Wow! Thanks, all, for the responses to my blog post, “Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality”, on the subject of RR (real reality) vs. VR (virtual reality).

I think that’s the most comments I’ve ever gotten on a single post, and they’re still trickling in. It’s nice to know that there I do have readers out there in RR, even if you don’t always agree with me. And it helped that BoingBoing mentioned my post.

I’m not exactly “against the singularity.” It’s rather that I’m against one particular postsingular notion, that is, the idea of grinding up Earth to make a VR Vearth. If I have any beef with the singularity it’s simply with how rapidly the public discussion of it has narrowed down to a very few ideas that are already cliches. And that’s what I’m trying to shake free from in my Postsingular series. Being a Hegelian, I like to leapfrog discussions, moving to the next idea down the line.

I’ll post some more pictures from the Pinedale, Wyoming, environs today, along with some back-atchas. I wrote this up somewhat hastily, so I apologize to those I left out, and to those whom I’ve misquoted or misinterpreted.

Jeff Saltzman : “Still, virtual realities are very real, they just have different qualities from RR”“ isn’t a 3D multiplayer game a virtual reality? … I think the only content with staying power will be captured reality”“ people you know, telepresence at sporting events or concerts or plays, the ability to have a simulated window that looks out on a real_ vista.”

Rudy: In terms of actual applications, I think “mixed reality” software is going to be very big. Things like overlays on actual scenes and live video blogs. I wrote about these “vlogs” in Mathematicians in Love.

Jeff Taylor: “In the virtual worlds that we now inhabit in games, the 3d environment is rendered only when it needs to be … with a bit of imagination isn’t it possible to make a long and dubious leap to theorizing that the universe is tracking what is being observed? And once that theory has been thrown out there, couldn’t a system that tracks observation also be rendering reality in a finite bubble around all ”˜observed’ particles?”

Rudy: The solipsistic version is that the narrator is the only real character and everything is simply being brought into view as he or she (but usually its a he) looks around. Fiction dramatizes our own psychodramas. Solipsism is an immature worldview, not the view of someone who’s been around the block, loved people, fought enemies. But you’re suggesting something different, that maybe only certain points in the universe are conscious and those are the zones being decohered. My current thinking is that consciousness is universal, so that everything is being filled in.

abend : “If you can simulate a person on a computer sufficiently well that they don’t notice the difference, then you can do things like send copies of them to other planets, keep backups in case of damage, optimize their thinking to eliminate cognitive biases, eliminate the need for sleep, etc.”

ChristopherMoody:“The only difference between me in a biological substrate and me in a utility fog is that the former is limited in its capabilities and extraordinarily fragile whereas the latter is infinitely mutable and near immortal. This is a life-affirming notion not a life-hating one. I love all of the zany, unpredictable complexity of life more than anything which is why I don’t ever want it to end. Cobb Anderson seemed to understand that soul=software as well as the desirability of continuing to run that software indefinitely. …Did I completely miss the mark in your writings?”

McBob: “The life-hating bit though…personally, if my mind could stay intact, I’d like to see the stars. What’s so magical about your body that you’d lose your joy in life by changing it? The techie dream here is simple – I am me, no matter what body or form I have.”

Rudy: These responses make the point that, given that our bodies do seem doomed to decay, might it not be wise to seek out digital immortality? I’m all for immortality—at least on my good days—but there’s no particular reason to think we’ll find it in digital form. My sense is that the digital age is going to be over in another couple of hundred years. We’ll be back to analog matter biocomputations. Rather than going all around Robin Hood’s barn to put yourself into a buzzing beige box, you’ll just grow yourself a new meat body.

I’m still somewhat comfortable in saying that soul = software, but I now realize that the software goes down much deeper than I’d realized before. You need to carry over the machine code and the ROM code and the laws of physics… And, again, I think that modeling all this digitally is a dead end.

Steve H: “Erasing this world to make another one would be nuts. Making another one just like it would be cool, though. Turn Jupiter into computronium, or Mercury, and make a really hardcore Second Life.”

Rick York: “Isn’t the point of creating VR is to make it different? I love RR, but I want to bend the rules.”

Jeff: Where do you get the energy to turn conventional matter like silicon or iron into raw, unprogrammed computronium?”

Rudy: Certainly if you want to crunch up a junker world like Neptune (but what do the Neptune crystal creatures think of that?) and make a Vearth, that is less objectionable. And making a world quite different from Earth seems interesting, that’s what we do when we write novels, too.

