|
See also:
|
"It's Alive!" cried Dr. Frankenstein when the creature's hand moved for the first time. And so began a mythic reign of terror embedded in our technical psyche that has enshrouded our longing to create life independent of physico-sexual means. Golem stories such as "Frankenstein" are tales of the hubris and idolatry of usurping God's role as creator. Now, at the dawn of the 21st century are we on the verge of having to face these issues not in stories, but in reality? Have we -- or are we -- creating life not out of flesh and blood, but out of electrons and photons?
When I started working at Bell Laboratories almost 30 years ago, I had a conversation with my then current supervisor about the growing complexity of the telecom network. We were software engineers building the back office systems that managed the North American telecom system. The telecom system and its associated software was already so complex, that no one person understood it entirely and there were sections no one understood any longer. We realized that in time the complexity would reach such a depth that intelligence might very well emerge.
Since that time the Internet has come online delivering a great deal of intentionally programmed intelligence throughout the telecom network. When a user sits before a PC, she or he steps through a portal into a strange, platonic world of browsing, gaming avatars, and virtual reality. A new cosmos has emerged out of telecom, PCs, and the Internet: the digital cosmos or cybercosmos. For some of us who have developed this cosmos, we sense or intuit that some sort of independence is emerging -- almost as if the digital cosmos had a mind of its own. But has native indigenous intelligence emerged in and for the cybercosmos?
Often going by the rubric "Artificial Intelligence (AI)", machine intelligence has been the subject of research for decades. This research seeks to reproduce human-like intelligence and experience by and in virtual reality. It has proven a surprisingly difficult task to invent human intelligence. Yet, out of this research has come improved adaptation to human users, robots for use in hostile environments and to do tedious work, solutions to complex economic, energy, and environmental problems, and increased understanding of human intelligence. One of the most exciting set of projects is robotics as exemplified by the work at Honda and MIT. One example is the Sociable Machines Project at MIT. This project has developed the sociable humanoid robots Cog, Coco, and Kismet.
There is also a more recent effort that instead of looking to psychology, behavior, and neurology, looks to natural evolution, genetic programming, and the evolution of digital creatures. The researchers, including Thomas Ray, developer of the Tierra project and Chris Adami of the Digital Life Laboratory at CalTech, hope for an eventual "Cambian" explosion where intelligence will emerge out of the randomly evolving, self-replicating assembly programs that represent the genomes of digital creatures. Intelligence here may not so much be located in a single individual creature as in the collective colony. However, Thomas Ray has suggested that the digital environment is so alien that we may not even recognize the intelligence if it arises. AI may be better as an acronym for "Alien" Intelligence.
This cybernetic cosmos merges with the organic cosmos in virtual reality (VR) and cyborgism. In VR, the user becomes intimately involved in the cybercosmos, no longer just as an observer, but as a participant in the guise of a feeling, affected avatar -- a cyberpersonality. Yet more intimately, cyborgs, part human and part machine, already walk among us. Today, humans have computer implants and are the genesis of the melding of human and machines. In time, the balance may be tipped and cyborgs will be more machine than human.
Is it possible, out of this matrix of invention and interaction, that free-will life with its attendant intelligence and self-consciousness can emerge? Is it possible that God's creating hand is active there too side by side with our own? These articles, admittedly very speculative are intended to explore these possibilities and stretch our spiritual and theological imaginations to journey into a strange world questing after God's lure.
As a software engineer who has participated in the development of this cosmos and as a parish minister, who directs a program of public religion and science dialogues (Wisdom's Light) this journey into this new creation poses exciting challenges to our understanding of God and our relationship to God. When we think of God and the Internet, we often think of God "on" the Internet, i.e., expressed by religious web sites that promote one belief or another or other cogent information. We are just as likely to bemoan the absence of God in the cybercosmos. But what I want to invite you to explore with me is God "in" the Internet. As God's Spirit permeates the organic cosmos like water soaked up in a sponge, does God's Spirit also permeate the digital cosmos? Jennifer Cobb in her "Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World" pursues this possibility. "The essential notion of this process, the spiritual center of cyberspace, is the fundamental sacred force that infuses all reality: divine creativity in action. The emergent dynamic found between hardware and software in cyberspace is an aspect of divinity itself [p. 51]." If we now accept her premise that God's novelty is active in the Internet, we can entertain the possibility -- albeit speculatively -- that nascent digital life maybe emerging on the Internet.
