I’ll get back to “It from Bit” another day. Today I’m pasting in part of my ever-growing cumulative email interview, expanded by questions from Carmine Treanni for Quaderni D’Altra Tempi, an Italian SF review.

Today’s photos are from Brussels, 2002, where I was visiting The Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC) and working on Frek and the Elixir and my Lifebox book; I just came across the digital files for these images today.

Oh, before the Brussels pictures, let’s start with a particularly evil-looking photo of El Chimp. I mean is this scary and retro and Orwellian, or what?

Q 171. You are considered to be among the founders of the Cyberpunk, together with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. After twenty years from the birth of the movement, which are, in your opinion, the traces left by the movement in and out of the science fiction?

A 171. The whole style of dark, glittering, noir Hollywood films running from Blade Runner through the Terminator to the Matrix might be thought of as coming out of the cyberpunk sensibility. One topic beloved of cyberpunk was the fusion between humans and machines, and this is something you see in all these films. We were, if you will, the canaries in the coal mine, noticing the first fumes of mankind’s accelerating roboticization.

Films, however, miss the druggy, antiestablishment satire that lies at the core of cyberpunk. But other writers have picked up the torch of nihilistic humor and apocalyptic speculation. I think of, for instance, Charles Stross’s Accelerando of 2005.

Q 172. With your four novels belonging to the Ware series, you gave birth to a real revolution in the robot concept of science fiction. How do you think that robotic technology will develop in the human future?

A 172. When I visit a lab and see the actual state of cutting-edge robotics, I’m always a bit disappointed. It’s still so flaky and cobbled together. I think it could be a hundred years until we get seriously good humanoid robots. There’s also the question of whether we really need the humanoid robots so beloved in SF. After all, we already have too many people, and people cost next to nothing to bring into being. But it’s work to be around other people, and some geeks dream of being able to get machines that do all the useful things that humans do without including the troublesome things such as: making you feel empathy and sympathy and pity for them; possibly becoming annoyed or even rebellious; not being something you simply turn off and throw away when you’re done.

Laid out like this, we can see how really screwed-up is our desire for robot slaves! In my Ware books, of course, as soon as the robots got as smart as people, they were as much trouble as people.

In terms of actual technology, I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of piezoplastic, that is plastic that flexes like muscles. Brittle gear-and-spring robots seem so unnatural. Putting it quite baldly: What good is a humanoid robot who you wouldn’t want to have sex with? I really get into that in my book Freeware, where there’s people sexually obsessed with soft robots.

An alternative to smart-plastic robots may be biotechnology. If you talk about a biotech robot, you really bring the fundamental contradiction into relief: geeks want to make a person that is a “robot” in the sense of not having a soul or deserving any empathy. Sometimes SF movies have treated this theme, with the underclass being clones. But, again, with overpopulation, this exercise is fundamentally pointless. Humans already know about enslaving each other, and we already know it doesn’t work out as a good thing.

In a more practical vein, I think we will see better and better AI in our appliances. Certainly the self-driving car will come into being, assuming there’s away around the crippling law-suits that will ensue when the vehicles occasionally malfunction. Certainly our computers will learn to speak, to understand speech, and to fake something like a human personality in conversation.

One of the best ways to have a program imitate a human is simply to give it an enormous database of texts that one person has written or said. In this case, a good search engine can replace having to create real AI. The program simply looks up an appropriate answer. I call this kind of device a “lifebox.”

Q 173. Could you, please, talk about your new nonfiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul?

A 173. The title itself is a dialectic triad. The Lifebox thesis is that there can be computer models of human minds, the Soul antithesis is that I feel myself to be a vibrant energy-filled being and not a machine, the Seashell synthesis is that the computational patterns found on certain kinds of seashells are examples of the gnarly deterministic-but-unpredictable computations that could indeed inhabit my skull.

I might mention that the subtitle is What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy. You can find out more about the book on my Lifebox website.

