Instantiation, another great collection of Greg Egan’s short stories

Greg Egan is a master of short-story telling. His Axiomatic collection of short stories is one of my favorites. This new collection of short stories keeps Egan’s knack for communicating deep concepts using few words and dives deeper into the concepts of virtual reality and the impacts of technology in society.

The first story, The discrete charm of the Turing machine, could hardly be more relevant these days, when the discussions on the economic impacts of Artificial Intelligence are taking place everywhere. But the main conducting line of the book is the series of stories where sentient humans who are, in fact, characters in virtual reality games, plot to break free of their slave condition. To find out whether they succeed or not, you will have to read to book yourself!

PS: As a joke, I leave here a meme of unknown origin

SIMULACRON-3: are we living in a computer simulation?

Are we living in a computer simulation? And, if so, how could we tell? This question became very popular in the last few years and has led to many articles, comments, and arguments. The simulation hypothesis which states that all of reality, including the Earth and the observable universe, could, in fact, be the result of a computer simulation is a hot topic of debate among philosophers, scientists, and SF writers.  Even the popular Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) webcomic has helped clarify the issue, in a very popular strip. Greg Egan, the master of realistic SF, may have taken the matter to its ultimate consequences, with Permutation City and Instantiation, but the truth is that this question has been the subject of many books, including the famous Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

Still, to my knowledge, Simulacron-3, by Daniel Galouye, may have been the first SF book to tackle the issue head-on. For a book written more than half a century ago, the story is surprisingly modern and up-to-date. Not only the presentation of the simulated reality world is very convincing and the technology very believable, but it also turns out that the reasons why the simulated reality world (Simulacron-3) was created could be sold as a business plan for any ambitious startup today.

There is not much more that I can write about this book without depriving you of the pleasure of reading it, so let me just recommend that you get a copy from a website near you and take with you for the summer holidays.

Mindscape, a must-have podcast by Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast addresses topics as diverse as the interests of the author, including (but not limited to) physics, biology, philosophy, complexity, intelligence, and consciousness. Carroll has interviewed, in-depth, a large number of very interesting scientists, philosophers, writers, and thinkers, who come to talk about some of the most central open topics in science and philosophy.

Among many other, Daniel Dennett discusses minds and patterns; Max Tegmark  physics, simulation and the multiverse;   António Damásio  feeling, emotions and evolution; Patricia Churchland, conscience and morality; and David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness.

In all the interviews, Sean Carroll conducts the conversation in an easy and interactive mode, not imposing his own views, not even on the more controversial topics where the interviewees hold diametrically opposed opinions.

If you are into science and into podcasts, you cannot miss this one.

I am a strange loop – by Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter has always been fond of recursion and self-referential loops, the central topic of his acclaimed “Gödel, Escher and Bach” . In his 2007 book, “I am a strange loop”, Hofstadter goes even deeper into the idea that self-referential loops are the secret item that explains consciousness and self-awareness. The idea that consciousness is the result of our ability to look inside ourselves, and to model our selves in the world, is explored in this book, together with a number of related issues.

To Hofstadter, Gödel theorem, and the way Gödel has shown that any sufficiently complex mathematical system can be used to assert things about itself, is strongly related with our ability to reflect into our own selves, the phenomenon that, according to the author, creates consciousness.

Hofstadter uses the terms “soul” and “consciousness” almost interchangeably, meaning that, to him, our soul and our consciousness – our inner light – are one and the same. Other animals may have souls, such as dogs or cats (but not mosquitoes) although “smaller” and less complex than ours. One of the strongest ideas of the book, much cherished by the author, is that your soul is mostly contained within your brain but is also present, at varying lower levels of fidelity, in the brains of other people that know you and that have models of you inside their own brains.

In the process of describing these ideas, Hofstadter also dispatches with a few “sacred cows”, such as the idea that “zombies” are possible, even in principle, the “inverted spectrum” conundrum (is your red the same as my red?) and the “impossible” – to him- idea of free will.

The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality, a 1997 book by David Deutsch, is full of great ideas, most of them surprising and intriguing. The main argument is that explanations are the centerpiece of science and that four theories play an essential role in our understanding of the world: quantum theory, the theory of evolution, the theory of computation and epistemology (the theory of knowledge).