I take objection to Stross’s notion of smashing things up to make computronium. Remember, guys, ”˜computronium’ is just a word that Charlie made up. Matter doesn’t need to be optimized for computation. It’s just that we don’t yet have the I/O, the input output.

[Correction form a late-breaking comment by Andrew Doull: “Computronium” predates Stross.]

paradoctor: “My own fantasy isn’t Vearth but Earth 2.0. Keep nature, just add to it. For instance, how about giving every cell on Earth a molecule-sized computer to use? The difference between Vearth and Earth 2.0 is that on Vearth the nanocomputers own the cells, and on Earth 2.0 the cells own the nanocomputers.”

Rudy: This is exactly the idea that underlies my ending to Postsingular and the whole underlayment of my novel Hylozoic, which I’m just finishing.

someguy: “Maybe the best explanation for plank time / length and all the other quantum weirdness is that we are in a simulated universe and we are viewing the computational limits of that simulation.”

Rudy: My friend John Walker has been talking about this, too. It’s a great SF concept. This said, I don’t see our universe as a simulation inside something else. It’s a simulation that’s simulating itself. It’s the hardware and the software.

Jason Blum: “VR will very soon fly straight past rR (with a small r.) It doesn’t need to match nature – it need only match your perception of nature, which ain’t much.”

I dunno: “All you have to do is fool the entities in the Vearth … That said, the whole concept is silly to me. I don’t get why anyone would want to.”

mahalis: “I think it’s reasonable to say that …it would be possible to set up a virtual space that was real enough.”

Rich: “There are huuuuuuuuuge amounts of detail we can’t perceive that doesn’t need to be rendered, which is computational power which can be used for other things. Like laserdragons.”

Vidar Hokstad: “We can’t predict the arrangement of individual atoms in a large object. Why would a simulation even try? If someone do point an electron microscope at an object in the simulated world, the simulator can pick any random arrangement and we wouldn’t know better.”

Sam Walker: “Quantum computing, could duplicate pretty much the whole universe in something like 10^300 fully entangled qubits.”

Rudy: My whole point is to wake people up to the fact that the physical, daily world is inconceivably rich. It’s something that we forget if we look at screens all the time. And I think it’s safe to say that the rulers and merchants in our society are interested in blurring this distinction. If you’re outside looking at a cloud, you’re not spending money and you’re not thinking about what the politicians are up to.

And if you really think that there is some shortcut desktop way of simulating reality in full, I’m sorry, but you’re just factually wrong. Not that 10^300 fully entangled qubits is a desktop system! That’s, like, the universe. One remark re. quantum stuff— it may very well be that quantum mechanics is just a high-level approximation, and matter is in fact infinitely, or even transfinitely, divisible.

The notion of leaving the details up to randomness is an interesting move. But maybe they aren’t random. Wolfram sometimes claims the whole kaboodle comes out of some, like, ten-bit rule that’s run for a really large number of cycles. Here’s the number of cycles that’s the thing that won’t fit on your desk.

When people talk about a substitute being “just as good,” I think of the Who song.

You think we look pretty good together
You think my shoes are made of leather

But I’m a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I’m just back-dated, yeah

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine looking suit is really made out of sack

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
…
Substitute me for him
Substitute my coke for gin
Substitute you for my mum
At least I’ll get my washing done

OmgWtfBBqNewFag: “What happens after the singularity level event is speculation. … My favorite is that the godlike AI computer mind could reorganize all matter in the universe and that the dimension containing our universe would recognize our universe not as an ignorant blob but something like a cute puppy.”

Rudy: The universe as a whole having a mind is a nice concept. These days I’m leaning towards the notion that the universe is larger than transfinite in size, so that there truly is no final “One” thing. There’s always a higher level.

MB: “One wouldn’t have to recreate the whole Earth, but only its surface down to a certain depth (say 100km) and then use some sufficiently realistic model for the interior. The resulting savings in material would be enormous and would allow for even more than slight inefficiencies in matter usage.”

Jeff: “There’s a lot of planetary volume that we don’t need to simulate at the atomic level. Do we really need to simulate the geophysical dynamo at the earth’s core that generates the magnetic field that creates polar auroras?”

Rudy: That’s a move worth mentioning, that you can just make a Hollow Earth replica. But this only what a computer scientist would call a linear speed-up, and it’s a logarithmic speed-up that you’d need to make computing Vearth feasible.