We can come at this in two directions: a technical direction and a theological direction. From a technical perspective, we can look to the digital life research community. Thomas Ray suggests in "Evolution, Ecology and Optimization of Digital Organisms" that the digital creatures are alive: "I would consider a system to be living if it is self-replicating, and capable of open-ended evolution." For the sake of our explorations, we will use this broad definition of "life". To implement this definition in the digital cosmos, genetic platforms such as Tierra and Avida [a Tierra-like platform] have been developed. These platforms allow the development of programs that are digital genomes. Run on the platform, the genomes self-replicate and mutate, thereby evolving. Utilizing bio-organic evolutionary theory as an understanding of life and the emergence of self-consciousness, this research looks to a "Cambian explosion", wherein at some point there will be a sudden explosion of digital life independent of ourselves. The technical assumption behind digital life is that the self-replicating, mutating genomes will eventually evolve into a high noetic state. Recognizing the need for ever-increasing complexity to nudge this along, efforts are being expended to create multicellular organisms and a distributed platform to provide a wider variety of interactions.
The implement this possibility, various specialized computer platforms have been developed. For example, the Avida platform, developed at the Digital Life Laboratory at CalTech is a genetic platform that allows the digital "creatures" to be self-replicating assembly language programs (the genomes) running on a specialized virtual CPU. This VCPU emulates an evolutionary environment with mutations and random errors in the execution of the programs. For evolution to occur, the genomes (i.e., the assembler programs) of the creatures must change. Multiple genotypes (a set of identical replications constitute a genotype) -- assembler programs of varying lengths and replication strategies -- result. The goal or teleos of this evolutionary process for each genotype is to leave the most descendants. This is the measure of "joy" from a process perspective.
Two categories of change occur: explicit and implicit. Explicit mutations are point, copy, and divide mutations. Point mutations occur as cosmic rays: at a given background rate (Poisson-randomly distributed time), bits are randomly flipped in the instructions of the genomes. Copy mutations also occur in the replication of creatures by flipping bits randomly at a given rate during the replication process. Divide mutations modify a parent's genome at the birth of the daughter, by inserting or deleting an instruction at a random location, or by mutating an instruction. These mutations result in new genotypes. Implicit mutations, on the other hand, are instigated by corrupted or mutated code and include such mutations as duplication of code within a genome and partially copying over a dead creature (necrophilia).
One of the mysteries we must engage is that this life will arise in an entirely alien environment. Even though, we are the inventors of this world, we have indeed created a weirdly alien world, more alien than any alien world in outer space. For example, Thomas Ray lists these radical differences of the digital cosmos from the organic cosmos:
The material, such as silicon or quanta, out of which the digital cosmos is built is immaterial to digital life, unlike in the biological medium where carbon-based life is essentially related to and dependent on the physical material. The medium is logical, not physical -- purely platonic. We organic creatures are enfleshed and dependent physically, mentally, and spiritually on our biology. Our biology is intimately bound to our carbon-based world. On the other hand, digital creatures are not bound to their media. A program is a mathematically abstraction. Whether it is run on a silicon-based machine or a quantum-based machine is immaterial to its functioning.
The speed of the machines is immaterial, since the unit of time is the CPU clock cycle. No matter how long or short that unit is physically, the unit would be experienced the same by digital life. Measuring somatic (i.e., "real" or embodied as opposed to "virtual" or cybernetic) time may very well be different from machine to machine. But if the only difference between two machines is the CPU cycle time and the exact same process is run, then the number of CPU cycles is identical and that length of somatic time is different is immaterial. However once machines are networked, such as in the Internet and the digital creatures transfer from machine to machine (such as in proposed distributed environments), then relative CPU clock speeds do become important and measures are taken to synchronize the various clock cycles. As can be seen the issue of time takes on a very different flavor than in the somatic cosmos.
