Collected Essays (47 page)

“Hello,” said Foxy, although Foxy had never talked before. “I’m not your dog anymore, Mr. Uno. Now I am Klaatu Zhang from Planet Sol. Would you like me to fetch something?”

“Well, I’d like a Ferrari,” said Mr. Uno.

Mr. Uno’s limpware robot, now known as Klaatu Zhang, bounced down the hill outside Mr. Uno’s house, and soon there came sliding up the street a big pancake of goo—that is, Foxy/Klaatu—with on top of it a bright new red Ferrari Testosterosso worth five billion dollars.

“Yaaaar!” said Mr. Uno.

“Yar!” answered the helpful limpware pancake which Mr. Uno had bought for only fifty-seven thousand dollars.

Walking up after the Ferrari came the manager of the dealership.

This won’t do, Mr. Uno,” said the manager to Mr. Uno. “You’re Bob, innit? Bob, what the hell you tryin’ to pull?”

“Oh, it’s just that I told my dog to fetch a Ferrari. I didn’t realize he could.”

“Cute,” said the manager, getting into the Ferrari. “You asshole.” He fired up the big engine and peeled out, spraying pieces of Klaatu Zhang all over the stone wall that held back the embankment upon which Mr. Uno’s house rested.

The sprayed pieces, each endowed with some holographic intelligence, crawled back into a puddle, and then there rose up from the puddle the perky pear shape of Klaatu Zhang. “Now what?” said Klaatu.

Moldie
. Looking out the bar’s glass door—I (mentally) see a yellow-striped green moldie humping by like a giant inchworm. The moldies would hang around in bars because they like to talk?

Phrases
. The huge sublunar marijuana caves. “I’m a lichenologist.” “As it happens, I’m developing a deal around the concept of The Face on Mars.”

Power Tool
. Corey Rhizome’s chunky funky clunky Makita piezomorpher.

Republikkkan
. A man rapping impatiently at the window next to his office door. He wants Monique or Ouish to come on in and suck him off. Blue veins under his smooth shiny nearly hairless skin.

Star
. Tre Dietz leaves with one of the starry minds. Or maybe he only does an excursion. Like to a star and back. Tre goes to the fuckin’ Sun! Old Tre never quite the same after that run…

Note on “Phreak Scenes”

Written 1995.

Unpublished.

I wrote this for
Mondo
2000
but, unless I’m mistaken, it didn’t appear in print. The piece is based on excerpts from the notes for my novel-in-progress at that time,
Freeware
. I was basically trying to do a cut-up piece that I could pass of as an article and, as I mentioned before, echoing Bruce Sterling’s “Twenty Evocations.” I like the quality of cut-ups, although I don’t think I’d ever take the full Burroughs route and construct a whole novel that way.

Three Flip Answers

What should you take 200 years into the future?

You ever notice how in the 1800s when people like Pocahontas or Ramanujan would go to England they would die of a year in disease? Take your own food, freeze-dried like for a camping trip, and take your own water purification pump.

Take a laptop with a bunch of computer games on it. People now pay big bucks for oldtime mechanical toys. We could still make them but we don’t. Future computers will be great, but they won’t be quaint.

Take a family photo-album; proves your from the past and has random little things they won’t know about.

You know that drawer you have where you keep little mementoes, games, toys, thingies? Empty it into a sack. It’s all priceless ephemera.

If you practice any art or craft, bring some samples of what you made.

What will sex be like in fifty years?

Fashion: X-shirts, which have blown-up photos of the wearer’s genitalia.

Sex in zero gravity very popular. Shuttle ships will take you up for an hour, just like now you can get a small plane to fly you over SF bay while ya DO it.

Scrotal pregnancies. Lots of men carrying babies in their scrota. Special little wheelbarrow that they use.

What will you find in the trash in thirty years?

Disposable facemasks, like to be tan or Black or whatever.

Fashion ears, they’re uncomfortable enough to throw away.

Misters—favorite drug intake is like asthma inhalers, five hits in a pulser.

Dermal patches for drug delivery.

Little bags of excrement—you can wear a pair of tubes that catch all your waste on the go so you don’t need to venture into public bathrooms. Dogs wear ‘em too.

Sacks of chewed food. You can get this thing like a condom that hooks onto your back teeth and goes down your esophagus and you eat a whole meal and it all goes into the big stomach rubber and then you pull it out. Colloquial: “I’m packing a lunch for the homeless.”

Talking cards that give directions to someplace; you throw it away when you get there.

Note on “Three Quick Answers”

Written 1995.

Unpublished.

I wrote this for a
Wired
1995 feature to be guest-edited by Douglas Coupland. I think my material was unused.

Edge Questions

Everything is Alive

Answer to The Edge Annual Question, 2006: “What is Your Dangerous Idea?”

Panpsychism. Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules—each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.

I’m quite comfortable with the notion that everything is a computation. But what to do about my sense that there’s something numinous about my inner experience? Panpsychism represents a non-anthropocentric way out: mind is a universally distributed quality.

Yes, the workings of a human brain are a deterministic computation that could be emulated by any universal computer. And, yes, I sense more to my mental phenomena than the rule-bound exfoliation of reactions to inputs: this residue is the inner light, the raw sensation of existence. But, no, that inner glow is not the exclusive birthright of humans, nor is it solely limited to biological organisms.

Note that panpsychism needn’t say that universe is just one mind. We can also say that each object has an individual mind. One way to visualize the distinction between the many minds and the one mind is to think of the world as a stained glass window with light shining through each pane. The world’s physical structures break the undivided cosmic mind into a myriad of small minds, one in each object.