You may raise a number of questions about these particular choices, such as why is the theory of relativity not there or why is the theory of evolution simply not a result of other theories in physics or even what makes epistemology to special. You will have to read the book to find out but the short answer is that not everything is physics and that theories at many levels are required to explain the world. Still, in physics, the most fundamental idea is quantum theory and it has profound impacts on our understanding of the universe. Perhaps the most significant impact comes from the fact that (according to Deutsch) what we know about quantum theory implies that we live in a multiverse. Each time a quantum phenomenon can conduct to more than one observable result, the universe splits into as many universes as the number of possible results, universes that exist simultaneously in the multiverse.

Although the scientific establishment views the multiverse theory with reservation, to say the least, to Deutsch, the multiverse is not just a theory, but the only possible explanation for what we know about quantum physics (he dismisses the Copenhagen interpretation as nonsense). Armed with these four theories, and the resulting conclusion that we live in a multiverse, Deutsch goes on to address thought-provoking questions, such as:

• Is life a small thing at the scale of the universe or, on the contrary, is the most important thing on it?
• Can we have free will, in a deterministic universe? And in the multiverse?
• Do computers strictly more powerful than Turing machines exist, and how do they work?
• Can mathematical proofs provide us with absolute certainties about specific mathematical statements?
• Is time travel possible, at least in principle, either in the physical world or in a virtual reality simulator?
• Will we (or our descendants, or some other species) eventually become gods, when we reach the Omega point?

The idea of the multiverse is required to answer most, if not all, of these questions. Deutsch is certainly not a parsimonious person when he uses universes to answer questions and to solve problems. The multiverse allows you to have free will, solves the paradoxes of time travel and makes quantum computers possible, among many other things. One example of the generous use of universes made by Deutsch is the following sentence:

“When a quantum factorization engine is factorizing a 250-digit number, the number of interfering universes will be of the order of 10 to the 500. This staggeringly large number is the reason why Shor’s algorithm makes factorization tractable. I said that the algorithm requires only a few thousand arithmetic operations. I meant, of course, a few thousand operations in each universe that contributes to the answer. All those computations are performed in parallel, in different universes, and share their results through interference.”

The fact that Deutsch’s arguments depend so heavily on the multiverse idea makes this book much more about the multiverse than about the other topics he addresses. After all, if the multiverse theory is wrong, many of Deutsch’s explanations collapse, interesting as they may be.

Still, the book is full of great ideas, makes for some interesting reading, and presents many interesting concepts, some of them further developed in other books by Deutsch, such as The Beginning of Infinity.

Portuguese Edition of The Digital Mind

IST Press, the publisher of Instituto Superior Técnico, just published the Portuguese edition of The Digital Mind, originally published by MIT Press.

The Portuguese edition, translated by Jorge Pereirinha Pires, follow the same organization and has been reviewed by a number of sources. The back-cover reviews are by Pedro Domingos, Srinivas Devadas, Pedro Guedes de Oliveira and Francisco Veloso.

A pre-publication was made by the Público newspaper, under the title Até que mundos digitais nos levará o efeito da Rainha Vermelha, making the first chapter of the book publicly available.

There are also some publicly available reviews and pieces about this edition, including an episode of a podcast and a review in the radio.

The Digital Mind: How Science is Redefining Humanity

Following the release in the US,  The Digital Mind, published by MIT Press,  is now available in Europe, at an Amazon store near you (and possibly in other bookstores). The book covers the evolution of technology, leading towards the expected emergence of digital minds.

Here is a short rundown of the book, kindly provided by yours truly, the author.

New technologies have been introduced in human lives at an ever increasing rate, since the first significant advances took place with the cognitive revolution, some 70.000 years ago. Although electronic computers are recent and have been around for only a few decades, they represent just the latest way to process information and create order out of chaos. Before computers, the job of processing information was done by living organisms, which are nothing more than complex information processing devices, created by billions of years of evolution.