Anton Bijgaarden: “There is no reality out there, just interpretations, perceptions, a collective hallucination tinted by emotions and interests that we agree upon only to fulfill the practical business of living. Therefore, every reality is a virtual reality, never reaching the actual thing. … “

Auer Westinson: “ We already live in a simulation. Every one of us. We already have a simulated VR presentation of the world — running on the cybernetically feedback-looped brain wetware supercomputer. I am interested in getting to the bottom of what it is we already are experiencing—not building another simulation.”

Evan : “When you consider how rich and detailed and complex the world around us is, it’s staggering to imagine how much more so the real one must be…”

Alek Traunic: “Does the human brain already have all the software needed to create a 100% believable VR?”

Rudy: These conversations are good in that they do get us to thinking about Ultimate Reality or, maybe, the Ultimate Morass of Reality Layers. I like the notion that, since we dream convincingly, our brains can simulate reality. This said, I don’t usually see very realistic things in my dreams.

outerjoin: “Don’t forget that Vearth would actually require dev, test, and staging environments to enable all phases of the testing cycle … Post-release bugs are what we refer to as the “paranormal”, and people like Jesus are no more than test user accounts with admin rights.”

Kelson:“Do you suppose that Nature might have some sort of auto-immune response should any one part of herself start tinkering too much?”

Rudy: Some great SF ideas here. I love it. I may shamelessly use one of these…

Mantissa128: “It is amazing that matter is performing computation while just sitting there, but we don’t have access to it, we have no way of making it do our bidding except by blunt force that applies to trillions of atoms. We need to get down there, have our conscious decisions exert a causative force at an atomic level.”

Sam Walker: “In the nanomachine world you describe, the advantage to replacing the blade of grass with pseudograss is that pseudograss is programmable.”

Rudy: This is a key point. As I mentioned above, I don’t think we need to go to computronium. I think matter, just as it is, does as much rich computing as we want. The catch is the I/O problem: how do we get at it? How do we hack matter?

In my novel in progress Hylozoic, the characters do it via a kind of telekinesis. They’re able to telepathically merge into an atom, say, and reprogram it. I don’t have a super-good explanation of how this works, my current one is based on some handwaving talk about unfurling the eighth dimension; I say a bit about this my Psipunk essay.

What is reality?

I’m in Pinedale, Wyoming, visiting my daughter Isabel and doing some cross-country skiing among the aspen trees. They have great patterns like eyes on them. Today’s pictures are all from Pinedale, which is a nice example of an RR “real reality” far richer than any VR “virtual reality” we’re ever going to see.

In the last couple of weeks I twice noticed people online questioning my scientific accuracy when I claim in Postsingular that it’s bogus to talk about porting humanity into a complete virtual model of Earth. So today I want to explain some of the reasoning behind my claim.

Arguments for Vearth are sometimes start by talking about an imaginary substance wittily dubbed “computronium” by one of my favorite writers, Charles Stross. In Accelerando, he says computronium is “matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing.”

Although it’s a cute idea, I think computronium is a fundamentally spurious concept, an unnecessary detour. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the maximum possible rate. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.

[The ice fishing derby on Lake Fremont in Pinedale]

In an extreme vision—which is the one I disparage in my novel Postsingular—Earth is turned into a cloud of computronium which is supposedly going to compute a virtual Earth—a “Vearth”—even better than the one we started with.

This would be like filling in wetlands to make a multiplex theater showing nature movies, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination eco-resort, or killing an elephant to whittle its teeth into religious icons of an elephant god.

[Alley near the Teton Court Motel]

Ultrageek advocates of the Vearth 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.

As I’ll explain below, this is factually incorrect. Before getting into that, I might also ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There’s something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It’s a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old “work now, get rewarded in heaven” routine.

[Game heads on display in Ridley’s Grocery (formerly Faler’s)]

Anyway, let’s get back to my main point, which is that VR isn’t ever going to replace RR (real 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 computer science provides strong evicence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

[Girl holding a fish as if it were a stuffed animal]

This is 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 see The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, or Stephen Wolfram’s revolutionary tome, A New Kind of Science—note that Wolfram prefers to use the phrase “computational irreducibility” instead of “natural unpredictability”.

[On a ridge above Fremont Lake on a climb led by Sherpa Iz-teng]

Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that’s smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments.

[A lo-resolution lodging near Pinedale]

But wait, answer the true-believer ultrageeks, if you do smash the whole planet into computronium, 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. Perhaps 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 embodied software that was embedded in the world’s behaviors. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.