The minds of panpsychism can exist at various levels. As well as having its own individuality, a person’s mind would also be, for instance, a hive mind based upon the minds of the body’s cells and the minds of the body’s elementary particles.

Do the panpsychic minds have any physical correlates? On the one hand, it could be that the mind is some substance that accumulates near ordinary matter—dark matter or dark energy are good candidates. On the other hand, mind might simply be matter viewed in a special fashion: matter experienced from the inside. Let me mention three specific physical correlates that have been proposed for the mind.

Some have argued that the experience of mind results when a superposed quantum state collapses into a pure state. It’s an alluring metaphor, but as a universal automatist, I’m of the opinion that quantum mechanics is a stop-gap theory, destined to give way to a fully deterministic theory based upon some digital precursor of spacetime.

David Skrbina, author of the clear and comprehensive book Panpsychism in the West, suggests that we might think of a physical system as determining a moving point in a multi-dimensional phase space that has an axis for each of the system’s measurable properties. He feels this dynamic point represents the sense of unity characteristic of a mind.

As a variation on this theme, let me point out that, from the universal automatist standpoint, every physical system can be thought of as embodying a computation. And the majority of non-simple systems embody universal computations, capable of emulating any other system at all. It could be that having a mind is in some sense equivalent to being capable of universal computation.

A side-remark. Even such very simple systems as a single electron may in fact be capable of universal computation, if supplied with a steady stream of structured input. Think of an electron in an oscillating field; and by analogy think of a person listening to music or reading an essay.

Might panpsychism be a distinction without a difference? Suppose we identify the numinous mind with quantum collapse, with chaotic dynamics, or with universal computation. What is added by claiming that these aspects of reality are like minds?

I think empathy can supply an experiential confirmation of panpsychism’s reality. Just as I’m sure that I myself have a mind, I can come to believe the same of another human with whom I’m in contact—whether face to face or via their creative work. And with a bit of effort, I can identify with objects as well; I can see the objects in the room around me as glowing with inner light. This is a pleasant sensation; one feels less alone.

Could there ever be a critical experiment to test if panpsychism is really true? Suppose that telepathy were to become possible, perhaps by entangling a person’s mental states with another system’s states. And then suppose that instead of telepathically contacting another person, I were to contact a rock. At this point panpsychism would be proved.

I still haven’t said anything about why panpsychism is a dangerous idea. Panpsychism, like other forms of higher consciousness, is dangerous to business as usual. If my old car has the same kind of mind as a new one, I’m less impelled to help the economy by buying a new vehicle. If the rocks and plants on my property have minds, I feel more respect for them in their natural state. If I feel myself among friends in the universe, I’m less likely to overwork myself to earn more cash. If my body will have a mind even after I’m dead, then death matters less to me, and it’s harder for the government to cow me into submission.

Can Robots See God?

Answer to The Edge Annual Question, 2007: “What have you changed your mind about, and why?”

Studying mathematical logic in the 1970s I believed it was possible to put together a convincing argument that no computer program can fully emulate a human mind. Although nobody had quite gotten the argument right, I hoped to straighten it out.

My belief in this will-o-the-wisp was motivated by a gut feeling that people have numinous inner qualities that will not be found in machines. For one thing, our self-awareness lets us reflect on ourselves and get into endless mental regresses: “I know that I know that I know…” For another, we have moments of mystical illumination when we seem to be in contact, if not with God, then with some higher cosmic mind. I felt that surely no machine could be self-aware or experience the divine light.

At that point, I’d never actually touched a computer—they were still inaccessible, stygian tools of the establishment. Three decades rolled by, and I’d morphed into a Silicon Valley computer scientist, in constant contact with nimble chips. Setting aside my old prejudices, I changed my mind—and came to believe that we can in fact create human-like computer programs.

Although writing out such a program is in some sense beyond the abilities of any one person, we can set up simulated worlds in which such computer programs evolve. I feel confident that some relatively simple set-up will, in time, produce a human-like program capable of emulating all known intelligent human behaviors: writing books, painting pictures, designing machines, creating scientific theories, discussing philosophy, and even falling in love. More than that, we will be able to generate an unlimited number of such programs, each with its own particular style and personality.

What of the old-style attacks from the quarters of mathematical logic? Roughly speaking, these arguments always hinged upon a spurious belief that we can somehow discern between, on the one hand, human-like systems which are fully reliable and, on the other hand, human-like systems fated to begin spouting gibberish. But the correct deduction from mathematical logic is that there is absolutely no way to separate the sheep from the goats. Note that this is already our situation vis-a-vis real humans: you have no way to tell if and when a friend or a loved one will forever stop making sense.

With the rise of new practical strategies for creating human-like programs and the collapse of the old a priori logical arguments against this endeavor, I have to reconsider my former reasons for believing humans to be different from machines. Might robots become self-aware? And—not to put too fine a point on it—might they see God? I believe both answers are yes.

Consciousness probably isn’t that big a deal. A simple pair of facing mirrors exhibit a kind of endlessly regressing self-awareness, and this type of pattern can readily be turned into computer code.

And what about basking in the divine light? Certainly if we take a reductionistic view that mystical illumination is just a bath of intoxicating brain chemicals, then there seems to be no reason that machines couldn’t occasionally be nudged into exceptional states as well. But I prefer to suppose that mystical experiences involve an objective union with a higher level of mind, possibly mediated by offbeat physics such as quantum entanglement, dark matter, or higher dimensions.

Might a robot enjoy these true mystical experiences? Based on my studies of the essential complexity of simple systems, I feel that any physical object at all must be equally capable of enlightenment. As the Zen apothegm has it, “The universal rain moistens all creatures.”

So, yes, I now think that robots can see God.

Search and Emergence

Answer to The Edge Annual Question, 2010: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?”