The World in the 21st Century: Facing a Singularity

It seems possible to discern four major trends that will determine the future of humanity in the 21^st Century. They suggest a world approaching a multifaceted singularity that will mark an unprecedented change in everything and characterized most fundamentally by a loss of even the gloss of human agency.

The Economist of March 14 (2015) covers one of these trends in suggesting the likely continued success of “Factory Asia” – China plus its manufacturing chain of the currently even lower wage countries of Southeast Asia. This already accounts for almost half of all manufactured goods produced on the planet. China's advantages – financial and technological plus low cost labor and the very large domestic market – will allow it to continue to dominate manufacturing. But the real story here is that – as The Economist points out – this dominance will make it very difficult for other developing countries to progress to growth and prosperity through making things. The paper suggests services and agriculture as alternatives. But the basic problem is deeper and has been visible for much longer: looking at it globally, there may not be enough work to do to supply meaningful paid jobs to everyone who needs or wants one.

This highlights the second trend – the rising tide of computer-driven automation and the subject of “How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over” by Sue Halpern in the New York Review of April 2 (2015). In reviewing a book by Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage: Automation and Us), Halpern notes that while predictions that mechanization would put humans out of work – and even Keynes saw the problem of what he called “technological unemployment” – so far technological advance has seemed to create new jobs to replace lost ones. But Carr argues that we are facing something new this time as computer driven automation – robots and virtual robots – takes on tasks such as surgery, drug development, driving, analysis and writing software and not only old fashioned machine production. This means not only losing jobs but most especially good jobs. While increased efficiency and lower cost of the goods and services produced through this new age of automation may be good for consumers with money, the questions arise of who will be able to afford them and what quality of life will those with no or unrewarding work have? As Paul Krugman has noted, most benefit – in the form of higher profits – will accrue to those few who own the robots.

So “modernity” in the 21^st Century may turn out to equal a shrinking middle class and increased and unrelenting inequality. This leads to the third trend, the breakdown of order. Over the last few centuries, an increasing number of people have experienced modernity as disruption to their lives and traditions and an increasingly fierce struggle for livelihood. The frustration, resentment and often unbridled competition produced provided the motive force to the social and political movements that led to the domestic and international conflicts and wars of the 20^th Century. The Cold War contained these forces by dividing the world between just two all-powerful and demanding camps. But since the fall of the USSR, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and reassertion of nationalisms, new forces of disorder have added to the old while the world has splintered into multipolar chaos. Globalization has meanwhile not solved inequality but has succeeded in presenting have-nots with minute-by-minute images of what they have not. The Cold War may have been an artificial order while disorder and chaos may be the new rule in what might be best described as an ever encroaching “state of nature.” And by the way, “military responses” just seem to make things worse and the rich don't seem to see a problem.

This brings us to environmental change, where the environment might be best understood as including the natural world in its totality: biology (e.g., disease) and land (e.g., desertification) as well as weather and climate. Scientists tell us – and have been telling us for a while – that humans are changing the world in ways we can't entirely predict but seem to be leading to challenges unprecedented in human evolution.

So, we – and more to the point, our children and their children – face finding a way to live in a world increasingly characterized by inequality, disorder and automated change that seems to be racing beyond our control. A singularity is something you enter that leads into a reality beyond normal experience. If we have not yet passed the event horizon of this human “black hole,” we are close. Time to start thinking of something different?

186,000 Miles Per Second

Some time ago, I suggested that perhaps the speed of light is actually the speed of consciousness. The speed of light seems to be one of the universe's givens. We cannot explain why light “travels” at around 186,000 miles per second; it just does. Nor do we really understand why anything traveling at that speed does not experience the passing of time. (At the speed of light, time does not pass.) And of course, we really have no idea of what time is, really. It's just there, an apparently limitless sea that we swim in – and in only one direction, forward.

My Dad used to look up into the sky at night and ask how could all that be just an accident. One might say the same about any of the various fundamental physical constants that science has laid bare. They seem to be just what is needed for a universe in which we could come into being. We live in a Goldilocks universe, not too hot and not too cold.

So perhaps we might ask what does the speed of light tell us, if anything, about the nature of a reality that seems just right for us? First, without a speed of light – which places a limit on matter, which cannot travel any faster and thus must exist in time – everything would happen at once. Because everything does not happen at once – at least to things made up of matter – we can experience reality as the passage of time. That light travels so very quickly, compared to our experience of time, long distances of space are compressed into short intervals of our experience. Light travels 186,000 miles with every second we breath. That speed measures exactly how much slower we move through our physical existence than the instantaneous eternal of the universe beyond time that light exists within. 

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements--surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7

Will the Coming Turing Machines Have Soul?

By now, most everyone probably has heard of Alan Turing.  He played a lead role in breaking Nazi codes during WWII and contributed to the conceptual framework behind modern computers.  He also devised the Turing Test, a way to decide the question of whether an electronic machine might be able to think.  A machine might be said to pass the test if through a series of written questions and answers through a blind channel, a human would think that he or she was communicating with another human being.  This has set the standard for much of the debate over artificial intelligence. 