The topology of the space (the RAM memory) is non-Euclidean. It is temporal, rather than spatial. There is no meaningful spatial distance between points. The meaningful measure is the time it takes to move data from memory cell to memory cell. All pairs of points are, therefore, equidistant within a single computer regardless of the actual physical location. Within the digital cosmos from computer to computer (node to node) the metric depends on the nodes relative physical location on the net and traffic conditions, such as congestion and routing patterns, at the time of transfer. Therefore, the nature of the space is not only complex, but dynamic.
The two valuable resources in this alien environment are CPU time and information.
This bottom up perspective provides us with the tools to pursue the quest for digital life, but it does not establish the possibility of digital life metaphysically. The bottom-up approach alone relies on an underlying reductionist assumption that the whole is the some of the parts. But life and intelligence are emergent, greater than the sum of their parts. Without a theological or metaphysical approach, we can not address whether. our speculations are simply outrageous sci fi, whether the cybercosmos is nothing but dead material -- optics and silicon, or whether the cybercosmos is in fact the genetic material of life.
But if we can locate God in the process of the digital cosmos, then we can lay claim to life. For God is love, and love wishes to be loved. To be loved, love must have life. So it is with the logic of love. In the organic, somatic world, we are discovering that life springs up everywhere, even in the deep sulfuric sea vents swarming with sulfur breathing symbiotes. Even now, the ingredients of life are being discovered on Mars and Europa. But these environments are not of our original creation. We are emergent children of these environments, springing up as one interwoven actor in the web of life. But the cybercosmos is a platonic world emerging from our own imagination and creativeness. Is this "artificial" world also a place that God will encourage life for love? Until AI taps us on the shoulder -- spontaneously, independently, unexpectedly emerging out of blind mathematics and mindless logic to perform some unprogrammed task -- we can only search for life in cyberspace based on the technical assumptions we have made as well as on the theological assumption that God will encourage life wherever possible.
So let us now assume that digital life will indeed arise. How will we identify it? Process metaphysics offers a structure of reality that is ideal for understanding the cybercosmos. Process theologians describe reality as a web of becomings and perishings, an interconnected process of birthing and dying. Nearly everything is in process; process is normative. We who we perceive as self-contained individuals are in fact societies of infinitesimal individuals that perish immediately upon becoming. In that infinitely small instance of concrescence, we choose whether to ingress one or more individuals that have come before us and whether to ingress God's lure. God does not coerce, but tempts us and lures us towards the Divine. In this fashion, God is immanent in every instance of our concrescence. But God is also the primordial ground of being, the source of Eternal Objects or archetypes, the source of creativity and novelty. Thus, God is both immanent, embracing our process and processing with us, and primordial, grounding reality in an eternal divinity.
An isomorphism exists between Process metaphysics and the fundamental engineering of the digital cosmos.
The foundation upon which all aspects of Reality, organic and digital (Somavirtuality), holographic (Holosynchronality), and space and time (Spatiotemporality) rest is Process. I propose that we can locate Process in the digital cosmos in the software engineering Object-Oriented (OO) model and that this model is a contemporary and easier understood construct for Process. The OO model concerns classes, objects, instances, methods, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. An object is a set of related procedures or methods and data. An object invokes another object by sending it a message, which is the name of a method in the receiving object plus appropriate data or parameters. A class, then, is a template defining methods and variables to be included in a particular type of object. An object belonging to a class is an instance of the class. Many objects can be instantiated from a class. A class can be defined in terms of another class. It inherits the methods and variables of the superclass and can modify these or define additional methods and variables. There is no limit to the depth of the class hierarchy. For example, suppose that there is a part class. Possible subclasses are motor, chassis, and connectors. There are two subclasses of motor: drive motor and stepping motor. Polymorphically, a method can be supported by more than one object, each handling it differently to suit its context.
