And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] 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. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual 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 no feasible VR can ever match nature, 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 using 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."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker

Comments

[Gaseous Clay]

Per the norm, I read this after an exceptionally long day and a few too many drinks, so, my comprehension is blitzkrieged by exhaustion and Dionysian delirium. That said, I’ve often wondered, while you speculate about the future, is it possible that time moves forward and backward simultaneously? I wonder this in contemplation of the universe collapsing. If we’re moving forward in space and time, but the universe is collapsing, would there not be overlap? Certainly, there are infinite possibilities at any given second, but when the grid aligns we have déjà vu and synchronicity. We’re rapidly approaching 2012. As you’ve always been, and will be, more educated on these subjects… I’m more of a dreamer and an uneducated closet philosopher. Could our future be pushed back upon us? Memory data getting defragged on the universal hard drive? Hylozoism sounds very familiar to me. Possibly from something Neil Stephenson wrote? Maybe even from P. Dick’s exegesis? Oh, and, by the by, matter is awake and well. “Return from the Stars” is a perfect example of it, we just don’t understand the language. We lost the ability/will to communicate with it. We are dead-alive; totally somnambulistic. Concrete beings in concrete realities. Drop more L.S.D. Reach out. I have seen the stars in the sky re-arrange and line up, especially in NM.

I really like this post from you. It's been a long time since I gave anything like this even the slightest of thought. Too long, or was it tomorrow.

[messiestobjects]

Glad you enjoyed it! Always nice to catch you on the two drinks to the philosophy wind.

Hylozoism has been around for awhile, actually. It's a relatively modern way of thinking of panpsychism. Rucker has taken it a step further: He doesn't mean anything philosophical, spiritual, or religious by it. Well, maybe spiritual, but only in that fried Berkeley literati sense of it.

No, he's talking about actually scientifically waking matter up, as in making it conversational. There's a whole bevy of side effects that lead up to this deal; a sort of technologically induced telepathy for instance, which would allow us to communicate directly with anything we choose.

And until recently, I'd have agreed with you about the intriguing possibilities about the time issues of a collapsing universe... however they've recently pretty conclusively discovered that the Universe is not in fact collapsing. It's going to continue to expand forever. There is apparently not enough matter in the Universe to reverse the gravitational direction of the big bang, so, we don't get a nice neat cyclical big crunch. They could always uncover other evidence that there is some other form of matter out there that could cause a collapse, but for now, we're faced with an ever expanding eternity of space until matter is stretched so thin that even the atoms won't be able to hold together.

It's kind of a depressing thought, but by then, per another common discussion in Year Million, we may have found a way to hop down into a baby universe caused by a bubble of spacetime ripped off from a black hole. All part of that Multiverse deal that all the scientificos are bubbly about these days. So you know, there's still hope.

[messiestobjects]

By the way, if I haven't told you this before, you'd really dig Rudy's stuff. Especially if you're enjoying the thought of thinking about this kind of stuff again. Try out his best book ever, White Light.

[Miss Luongo]

I was reading an essay by a futurist and he said what he does to guess about the distant future world is he looks at the past and sees what's remained in the present. He said, for example, that computers probably won't be around in a million years. They're just a blip on the timeline. But we'll still eat, and mate, and gather, I suppose. I don't know. I put the magazine down and can't find it.

[messiestobjects]

Yeah I read that too, but I don't buy it. Things that are really good ideas do tend to stick around, even when scores of others may fall by the wayside. Agriculture, for instance, made a relatively recent appearance on our evolutionary timescale, yet it has stuck around and I don't see it disappearing from our bag of tricks. Blacksmithing might be a good comparison for computers. Blacksmithing itself may more or less be considered a fringe art these days, yet we still do all kinds of crazy things with metal. So today's particular form of computing may go by the wayside, but I imagine that computing itself will never leave our lifestyle. It's too powerful of a tool. And about the eating and mating and laughing thing: those will only still be around if we decide to keep our bodies.