Machines that may pass the Turing Test are on the horizon.  Much is now being written about the development of machines that can learn and even read emotions -- affective computing -- by working through big data using sophisticated algorithms, running many iterations with pattern recognition. The machines essentially construct elaborate maps of patterns that emerge through analyzing huge sets of data by trying all paths but increasingly using the ones that lead to useful answers, a kind of binary evolution.  This form of machine "intelligence" is already being used on iPhones to determine what you might like to type, by Google to direct your search as you consider where to go and by the NSA to pick through the ever-expanding data haystacks for those "golden" needles.  Companies are eager to use affective computing to read your face, body language and physical state (via iWatch and other connected sensors) -- and therefore your emotions -- as you socialize and consume via the Web. 

All this also raises the very real possibility that soon, we might be able to talk with a robot able to read our verbal and non-verbal, internal and external information and convince us that even though we can see it is a machine, it is acting human.  It would pass a Turing Test squared.

Leaving aside the possibility that such machines might also be able to read us without our knowing, this raises the question of whether such machines would indeed be thinking actors perhaps deserving the attribution of being considered conscious.  Would a machine able to meet the Turing Test -- including by "understanding" what we say, how we feel and also being able to respond in a fully appropriate and meaningful way-- be alive?  Human?  Or to flip the question, are we, essentially, anything more than an evolutionarily elaborated biological device trained through life experience -- iterative learning -- and thus able ourselves to meet the Turing Test and nothing more?

Put more simply, can true understanding be reduced to even extremely complex patterns and decision algorithms stored and processed in massive memory?  Is a machine that "understands" in this way still just a very sophisticated hunk of metal or has some sort of "soul" been engendered in the complex workings of advanced electronics?  There are those who see consciousness as indeed just such an emergent property of the physical world.  The only other alternative seems to be some variant of the ghost in the machine.  Beyond this is perhaps the ultimate question of what exactly distinguishes life from non-life?  Can only things alive be said to truly think and feel?  Is it only a living creature that can be an agent with its own subjectivity?  I suspect so.  But the time may be coming for us to add to the Turing Test some way to measure that very property, which might also be called consciousness or just soul.

An Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book

In the beginning was the void. But it was not empty. Something,someone was there whether from past, future or beyond time and space. It (we?) learned, knew, decreed the rules of quantum plus physics and formed a point of matter and anti-matter. Because neutrinos always have left spin, that point twisted into an extra bit of matter while converting the rest into light. The Higgs field filled space and its pieces danced with light giving some of it mass according to the apparently predetermined values of the 19 elementary parameters of physical reality measured by our Standard Model.

Why that act of creation? From love, necessity, entertainment or simply the need to be? Follow St. Thomas' finger

Consciousness: An Alternative View

Been suggesting in this space that consciousness may be a primary characteristic of the universe and that there is, in effect, a “ghost in the machine” that observes the universe by collapsing the wave function of quantum reality. The supposition has been that our individual consciousness is but part of a cosmic consciousness that in some sense caused the universe. But there may be another way to look at things.

Stephen Hawkin has suggested that the entire universe might be described as a wave function. That is, one single equation – if we could calculate it – might define the entire universe across time. The math is beyond me but the notion might be seen as raising the question of how the wave function is broken by the conscious observer. One possibility is that a conscious observer is necessary. But at least for some billions of years, there was no conscious observer as we might understand that without resorting to some role for an original cosmic observer. Yet the universe evolved. From the Big Bang through the the differentiation of the primordial energies and matter to the emergence of galaxies and stars. Now without any conscious observers, how could the wave function of the universe have collapsed? To put this into classic terms, if a tree fell in the forest without anyone there to hear it, would it make a sound? For millions of years on earth, life arose and also evolved without any of us to witness it. Yet obviously, things happened and did so according to the laws of science. We live on continents that moved into the place we find them long before we arrived on the scene. Dinosaurs left fossils in the ground that we could later observe. Did none of this exist before we were around to see the results?

Our common sense must tell us that the universe and the world we live in did not depend on our observation to exist. The straight forward answer might be that the individual particles and organizations of energy and matter continually collapsed the wave function through their lawful interactions. Hydrogen crashing into oxygen makes water. Perhaps, then, wave functions collapsed through a kind of “virtual observation.” As wave functions broke down engendering new wave functions, this virtual observer rode the crest as a flame may arise from combustion. In effect, collapse creates the observer. In our case, the brain, with its almost infinite complexity, creates such a convincing virtual observer that our “I” experiences it as real. Consciousness – and our individual sense of self – would then be a kind of illusion riding the continually collapsing wave function arising from the biological mechanism of our brain and its moment-to-moment apprehension of the quantum reality at the base of everything.

This would not seem to me to explain why there is anything and why the universe is lawful. Nor does it fully answer the question of what might be said to have exisited without anyone to see it.  Perhaps all systems of matter and even the earliest forms of life have a kind of striving which is a form of consciousness.  Or a “virtual observer” might simply be the way the universe knows itself and therefore as real as anything else.

Still ruminating....

