{"id":4533,"date":"2013-01-14T16:06:26","date_gmt":"2013-01-15T00:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4533"},"modified":"2021-10-31T12:38:26","modified_gmt":"2021-10-31T19:38:26","slug":"charles-strosss-rule-34-and-the-nature-of-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/14\/charles-strosss-rule-34-and-the-nature-of-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Stross’s RULE 34 — And the Nature of Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before reading Charles Stross\u2019s novel Rule 34<\/em>, I\u2019d been under the misapprehension that the title was referring to cellular automata or CAs.<\/p>\n


\n[A reversible 1D Ca rule that I dubbed \u201cAxons\u201d\u009d in my and John Walker’s Cellab <\/a>package.]<\/em><\/p>\n

In the 1980s, the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram enumerated the simplest possible CAs in a list numbered from 1 to 255. Rule 30 is a very good generator of pseudorandom sequences, and Rule 110 is in fact a universal computer, capable of emulating any possible computational process. The CA Rule 34 is, however a very dull one, which produces patterns of parallel diagonal lines.<\/p>\n

But it turns out \u201cRule 34\u201d\u009d is hacker slang for the dictum: \u201cIf it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.\u201d\u009d (You can find a nice summary of internet rules in this 2009 essay<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

So…Rule 34. Bowling ball porn? Check. Squid porn? But of course. Lightbulb porn? No doubt. Sally Field? Please no.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[Spicy photo of the divine Vanessa Lake <\/a>with bowling ball, \u00a9 Vanessa Lake 2012 — found on a Tumblr site called \u201cA Purple Haze of Porn and JD.\u201d\u009d]<\/em><\/p>\n

You can test Rule 34 for whatever entity ____ you want by Googling \u201cporn ____\u201d\u009d and then selecting the Image option on the Google results page. You might want to adjust your Safe Search filter level to an \u201d\u02dcadultness\u2019 level you\u2019re comfortable with.<\/p>\n

Back in 2013 (when I wrote this post) you used to be able to search “Tumblr porn ____\u201d\u009d, with the reason for narrowing down to Tumblr sites being that Tumblr pages weren’t encrusted with intense adware (and possible malware). But now, as I lightly revise it in 2021, Tumblr has cleaned up.<\/p>\n

Anyway<\/em>, the heroine of Stross\u2019s novel Rule 34 <\/em>is working in the playfully dubbed \u201cRule 34\u201d\u009d branch of the Edinburgh police department, tasked with investigating the more kinky and dangerous things that the online locals might be getting up to.<\/p>\n

In recent years, Charles Stross has become my favorite high-tech SF writer. And he\u2019s not working in the sterile, Arthur Clarke mode of futurology, no, he\u2019s writing druggy, antiestablishment satire, in some ways similar to cyberpunk\u2014a mix of nihilistic humor and apocalyptic speculation. (Here\u2019s a page listing Stross\u2019s US editions<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In 1995, I read Stross\u2019s novel\/story-sequence Accelerando<\/em>. For several years before this, SF writers have been p*ssing and moaning and saying, \u201cGosh, we really can\u2019t see past the Singularity.\u201d\u009d And then Stross just goes in there and plows ahead. Machines as smart as gods? Why not. Hell, even the Greeks knew how to write about gods. You just do it. Pile on the bullsh*t and keep a straight face.<\/p>\n

Accelerando <\/em>gave me the courage to write my own Singularity novel\u2014which I called Postsingular<\/a><\/em> \u2014 it exists in paperback and ebook. See also the sequel, Hylozoic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The notion of a Singularity became a quasi-religious belief among some techies, a millennial conviction that computers would essentially eat everything and we\u2019d all be living in a giant videogame. Stross and Cory Doctorow took this line of thought to a maximal level in their recent novel\/story-sequence Rapture of the Nerds<\/em>, quite a wiggy romp.<\/p>\n

But Stross and Doctorow aren\u2019t Johnny One-Notes, not messianic Singulatarians. That whole rap is just one particular goof. Stross\u2019s Heinlein-inspired far-future novel Saturn\u2019s Children <\/em> is more like retro, old-school SF, a book in which the author actually worries about things like rockets having enough fuel to fly from planet to planet within our solar system. And Doctorow\u2019s engaging novels Makers <\/em>and Little Brother <\/em>and Pirate Cinema <\/em> are tightly linked into near-future possiblities\u2014the latter two might even be viewed as insurrectionary manuals for our youth.<\/p>\n

Coming back to Stross\u2019s Rule 34 <\/em>, this book, like its loose prequel, Halting State <\/em>, are quite close to the present-day world. It\u2019s a world where some AI type behaviors have emerged among the applications that run on the Web. What do we mean by AI?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Stross observes, \u201cIf we understand how we do it, it isn\u2019t artificial intelligence anymore. Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text… Perhaps we overestimate consciousness?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

He makes the point \u201cWe\u2019re not very interested in reinventing human consciousness in a box. What gets the research grants flowing is applications<\/em>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

And, again: \u201cgeneral cognitive engines [are all] hardwired [to] project the seat of their identity onto you … what we really want is identity amplification.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

