hard-wired to fear death.

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.)