I think we’re presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation.

Does this, then, mean that the world is dull? Far from it. The naturally occurring computations that surround us are richly complex. A tree's growth, the changes in the weather, the flow of daily news, a person's ever-changing moods — all of these computations share the crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic, gnarly computations are — and this is a key point — inherently unpredictable. The world's mystery is preserved.

I mixed together anecdotes, graphics, and fables, in the book to tease out the implications of this new worldview, which I call “universal automatism.” Looking at reality as a bunch of computations reveals some startling aspects of the everyday world, touching upon such topics as chaos, the internet, fame, free will, and the pursuit of happiness.

I tried to make this tome more than a popular science book, a philosophical entertainment that teaches us how to enjoy our daily lives to the fullest possible extent.

Q 174. What is your definition of science fiction? How do you consider and see the current status and the prospects of science fiction?

A 174. Science fiction is writing that analyzes some fast-changing aspect of society by extrapolating current trends into the future or into an alternate world. Traditionally science fiction has certain standard tropes that it uses, but new ones are being developed all the time — I’m thinking of things like blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, holograms, immersive virtual reality, robots, teleportation, endless shrinking, levitation, antigravity, generation starships, ecodisaster, blowing up Earth, pleasure-center zappers, mind viruses, the attack of the giant ants, and the fourth dimension. I call these our “power chords,” analogous to the heavy chords that rock bands use.

When a writer uses an SF power chord, there’s an implicit understanding with the informed readers that this is indeed familiar ground. And it’s expected the writer will do something fresh with the trope.

This implicit contract isn’t honored by mainstream writers who dip a toe into “speculative fiction”. These cosseted mandarins tend not be aware of just how familiar are the chords they strum. To have seen a single episode of Star Trek twenty years ago is sufficient SF research for them! And their running-dog lickspittle lackey mainstream critics are certainly not going to call their club-members to task over failing to create original SF. After all (think they), science-fiction writers and readers are subnormal cretins who cannot possibly have made any significant advances over the most superficial and well-known representations, and we should only be grateful when a real writer stoops to filch bespattered icons from our filthy wattle huts.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect. (And this rant is lifted from a Readercon address I gave in 2003. Note the ongoing lifebox simulation of me actually being alive…) Really, SF is doing quite well, although of late it seems as if fantasy is eating our lunch. But I’ve been hearing gloom-and-doom for my whole career as an SF writer. I’m just happy I continue being published and read. Maybe someday they’ll start making movies of my books and I’ll get the big money.

Q 175. Please tell me something about the writing process when elaborating a new novel.

A 175. When I start, I always have in mind a few crucial situations or devices that I’m eager to explore and depict. These ideas arise to some extent spontaneously, and to some extent from thinking about scientific and social ideas that interest me.

Once I have a vague idea of the book’s theme, I begin working on figuring out the characters, the geography, the society, the tone, the point of view, the story arc, the physics, and, above all, the plot outline.

I write about all these ideas in a notes document that I develop in concert with my novel; usually my notes documents end up nearly as long as my books. I post each of the notes documents online when the corresponding book is published.

The virtue of having a notes document is that then there’s something I can work on when I don’t quite feel ready to write the novel.

When a book’s going well, I can average about a thousand words a day. When I get my thousand words, I print it and go to the coffee shop and reread it and mark it up, then type it in again and repeat the process. I might cycle through a given section three times in a day, and the next day maybe one more time and then I move into the next section. I have more about all this in my document “A Writer's Toolkit.”

I tend to be somewhat anxious when I work, worrying I won’t be able to get things to come out right. In general, I worry too much.

Reader Jonathan Flynn points out that my Gigadial podcasts are visible on Feedburner, and that the Feedburner format is easier for his iPod to digest. Eventually (in 2015) I began posting my talks via Rudy Rucker Podcasts, see the button above.