In my opinion if you have a really effective AI system, it\u2019s in fact pretty easy to give it a sense of having a conscious self. It\u2019s basically just a matter of equipping your program with a mental image of itself. Here\u2019s a summary of my views of consciousness and AI, sdapted from my tome, The Lifebox, The Seashell, and The Soul<\/em>, available in paperback, ebook, or as a free online webpage version — here\u2019s a link to the section relevant to what I’m talking about here: Section 4.4 of Rucker’s LIFEBOX Tome: \u201cI Am\u201d\u009d.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(Thesis) <\/em>The slowly advancing work in AI seems to indicate that any clearly described human behavior can be emulated by a machine\u2014 if not by an actually constructible machine, then at least by a theoretically possible machine.<\/p>\n

(Antithesis) <\/em>Upon introspection we feel there is a mental residue that isn\u2019t captured by any scientific system; we feel ourselves to be quite unlike machines. This is the sense of having a soul.<\/p>\n

(Synthesis) <\/em>Sensing that you have a soul\u2014or, more simply, feeling a sense of \u201cI am\u201d\u009d\u2014 can be modelled by equipping your mental computation with a self-symbol, setting up a \u201cmovie-in-the-brain\u201d\u009d emulation of the self-symbol in the world, and then going one step further to tabulate the ongoing feelings of your self-symbol as it watches the mental movie. And the program watches the movie, and itself in the movie, and the tabulations of its feelings about itself and the movie…and that’s what it means to be conscious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I admit that the synthesis step is a little confusing the first time you hear about it. I had to think about it for several years before it made sense. And, truth be told, I’m still revising it every time I come back to it. I got the idea from Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s an illustration from that same section of\u00a0 my The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/em>, showing a game-design-style sequence of building up to the simulation of consciousness…and on beyond conscousness to empathy. I was teaching courses on videogame programming when I came up with this diagram…which took me a very long time to figure out..<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Left to right and top to bottom, the six cartoon frames represent, respectively:
\n*** immersion (you are the triangle critter)
\n*** seeing objects
\n*** movie-in-the-brain with self
\n*** feelings
\n*** core consciousness (movie-in-the-brain with self-and-feelings)
\n*** empathy (imagining another’s core consciousness)<\/em><\/p>\n

In this cartoon, core consciousness is represented as a weighting table of “feelings” here.\u00a0 Buckminster Fuller used to say, “I seem to be a verb.”\u00a0 Here we might say, “I seem to be a self-modifying lookup table.”<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m off on a tangent here\u2014emulating consciousness isn\u2019t a main theme in Rule 34 <\/em>\u2014although, near the end, Stross can\u2019t resist dropping the reader into the stream of consciousness of an intelligent program.<\/p>\n

Most of the novel works to dramatize the fact that we can go a long way towards the illusion of intelligence with a large database, some clever search software and a smidgen of creative intelligence. To some extent, we\u2019re simply beating the problem to death by having faster and bigger computers.<\/p>\n

Where does that extra pinch of AI come from? Do we need a big insight into how we think? Maybe not. The AI programming method known as neural nets works by letting a machine program learn and get smarter. Given enough time and hardware, it may be that neural nets can bring us to something that feels AI. Even though we won\u2019t know, in any exact sense, how it works. So, once again, we\u2019ll just have a huge data base with a neural net that\u2019s self-evolved a zillion effective weights to put onto the links between inputs and possible outputs.<\/p>\n

(A great description of this process can be found in an excellent but less-than-well-known book On Intelligence <\/a><\/em>by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The end result is a construct too complicated to design. It can only evolve. Stross sees the evolution as happening \u201cin the wild,\u201d\u009d that is, in the context of AI spam generators versus AI smart filters. \u201c…much span is generated by drivel-speaking AI, designed purely to fool the smart filters by convincing them that it\u2019s the effusion of a real human being… Slowly but surely the Turing Test war proceeds…\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n


\n[A neural net that takes a bundle of pixel-level inputs and decides what expression a face has.]<\/em><\/p>\n

On another note, I relished Stross\u2019s wry and realistic view of which of our past dreams do and do not come true:<\/p>\n

\u201cEven when they\u2019re working, online conferencing systems just aren\u2019t quite good enough to make face-to-face meetings obsolete. Working teleconferencing is right around the corner, just like food pills, the flying car, and energy too cheap to meter.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

And: \u201cReliable automatic face recognition is right around the corner next week, next year, next decade, just like it\u2019s always been.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Last week, I was nearly scammed by some Nigerian(?) people (or bots) who pretended to invite me to give a talk in London, all expenses paid, with a good speaker’s fee, under the condition that I obtain a UK work permit which would, it slowly came out, cost $1400, to be paid in cash via Western Union (and at this point I balked). What made the scam initially believable was that a variety of different addresses were emailing me about it. Stross explains this tactic in Rule 34<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have Junkbot establish a bunch of sock puppets… Junkbot then engages [the target person] in several conversation scripts in parallel. A linear chat-up rarely works\u2014people are too suspicious these days\u2014but you can game them. Set up an artificial reality game … built around your victim\u2019s world, with a bunch of sock puppets who are there to sucker them into the drama.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Phil Dick option: What if all <\/em>your email friends are sock puppets? What is it that they\u2019re trying to make you do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before reading Charles Stross\u2019s novel Rule 34, I\u2019d been under the misapprehension that the title was referring to cellular automata or CAs. [A reversible 1D Ca rule that I dubbed \u201cAxons\u201d\u009d in my and John Walker’s Cellab package.] In the 1980s, the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram enumerated the simplest possible CAs in a list numbered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4533"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13371,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions\/13371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}