Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Another issue with telepathy has to do, once again, with privacy. Here’s an analogue: a blogger today is a bit like someone who’s broadcasting telepathically, dumping his or her thoughts into the world for all to see. A wise blogger censors his or her blog, so as not to appear like a hothead, a depressive, or a bigot.

  What if telepathy can’t be filtered, and everyone can see everyone’s secret seething? Perhaps, after a period of adjustment, people would get thicker skins. Certainly it’s true that in some subcultures, people yell at each other without necessarily getting excited. Perhaps a new kind of tolerance and empathy might emerge, whereby no one person’s internal turmoil seems like a big deal. Consider: to be publicly judgmental of someone else, you compare your well-tended outside to the other person’s messy inside. But if everyone’s insides are universally visible, no one can get away with being hypocritical.

  Telepathy will provide a huge increase in people’s ability to think. You’ll be sharing your memory data with everyone. In the fashion of a Web search engine, information requests will be distributed among the pool of telepaths without the need for conscious intervention. The entire knowledge of the species will be on tap for each individual. Searching the collective mind won’t be as fast as getting something from your own brain, but you’ll have access to far more information.

  Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won’t actually change that much—not even in a million years. That’s a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we’ve utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins.

  No matter the tech, what people do is based upon simple needs: the desire to mate and reproduce, the need for food and shelter, and the longing for power and luxuries. Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there’ll be only ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportions of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there’s going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we’re getting screwed.

  Those goodies need not be “possessions” as we understand them; in the near term, an interesting effect will emerge. Since we’re all linked on the net, we can easily borrow things or even get things free. As well as selling things, people can lend them out or give them away. Why? To accumulate social capital and good reputation.

  In the orphidnet future, people can always find leftover food. Some might set out their leftovers, like pies for bums. Couch-surfing as a serial guest becomes eminently practical, with the ubiquitous virtual cloud of observers giving a host some sense of security vis-à-vis the guests. And you can find most of the possessions you need within walking distance—perhaps in a neighbor’s basement. A community becomes a shared storehouse.

  On the entertainment front, I imagine orphidnet reality soap operas. These would be like real-time video blogs, with sponsors’ clickable ads floating around near the characters, who happen to be interesting people doing interesting things.

  People will still dine out—indeed this will be a preferred form of entertainment, as physically eating something is one of the few things that require leaving the home. As you wait at your restaurant table for your food, you might enjoy watching (or even experiencing) the actions of the chef. Maybe the restaurant employs a gourmet eater, with such a sensitive and educated palate that it’s a pleasure to mind-meld when this eater chows down.

  Will telepaths get drunk and stoned? Sure! And with dire consequences. Imagine the havoc you could wreak by getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just emailing, phoning, or yelling at people face to face. There will be new forms of intoxication as well. A pair of people might lock themselves into an intense telepathic feedback loop, mirroring their minds back and forth until chaotic amplification takes hold.

  In the world of art, suppose someone finds a way to record mood snapshots. And then we can produce objects that directly project the raw experiences of transcendence, wonder, euphoria, mindless pleasure, or sensual beauty, without actually having any content.

  Telepaths will use language for superficial small talk, but, as I mentioned, just as often they’ll use psychic hyperlinks and directly exchanged images and emotions. Novels could take the form of elaborate sets of mental links. Writing might become more like video-blogging. A beautiful state of mind could be saved into a memory network, glyph by glyph. This new literary form might be called the metanovel.

  Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification

  In the ubiquitous nanobot model I’ve been discussing, the orphidnet, we have a vast array of small linked minds. It’s reasonable to suppose that, as well as helping humans do things, the orphidnet will support emergent, artificially intelligent agents that enlist the memory and processing power of a few thousand or more individual orphids.

  Some of these agents will be as intelligent as humans, and some will be even smarter. It’s easy to imagine their being willing to help people by carrying out things like complex and tedious searches for information or by simulating and evaluating multiple alternate action scenarios. The result is that humans would undergo IA, or intelligence amplification.

  A step further, intelligent orphidnet agents group into higher minds that group into still higher minds and so on, with one or several planetary-level minds at the top. Here, by the way, is a fresh opportunity for human excess. Telepathically communing with the top mind will offer something like a mystical experience or a drug trip. The top mind will be like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that link into unifying concepts that puzzle-piece themselves into powerful systems that are in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory—aha! Hooking into the top mind will make any individual feel like more than a genius. Downside: once you unlink you probably won’t remember many of the cosmic thoughts that you had, and you’re going to be too drained to do much more than lie around for a few days.

  Leaving ecstatic merging aside, let’s say a little more about intelligence amplification. Suppose that people reach an effective IQ of 1000 by taking advantage of the orphidnet memory enhancement and the processing aid provided by the orphidnet agents. Let’s speak of these kilo-IQ people as kiqqies.

  As kiqqies, they can browse through all the world’s libraries and minds, with orphidnet agents helping to make sense of it all. How would it feel to be a kiqqie?

  I recently had an email exchange about this with my friend Stephen Wolfram, a prominent scientist who happens one of the smartest people I know. When I asked him how it might feel to have an IQ of 1000, and what that might even mean, he suggested that the difference might be like the difference between simulating something by hand and simulating it on a high-speed computer with excellent software. Quoting from Wolfram’s email:

  “There’s a lot more that one can explore, quickly, so one investigates more, sees more connections, and can look more moves ahead. More things would seem to make sense. One gets to compute more before one loses attention on a particular issue, etc. (Somehow that’s what seems to distinguish less intelligent people from more intelligent people right now.)”

  Against Computronium

  In some visions of the far future, amok nanomachines egged on by corporate geeks are disassembling the solar system’s planets to build Dyson shells of computronium around the Sun. Computronium is, in writer Charles Stross’s words, “matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing.” A Dyson shell is a hollow sphere of matter that intercepts all of the central sun’s radiation—using some of it and then passing the rest outwards in a cooled-down form, possibly to be further intercepted by outer layers of Dyson shells.
What a horrible thing to do to a solar system!

  I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere and everywhen computes at the max possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.

  Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god.

  Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that’s a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It’s worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts. (For details on this point, see Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, or see the topic “irreducibility” in Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science.)

  Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that’s smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels.

  But wait—if you do smash the whole planet into computronium, then you have potentially as much memory and processing power as the intact planet possessed. It’s the same amount of mass, after all. So then we could make a fully realistic world-simulating Vearth with no compromises, right? Wrong. Maybe you can get the hardware in place, but there’s the vexing issue of software. Something important goes missing when you smash Earth into dust: you lose the information and the software that was embedded in the world’s behavior. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a potentially human-equivalent robot with no AI software, or, more simply, like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.

  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.
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br />   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.