The great visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined the phrase “It from Bit” to represent the notion that perhaps the universe emerges from digital computations. [The picture above is a famous illustration that Wheeler used not to symbolize “It From Bit,” but rather to depict the unrelated (?) notion that “the universe is a self-excited circuit,” meaning that because the universe (U) contains wave-function-collapsing observers (eyeballs), it is in some sense bringing itself into existence. I’ll bring this picture into the discussion a little later on.]

When I argue for universal automatism in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, I say that every process is a computation. Does this mean I’m arguing for an “It From Bit” position?

Yes, but — three buts.

(But 1) Perhaps it’s more useful to focus on there being computations at all scales. I’m more interested in thinking of computations as existing at all sorts of scales, as opposed to focusing on some possible ultimate ur-computation “underneath it all.” The ripples on the water are a computation of a large-scale computation being performed by the water, and there’s no need to delve deeper. Simply sticking at this level tells us a lot already: (a) The ripple patterns are computationally universal, (b) Even in the absence of any changes to the input flows, the ripple patterns are unpredictable in the sense that there’s no exponentially-fast shortcut prediction method, and (c) Given any proposed theory of physics, there are infinitely many statements about the future behavior of the ripples which cannot be proved or disproved from the theory. (All this is discussed in Chapter 6 of The Lifebox.)

(But 2) Maybe there isn’t one single computation that does it all. If we do go to the lowest scale, it’s not clear that the Many computations have to fit together into One computation. That is, I can imagine a swamp of computations at the lowest level, with our universe emerging above the swamp like marsh lights. We know from mathematical set theory that there are indeed classes of things that can’t be thought of as single entities — the classic example is the class of all sets. It could be that the class of all computations does not allow itself to be thought of as a single computation — somewhat analogous to the fact that the class of all humans is not itself an individual human. This is a subtle philosophical point. The class of all computations may not be a computation.

(But 3) Even if there is one universe-generating computation, we don’t need to imagine it as “running on something.” Suppose we can go to the lowest level and find one cosmic computation down there that generates the universe. Stephen Wolfram is optimistic about finding such a computation. He feels it should be what he calls a “network rewriting” system. From his studies of computation, Wolfram feels that in most interesting cases, a given computational task can in fact be performed by some very simply defined computational rule. So he's optimistic that if he does a brute force search over, say, the first trillion possible network-rewriting rules, he'd going to find a Fundamental Physics rule capable of generating our reality. That would be kind of amazing. Now suppose something like Wolfram's idea were to succeed. Suppose we do find some rather simple computational rule that, if run through enough cycles, can produce something resembling our universe. At this point, people often ask, “What is the system that this ur-computation is running on?” I’d think I'd like to say there isn’t any system that the ur-computation is running on. The ur-computation is running itself. It’s the bottom level. No elephants standing on turtles standing on turtles, dude. All that's down there is a network rewriting system. But why is it there? Ah, that's the unanswerable cosmic Superultimate Why question. That’s all she wrote, bro. And maybe now’s a good time to invoke Wheeler’s big U with the eyeball. The universe is dreaming itself.

I’m blogging about this topic today because I got a nice email from David Deutsch recommending his paper, “It From Qubit”. He’s interested in arguing that if there’s a cosmic computer it should be a quantum computer rather than a digital computer. To argue against the digital “It From Bit” position, he sets up a straw-man in the form of a “Great Simulator” which we universal automatists supposedly believe in. The straw-man Great Simulator belief corresponds to the Matrix-style notion that our reality is akin to a video game running on a desktop under some Geek Goddess’s desk.

Deutsch sets the Great Simulator straw man afire in these words, “A belief in the Great Simulator] entails giving up on explanation in science. It is in the very nature of computational universality that if we and our world were composed of software, we should have no means of understanding the real physics – the physics underlying the hardware of the Great Simulator itself. Of course, no one can prove that we are not software. Like all conspiracy theories, this one is untestable. But if we are to adopt the methodology of believing such theories, we may as well save ourselves the trouble of all that algebra and all those experiments, and go back to explaining the world in terns the sex lives of Greek gods.”

