Giant sand design at Ocean Beach, SF, sent by Harry Fu; the vertical dot is a person.
What if Earth’s system of clouds had long-term memory? Would they begin acting differently over time? Or brooks? I have a long-term memory, as does the human race, and we don’t actually change our behavior all that much. I type. My fingers moving around are as patterned-but-unpredictable as the waving of a pennant in the breeze. But close observation reveals that my finger-twitching in 2006 is rather different from what it was in 1986. Certain strings of letters have different frequencies (my vocab has changed).
[Gödel and Einstein in Princeton.]
Looking at a video of a tree branch waving in the wind, you’d be hard put, in our world, to say when the video was made. Not so if you look at a video of a person talking. Or at the genome of a bacterium (that is, the bacterial genomes change over a period of years). With a memory, history has a direction.
Looking at a waterfall in the Lexington Resevoir runoff, I was thinking some more about the idea that the water is a strong enough computation to support a human-style mind’s crunching, but that what’s still needed here for a human-style mind is some kind of memory. The waterfall is a processor without RAM. An unread book or static database is RAM without a processor.
Imagine freefloating RAM-souls that attach themselves to natural processes and let the process “think” them for awhile. For the thinking to work, though, the RAM-souls would have to be able to do some input/output with the parameters of the natural process. Alter the flowlines of the water coming into the fall, count the bubbles coming out.
When I mentioned to my wife that fire, air, and water were slated to acquire memories in Postsingular, she said, “That’s sad.” Meaning that one doesn’t like to imagine Nature changing. Particularly not if it means becoming more like a computer.
I have two candidates for the Puckish genii loci (in SteveH's apt phrase in his Jan 27, 2006, comment) that might inhabit such things as a fire, a waterfall, or even a breath of air: the orphidnet-evolved beezies (AIs that evolved inside a planetary computer net), and the Mirrorbraner aliens from the parallel world. Let's say the Mirrorbraners have been doing it all along, and the beezies learn how from them. And then everything is alive.
Of course when a fire dies down, the beezie in there needs a fresh computation fix. It could just wait around (spirit of the hearth) or it could look for some other computation. I have this image of them jostling each other to move in on some action. You spit, and there's a scurry of unseen activity as beezies vie for the computation of your oscillating fluid droplet's path through the troubled air.
Still groping…