Computers execute algorithms, sequences of small steps that, in the end, perform some desired computation, be it simple or complex. Algorithms are everywhere, and they became an integral part of our lives. Evolution is, in itself, a complex and long- running algorithm that created all species on Earth. The most advanced of these species, Homo sapiens, was endowed with a brain that is the most complex information processing device ever devised. Brains enable humans to process information in a way unparalleled by any other species, living or extinct, or by any machine. They provide humans with intelligence, consciousness and, some believe, even with a soul, a characteristic that makes humans different from all other animals and from any machine in existence.

But brains also enabled humans to develop science and technology to a point where it is possible to design computers with a power comparable to that of the human brain. Artificial intelligence will one day make it possible to create intelligent machines and computational biology will one day enable us to model, simulate and understand biological systems and even complete brains with unprecedented levels of detail. From these efforts, new minds will eventually emerge, minds that will emanate from the execution of programs running in powerful computers. These digital minds may one day rival our own, become our partners and replace humans in many tasks. They may usher in a technological singularity, a revolution in human society unlike any other that happened before. They may make humans obsolete and even a threatened species or they make us super-humans or demi-gods.

How will we create these digital minds? How will they change our daily lives? Will we recognize them as equals or will they forever be our slaves? Will we ever be able to simulate truly human-like minds in computers? Will humans transcend the frontiers of biology and become immortal? Will humans remain, forever, the only known intelligence in the universe?

 

Is mind uploading nearer than you might think?

A recent article published in The Guardian, an otherwise mainstream newspaper, openly discusses the fact that mind uploading may become a real possibility in the near future. Mind uploading is based on the concept that the behavior of a brain can be emulated completely in a computer, ultimately leading to the possibility of transporting individual brains, and individual consciousnesses, into a program, which would emulate the behavior of the “uploaded” mind. Mind uploading represents, in practice, the surest and most guaranteed way to immortality, far faster than any other non-digital technologies can possibly aim to achieve in the foreseeable future.

This idea is not new, and the article makes an explicit reference to Hans Moravec book, The Mind Children, published by Harvard University Press in 1988. In fact, the topic has been already been addressed by a large number of authors, including Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity is Near, Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence, and even by me in The Digital Mind.

The article contains an interesting list of interesting sites and organizations, including CarbonCopies, a site dedicated to making whole brain emulation possible, founded by Randal A Koene, and a reference to the 2045 initiative, with similar goals, created by Dmitry Itskov.

The article, definitely worthwhile reading, goes into some detail in the idea of “substrate independent minds”, an idea clearly reminiscent of the concept of virtualization, so in vogue in today’s business world.

Picture source: The Guardian

Black Mirror, a glimpse of the (near) future

 

If you didn’t yet watch any episodes of Black Mirror, a British series created by Charlie Brooker, go and fix that now. The 12 episodes of Black Mirror have been rated by The Wrap from “Good” to “Mind Blowing”, and they all cover the anticipated and non-anticipated consequences of new technologies.

According to the series creator, “each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they’re all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” 

The series analyses, sometimes in excruciating ways, how new technologies, such as social networks, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, can lead to unexpected, if plausible, lifestyles, problems and challenges.

Microsoft HoloLens merges the real and the virtual worlds

The possibility to superimpose the real physical world and the virtual world created by computers has been viewed, for a long time, as a technology looking for a killer application.

The fact is that, until now, the technology was incipient and the user experience less than perfect. Microsoft is trying to change that, with their new product, Microsoft HoloLens. As of April this year, Microsoft is shipping the pre-production version of HoloLens, for developers.

The basic idea is that, by using HoloLens, computer generated objects can be superimposed with actual physical objects. Instead of using the “desktop” metaphor, users will be able to deploy applications in actual physical space. Non-holographic applications run as floating virtual screens  that will stick to a specific point in the physical space or move with the user. Holographic enabled applications will let you to use the physical space for virtual objects as you would for physical objects. For instance, if you leave a report, say, on top of a desk, it will stay there until you pick it up.

The IEEE Spectrum report on the device, by Rod Furlan, provides some interesting additional information and gives the device a clear  “thumbs up”.

The HoloLens, a self-contained computer weighting 580 grams, is powered by a 32-bit Intel Atom processor and Microsoft’s custom Holographic Processing Unit (HPU).

The following YouTube video, made available by Microsoft, gives some idea of what the product may become, once sufficiently powerful applications are developed.

Image and video credits: Microsoft HoloLens website.