My defense here is that although I think there could be an ur-computation, I don't believe in a Great Simulator. And, backing up, I'm comfortable thinking of my universal automatism as simply saying the universe is made up of computations, without having to claim there is a superultimate aha computation. To be continued…

Superagent and tummler John Brockman announces that David Deutsch has won the Edge of Computation Prize. (“Tummler” means “One, such as a social director or entertainer, who encourages guest or audience participation.” Think Robin Williams or Milton Berle.)

Deutsch looks really cool, like Dracula maybe, or like an East European heavy-metal rock-star. I’ve never met him, though I’d like to. I went online and found some of his more recent papers.

I “read” “Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems” yesterday. As I think I’ve mentioned before, when it comes to discussing QM (quantum mechanics), I always feel like a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. It’s not so much that I read a truly heavy-duty quantum-information paper like this as I ice-skate it, speeding across the stretches of hide-thin Heisenberg matrices lest I fall through into the frigid waters of despair. Deutsch rewards the intrepid skater with tasty diagrams and primo buzzwords. What I found really mind-blowing is that he solves the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox!

The way the EPR runs is that if I let systems Q2 and Q3 interact near the bottom of the page at time t1, then move them very far apart as time runs up the page, and then perturb the systems by Rx(theta) and Rx(phi), and then, before any signal would have had time to move from Q2 to Q3, quickly at time t2 use Q1 to do a measurement on Q2 and use Q4 to do a measurement on Q3. And then we’ll find a surprising correlation between the results unearthed by Q1 and Q4, and we’ll feel like there must have been some action at a distance or magic-string entanglement to make the info in perturbed Q2 match the info in perturbed Q3. But how can the signal have traveled faster than light?

Deutsch’s solution to the EPR puzzle is so wonderfully simple, so full of the “DUH of Science” that I think it must be true. Deutsch points out that, duh, for you to be sure that the measurements found by Q1 and Q4 match, you have to, duh, bring Q1 and Q4 into proximity, and that the actual “magical” match-up between the Q1 and Q4 data only occurs when Q1 and Q4 are close together — which allows for the explanation that that match-up occurs because of a quantum interference process between the wave functions of Q1 and Q4. In essence, the state of Q3 gets hidden in the state of Q4, and is transported over to interact with the part of the state of Q2 hidden in Q1. We don’t notice this because the info that travels with Q4 is “invulnerable to decoherence but absolutely inaccessible to local experiments.” I think the guy is seriously onto something; to me the insight seems to be on a level comparable to Einstein noticing, hmmm, there’s no absolute way to synchronize clocks.

Other news. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul got a nice review in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday.

Richard Bacchus sent me some Pig Chef pictures from his travels in the South.

Blogger Ken Nickerson sent me a link to a site that makes an ever-changing collage display of an author’s name, tiled with images of his or her bookcovers found on Amazon.

John Shirley sent me a link to a now-do-you-finally-get-it illustration of the fractal concept: a looped zoom into a hand with five fingers, with five smaller fingers on each finger tip, with five etc. It would be cooler if the hand were moving, and flexing and changing position as you zoom in — which is, come to think of it, what a nonlinear fractal like the Mandelbrot set actually does. See also my old link to the zoomquilt.

I wrote about people with hands like this down to a few levels in Saucer Wisdom; Hans Moravec also describes devices like this, which appear in Paul DiFilippo’s novel Fuzzy Dice. By the way, I just noticed that Paul has a cool website with galleries of his richly satiric mail art.

These are partial notes of my remarks during my debate with Noam Cook of the Philsophy Department, at San Jose State University, November 10, 2005. I forgot to bring my recorder, so I didn’t manage to tape it for podcast.

