Today I’ll post some more pictures of Brussels, with comments. And in the main text I’ll put some notes towards a novel I’m trying to start. The book’s title is probably The Big Aha. I’ve blogged some of this material before, but I’ve been polishing and recofinguring it, so here we go.
[“Avis” means announcement. The message of the skull.]
A certain kind of advance could lead to a discontinuous jump in ordinary human’s intelligence. I’ll be calling this advance The Big Aha.
There’s a tantalizing dream of AI workers that there may yet be some conceptual trick that we can use to make our machines really smart. The only path towards AI at present seems to be beating problems to death with evolving neural nets working on huge data-bases. We get incremental progress by making the computers faster, the neural nets more complex, and the data bases larger.
The SF dream is that there’s some new and exciting angle, a different tech, a clear and simple insight, a Big Aha?
And—the kicker—the aha would work for human brains as well as for machines. I’m in fact thinking of us finding the Big Aha for human brains, and then transferring it down to the computers. Intelligence augmentation, then artificial intelligence. Not that the AI really matters that much if we can really kick our own minds into a higher gear.
So what’s the Big Aha that I have in mind?
I’m liking the ideas having to do with quantum computation. At one point SF writers used radio as an all-purpose Maguffin, then it was radiation, then black holes, space warps, chaos theory, quarks…these days I’m liking quantum computation as a magic wand.
Every object supports a very intricate quantum computation. Think of a septillion or so particles hooked together by intricate forces, all of them vibrating. Clearly any object is a universal computer with a very rich range of readily accessible states.
[With John and Mickey Shirley in the Mort Subite (sudden death) bar in Brussels.]
Let me start thinking of my mind as a quantum computation. After all, my thoughts aren’t at all like a page of symbols—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations. Is there any communicable way to truly describe your real mental life?
Go back to the notion that your brain, like any physical object, is a quantum system. Quantum systems can evolve in two modes:
You’re in the smooth mode when you gaze idly at a menu, and you collapse to the chunky mode when when you decide what to order.
[The mascot or logo of the Mort Subite bar, the name is also a type of beer. The image is bit like the Tarot card of the Fool.]
Introspection tells me that this distinction is accurate. I do feel the continuous and the discrete modes of thought within my mind. Although, admittedly, it may not be that the sensation really results from my mind being a quantum computer, this is an interesting model to use. Quantum effects could indeed be active in my brain. After all, the nerve cells have nanometer-sized structures, which are well within the range dominated by quantum mechanics.
Since I don’t want a branching universe or a multiverse, we have various minds or objects whose wave functions are either spread out or collapsed, not at all in synchronization with each other.
I get a visual image of something like a macramé. A tapestry made up of state functions that I see as being at some moments like spread-out ribbons and at other moments like narrowed down threads.
Although you may be in some peculiar eigenstate, I might be spaced out and mellow. But then it may be that one of us changes. A dance of pulsating wave function ribbons.
Where does the Big Aha lead us? I want to imagine learning to program objects directly. And we’ll call this hylotech, which relates to the word hylozoic that I talk about sometimes.
Hylo+zoic = matter+alive. I’ve been a hylozoist for many years now—believing that every object is at some level alive and conscious.
It feels good to accept that a rock or a chair is alive and conscious. And then we’re not lonely fireflies of mind in a vast dark warehouse of dead machinery.
How do you really know, after all, what the internal life of a rock is like? The rock might be thought of as a fully ascended Zen master! Maybe it can in fact simulate my presence by using quantum computation and entanglement. But we don’t need to burden the rock with a quirky personality.
Here’s an edited and adapted passage where I discuss hylotech in my old book Saucer Wisdom.
Once hylotech takes hold, most of the objects in a person’s home can talk a little bit, and each piece of furniture has the intelligence of, say, a dog. They get out of the way if you’re about to bump them. They adjust their shape to whatever you say. They can change their patterns to match any design that you show them. But smart hylotech furniture has some drawbacks.
There’s a story about how a photographer’s family came home from a week’s trip to find that the furniture has been bouncing around the house laughing and bathing its tissues in the studio’s klieg lights, breaking all the dishes and running up a huge electrical bill.
The photographer steps into his harshly lit studio and catches his furniture going wild. A rambunctious over-amped armchair is howling like a coyote, the sofa is galumphing around in pursuit of a long-legged tea-table, the side-board is dancing a tarantella on shards of broken crockery, and six dining-chairs are clambering on top of each other to form a pyramid. He loads the rogue furniture into a truck and hauls it off to Goodwill.
In another home, a young woman’s disgruntled suitor kicks one of her chairs across the room — and the chair runs back and breaks the guy’s leg. A cat sharpens its claws on a couch, and the couch flings the tabby out the window.
Out for a walk with two of my fellow TEDx speakers. Programmer-entrepreneur Ken Haase and SF author David Brin.
More to come on The Big Aha!