The Observer in the Machine

To elaborate on the notion that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, it would be necessary to suggest how the internal observer collapses the wave function presented by perception to produce mind and thought. Assuming that there is an internal observer – a ghost in the machine that operates within the context of the organic network of the brain (our wetware) – what is the quantum description of reality that might work?

One hallmark of human awareness and mind is our ability to anticipate the future as well as recall a past, an elaboration of a basic mammalian ability to track external dangers and opportunities. Our species evolved to dominate the earth as none other had ever done based on this ability to imagine what has not yet happened and ponder over it before deciding how to act to achieve a goal or avoid a problem. The basis for doing this successfully is an ability to call upon memories of our individual and collective past experiences which forms our available body of knowledge. We see patterns in the present, place them within a framework of patterns experienced in the past and project them into the future. We do this within the internal space of our mind.

But how do we know the next thing to think or say? We experience thought as a self-generating process. When we want to speak, it comes forth as a river emerging from a dark cave into the bright sunlight. Our thoughts stream in the same way. Obviously, something is going on behind the scenes of which we are generally unaware. Much of our mental processes remain unconscious. But how exactly does that work? What is going on in that cave, what are those unconscious processes?

The uncollapsed wave function of any quantum system exists without time or particularity. Particles are waves and remain entangled until measured, i.e., observed. Until they are, they exist in a probabilistic manner everywhere they might be. Recent experiments using weak measurement suggest that future observations – things that have not yet happened – can influence the present. Weak measurement somehow seems to tap into quantum reality without collapsing the wave function. It offers a way to get a sense of some values of the wave function without actually forcing the collapse. Making or not a subsequent measurement which does collapse the wave function shows up – statistically – in that previous measurement.

Our internal observer interacts with the quantum wave function continuously presented by the organic processes of our brain within the space of the unconscious mind. The mind apparently holds some 15-20 seconds of time within its active reach including a 2-3 second “moment” that is now. As long as the wave function of mind remains uncollapsed, the observer may weakly measure it, including what we have not yet experienced. Bringing together what has not yet occurred but may be anticipated, current information about internal and external states and information of the past, the observer collapses the wave function – from moment to moment – and that particular thought, expression, or action emerges into consciousness. Our consciousness doesn't actually lurk in the dark lining things up but exists within the collapsing wave function, like a flame above a quantum candle, as both observer and agent.

There may well be a locale within the brain where the link between the material basis of mind and the “ghost” is made. It would have to be a small area, or at least contain spaces tiny enough for quantum systems to exist uncollapsed. But the inputs must span the brain and the neural network itself may well work as a system – or system of systems – operating through a brain-wide quantum entanglement.

Quantum Consciousness

In 1929, Niels Bohr, in what he admitted was perhaps a rush of enthusiasm for the new science, speculated that perhaps the quantum understanding of physical reality might also apply to an understanding of the mind and consciousness. Maybe as analogy but perhaps, he suspected, as something more. In effect, Bohr suggested that any effort to apply thought to perception – of the subject apprehending the object – collapsed a continuous wave function. When we use language to describe something – whether it be internal or external – we were extracting some possibilities out of a number of ways to do so, indeed from a continuously variable flow. Recent investigations (as reported in Science News) into apparently illogical thought – decisions or judgements that flout the basic mathematical logic of if A=X and B=X, then A=B – suggest the possibility that quantum logic in which something can be both particle and wave at the same time may apply. The situations examined violated the “sure thing” rule.

One well-known example involved asking students whether they would buy a ticket for a Hawaii vacation in three different situations: They had passed a big test, they had failed the test, or they didn’t yet know whether they had passed or failed. More than half said they would buy the ticket if they had passed. Even more said they would buy the ticket if they failed. But 30 percent said they wouldn’t buy a ticket until they found out whether they had passed or failed.

It seems odd that people would decide to buy right away if they knew the outcome of the test, no matter what it was, but hesitated when the outcome was unknown. Such behavior violated a statistical maxim known as the “sure thing principle.” Basically, it says that if you prefer X if A is true, and you prefer X if A isn’t true, then you should prefer X whether A is true or not. So it shouldn’t matter whether you know if A is true. That seems logical, but it’s not always how people behave.

The researchers found that context is important and that quantum logic may better explain such behavior. We make decisions within a framework that allows possibilities that are logically the same to interfere with each other as quantum waves might. Uncertainty seems to leave us both particle and wave.

This is deep. But the essential bit seems to be that the conscious observer necessary to turn quantum reality into the classical reality we live in – by observing and thereby collapsing the wave function – also may operate in the same quantum/relativistic manner. If the brain is organically based and operates as a classical system, perhaps the mind – brain/nervous system plus consciousness – acts as a quantum system in which perceived reality is constructed through collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. (Some of us “collapse” more readily than others: judgers vs perceivers?) Now, whether consciousness itself is a quantum-derived property of the physical brain – perhaps arising at the nano-level – or a “ghost in the machine” would remain a question. But the first possibility – that consciousness arises within and from a physical system that demands consciousness to operate – would seem to violate Gödel's incompleteness theorem.