It was a nice event, with a big and enthusiastic audience, maybe 150 people, who asked a lot of good questions at the end. I was anxious about the event. They say that people have a phobia of public speaking — how about public speaking with a guy there to contradict everything you say! But Noam was a gentleman, and it went smoothly. I’ve incoporated some of my responses to his points in these notes.

Summary. I wish to argue that humans will eventually bring into existence computing machines that are as alive and intelligent as themselves.

After all, why shouldn’t there be alternate kinds of physical hardware which successfully emulate the behavior of humans? The only hard part is finding the right software for these systems. And even if the software is very hard to figure out, we have some hope of finding it by automated search methods.

Definition. A computation is a deterministic process that obeys a finitely describable rule. Saying that the process is deterministic means that identical inputs yield identical outputs. Saying that the rule is finitely describable means that the rule has finite description such as a program or a scientific theory.

I believe in what I call universal automatism: It’s possible to view every naturally occurring process as a computation. For a universal automatist, all natural processes are deterministic and finitely describable — the weather, the stock market, the human mind, the course of the universe. The laws of nature are a kind of computer program.

In a broad sense, any object is a computer, but for this debate, let’s use “computer” in the narrow sense of being a manmade machine. Definition. A computer, or computing machine, is a device brought into being by humans using tools and used to carry out computations.

In arguing that we can eventually produce computers equivalent to humans, it’s useful to break my argument into three steps.

(1. Automatism) A human mind is a deterministic finitely complex process; that is, human consciousness is a computation carried out by the body and brain.

(2. Emulation) The human thought process can in principle be emulated on a man-made computer; that is, we can carry out equivalent computations on systems other than human bodies.

(3. Feasibility) We will in fact figure out a the design for such a computing system; that is, humans and their tools will eventually bring into existence such human-equivalent systems.

I realize that many people don’t want to accept that (1. Automatism) they are deterministic computations. This is the point I’ll I really have to argue for.

Looking ahead, if I accept that (1. Automatism) I’m a computation of some kind, then it’s relatively easy to believe that (2. Emulation) this same computation could be run on a man-made machine, for computers are so programmable and so flexible.

It’s also not so hard to believe the third step, which says (3. Feasibility) if its in principle possible to run a human-like computation on a machine, then eventually we fiddling monkeys will figure out a way to do it. It’s only a matter of time; my guess is a hundred years.

1. On Automatism. In arguing for the idea that our mind is a kind of computation, note that our psychology rests on our biology which rests upon physics. And physics itself is, I believe, a large, parallel, deterministic computation.

The uncertainties of quantum mechanics aren’t a lasting problem, by the way; the present-day interpretation of quantum mechanics is simply a scrim of confusion and misinterpretation overlaying a crystalline deterministic substrate which will eventually come clear.

So if we grant that human consciousness is a particular kind of physical process occurring in human bodies, and if we grant that physics is made up of deterministic computations, then we have to conclude that consciousness is a kind of computation.

Let me forestall three objections.

Free Will Objection: If I’m a deterministic computation, why can’t anyone predict what I’m going to do?

Answer to Free Will Objection: When I say the human mind can be regarded as a deterministic computation, I am not denying the experiential fact that our minds are unpredictable. The fact that you can’t predict what you’ll be doing tomorrow or next year is fully consistent with the fact that you are deterministic.

The impossibility of predicting your future results from two factors. Most obviously, my future is hard to predict because I can’t know what kind of inputs I’m going to receive. But, and this is a key point, I’d be unable to predict the workings of my mind even if all my upcoming inputs were known to me. I’d be unpredictable even if, for instance, I were to be placed in a sensory deprivation tank for a few hours.

A gnarly computation such as is carried out by a human mind is irreducibly complex; it doesn’t allow for any rapid shortcuts, not even in principle. This is a fact that computer scientists have only recently begun talking about; see Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science, and my own book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

The mind is a deterministic computation, but here are no simple formulas to predict the mind.