[Non-bit-mapped wood grain]

Ah, says the VR true believer, 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, and so on?

But, come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing 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. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

Just as she is, Nature embodies superhuman intelligence. She’s not some piece of crap to tear apart and use up.

***

By the way, I have written a full-length essay expanding on some of these topics; it’s called “The Great Awakening,” and you can read it free online. It appeared in Asimov’s SF magazine in August, 2008, and in the anthology Year Million, edited by Damien Broderick, from Atlas Books in August, 2008.

For my answers to the many comments on this post, see my next blog post.

I’ve blogged about the Dead Pigs before, and our epochal performance at the faculty show of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where I taught math from 1980 to 1982..

And now Andy Warren has put two Dead Pigs clips on YouTube, the opener and the encore In the encore clip above—thich I think is the better of the two—we’re doing a version of “Duke of Earl,” perhaps better called “Duke of Pigs.”

Daddy sent me to Randy-Mac.
He bought me a horse and a Cadillac.
I sold the car and bought me a brain.
Now I’m half grown up and I’m goin’ insane.
Duke duke duke, Duke of Earl
duke duke, Duke of Earl,
duke duke, Duke of Earl.

I was still a mathematics professor there at that time (although I knew I wouldn’t be back the next fall) and I went to meet my Calculus section the next morning. I’ve never had so attentive a class! But then I started talking about Calculus, as usual, and the glamor wore off.

In the opener clip shown above, we’re first doing an (improvised) warm-up called “Dead Pigs” — and I kept trying to get the band to start in on the second song, which is something like “Louie Louie.”

Apparently a guy who was interviewing to replace me as math professor was in the audience with the math department chairman at the show. I remember laughing about this with Mike Gambone, our saxaphonist and my best freind at RMWC. He was imagining the chair saying, like, “And, um, here’s Dr. Rucker, whom you’ll be stepping in for…”

We had a few other songs, that we played in rehearsals and in our one other live show—such as the original “Year after Year,“—but I don’t think we ever thought to record those. I still can hear them, though…

On another front, Charlie Jane Anders put a nice write-up about my novel Postsingular on io9, the vibby new SF blog.

I’m still working on the second draft of Hylozoic, without much time to think or write anything fresh for the blog. I do have a few new pictures, so to have something to weave among them, here’s an unused bit I cut from Hylozoic for being too arcane.

Chu felt confident. His dreams had unearthed a powerful quantum-mechanical metashape, a hyperdimensional operator resembling a tesseract pattern with a tiny cube set into the center of a large cube, and slanting lines connecting the two cubes’ corners. The lines sketched out six skewed cube-like shapes connecting the inner and outer cubes.

The little cube was the size of an atom, and the big cube was ten centimeters on an edge, the size of a large man’s fist. The vibby thing was that the pattern was undergoing a four-dimensional rotation that continually had the center cube sliding over to become one of the skewed in-between cubes and then somehow jiggling out to be the outer cube, then skewing in from the opposite side and eventually ending up in the center again.

In a painfully strong flash of inspiration amid the lucid dreams, Chu had deduced that his tesseract-shaped operator could transform an atomic-level rune into a rune to be cast onto a quantum-computation to be carried out by a fist-sized region of space. Instead of having to program ten tridecillion atoms with the original rune, it would be enough to program a quintillion cubic decimeters—in exponential notation, 10^18 cubic decimeter chunks instead of 10^43 atoms. A quintillion was just on the border of the current abilities of a kiqqie human who didn’t happen to be a zenohead.

“Tesseract?” said Kakar, shadowing the motions of his mind.

“Gaia dug up the name,” said Chu. “But I thought of the math.”

Feeling a little shaky with excitement, he squeezed the conch-like rune into the tiny central cube of his tesseract, and watched as the shape spun around, producing an warped, inside-out seashell with most of the extra spikiness smoothed away.

“Wait, wait,” clucked Kakar. “I don’t get it. Show me again how you did that.”

“You put the atomic rune into the middle of the tesseract and it turns into a puffed rune that you map onto fist-sized chunks of space,” said Chu.

“Oh,” said Kakar, trying to keep his cool. “I see. It’s simple.”

“Now it is. And we’re going to name the trick after me. Chu’s Kludge.”

“Kludge…” said Kakar, searching Gaia’s database. “Ah. A clumsy and inelegant workaround.”

“I’m brilliant but humble,” said Chu.