“Chinese Room” Objection: A computer can be programmed to emulate all of human behavior, it is still only putting on an act, and it has no internal understanding, knowledge, or intentionality. Consider, for instance the IBM chess-playing program Deep Blue. It excels at playing chess, but it doesn’t “know” anything about chess.

Answer to the “Chinese Room” Objection. To the extent that we can give a precise descriptions of our psychological states, we can create AI programs to emulate them. A goal becomes a target state the program wants to reach. A focus of attention is a particular pointer the program can aim at a simulation object. An emotional makeup becomes a system of weights attached to various internal states. Conscious knowledge something may involve a kind of self-reflexive behavior, in which the system models the world, a self-symbol, the relationship between the world and the self-symbol, and the self-symbol considering the relationship between the world and the self-symbol. To the extent that this can be made precise it can be modeled. Present day AI programs lack many of the internal aspects of human psychology simply because these aspects have not yet been well-enough described. But in principle, it can all be modeled.

Supernaturalism Objection: Given that humans are the Crown of Creation, God surely loves us so much that we’ve been equipped with some vital essence that wholly transcends the petty, deterministic bookkeeping of computational physics.

Putting much the same notion more secularly, we might say that there are oddball as-yet-unknown physical forces involved in life and in consciousness; perhaps quantum computation has something to do with this, or dark energy, or instatons on D-branes in Calabi-Yau spaces.

Answer to the Supernaturalism Objection: We are already on the point of building physical quantum computers. In the long run, any possible kind of physics should be something that we can put into the devices we make. And who’s to say that God’s special vital essence doesn’t dribble our devices as well. Zen Buddhists tell the story of a monk who asks the sage, “Does a stone have Buddha-nature?” The sage answers, “The universal rain moistens all creatures.”

2. On Emulation. The second step of my argument is very easy to defend; we’ve known since the 1940s that there is not an endless staircase of more and more sophisticated computation. Relatively simple devices such as a desktop computer are already “universal computers,” meaning that, in principle, your desktop machine can emulate the behavior of any other system. It’s just a matter of equipping your computer with a lot of extra memory, getting it run fast, and giving it the right software.

I estimate the actual computational power of the human brain as being on the order of a quintillion primitive operations per second using a quintillion bytes of memory. In scientific nomenclature, this would be an exaflop exabyte machine..

Extrapolating from present trends, we may well have desktop computers of this power by the year 2060. Of course the hard part is figuring out how to write the human-emulation software for the exaflop exabyte machine.

3. On Feasibility There are all sorts of ways of making computers, and some hardware designs are better for certain kinds of problems than others. In making a computer that emulates humans, we face two interlocking problems: finding the best kind of hardware to use; finding appropriate software to run on the hardware.

These are exceedingly hard problems. My guess is that it will take at least another hundred years for full parity between humans and certain machines. Possibly I’m too pessimistic.

There are certain limitative logic theorems, such as G�del’s incompleteness theorem, suggesting that it’s in principle impossible to write software equivalent to a human mind. But these theorems do not rule out the possibility of managing to evolve or to stumble upon human-equivalent software. All that is ruled out is the ability to truly understand how the software works.

Evolution, also known as genetic programming, is a widely used technique in computer science. Although artificial evolution doesn’t find the very best algorithms, it is able to find acceptably good algorithms, often in a reasonable amount of time.

It may be that we don’t need to use an evolutionary process. Wolfram argues that whenever you can find a complicated program to do something, you can also find a concise and simple program to do much the same thing. If we had a better idea about the kinds of programs that might generate human-level AI, we might achieve a rapid success simply by doing an exhaustive search through the first, say, trillion possible such programs.

It may in fact be that human-style mentation is something that nature “likes” to produce; it could be a ubiquitous pattern like cycles or vortices or pairs of scrolls. In this case the search might not take so long after all.