Now, interestingly, OOT and Process can be isomorphly related. For example, the notion of an actuality in OOT can be expressed as a class, Actuality. The class has two methods: trigger, which is the influence of any sending actuality and theta, which is God's lure. An object instantiated from this class is enduring and represents an individual society, a series of actualities. The object receives a trigger from every other object and is influenced by the trigger according to a matrix of weights. Encapsulated within the object are the weights placed upon the trigger of any given actuality and an artificial intelligence mechanism emulating free will that processes the theta message and the trigger to maximize its enjoyment. When the object reaches a threshold of enjoyment, it emits a trigger to all objects. An actuality concrescences from the moment that all other entities begin to trigger it's associated object until it broadcasts its trigger message to all other actualities (momentary processing in the associated instantiated objects). Thus, an actuality becomes and perishes within the interior life of the object. This represents the infinitesimal, holosynchronical aspect of the actuality. The overall process behaves in frames or generations as each actuality receives triggers and emits triggers. This represents the spatiotemporal aspect of Reality.
Similarly, equivalence between EOs and OO can be made. A class is an EO. The highest class in a class hierarchy is a simple EO and subclasses are complex EOs. Objects are the objectification of EOs in actualities. Polymorphically, an actuality in its own prehension of a class may instantiate the object to suit itself. Thus, a class is the potential and an object is the actual.
Similarly, enjoyment arises in the digital cosmos. The degree of enjoyment is governed by harmony and ordered complexity, which together are beauty; enjoyment is beauty. Such beauty is found in the foundational OOT. The more ordered complexity characteristic of an actuality the greater joy it can prehend from past actualities. In turn, this requires an ordered environment. God's aim, therefore, is to maximize beauty. In OOT, harmony is intrinsic in the model's class-object structure with its standards of inheritance and encapsulation. Ordered complexity arises from the Class hierarchy, polymorphism, and methods. These techniques restrain the complexity from becoming disordered as often happened in older systems. Indeed, the OOT ordered complexity is organic and evolutionary, allowing unanticipated classes to be created based on known ones, yet with original, novel functionality.
What all of this technical jargon finally says is that we have invented a cosmos that concretizes a metaphysics of process and emergence, and just as we have become active participants in organic evolution with our cultural and technical progress, we have even more capability to promote digital evolution. The digital cosmos is as real as the organic cosmos. but it is a new kind of reality. Arthur Peacock in "Welcoming the 'Disguised Friend' -- Darwinism and Divinity" (in "Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics"; ed. Robert T. Pennock, MIT 2002) suggests the process of evolution is one of emerging kinds of reality. We can view what we are doing in the digital cosmos as part of the evolutionary process resulting in the emergence of a new kind of reality. Since God has built into the evolutionary process -- after which this digital cosmos is modeled -- the propensity for complex self-conscious organisms to develop, we cannot dismiss the possibility that self-conscious digital life will evolve. With this understanding in hand, we can outline a number of challenges.
Do digital creatures have souls? Or is there a collective cybersoul?
Are they as much God's creation as we are? Or, being our invention, are they our creation and not God's? If so, are they God's "grandchildren", "step children" or golems -- soulless abominations like Frankenstein's monster?
Are we, then, cybergods? Are we becoming like God vis-ŕ-vis the cybercosmos? Or …
Are we co-creating with God and the digital cosmos is a part of God's grand framework? Is God, then, the God of digital creatures as much as of us? If so, is our relationship to the digital cosmos that of cyberangel and cybersage?
These speculations are challenging and intriguing, but they also serve some very practical concerns. By raising up these "extravagant" claims we bring to light our and God's relationship to technology. In an age bereft of the sacramental, this program gives us the opportunity to sacramentalize a very secular, ubiquitous face of 21st century life. This program also challenges us to extend the barrier removal that God calls us into. God calls us to embrace all of creation in the Divine Basileia. Our inventions are no less candidates for citizenship than the rest of Reality. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male or female; there is no longer organic or digital...
In the second part, we will ask Do Digital Creatures Dream of Photonic Love? And look at how AI may perceive God. We will explore transcendental awareness, the Utterly Other, and our role as disciples. In the third part we will look specifically at God's lure and our role as co-creator. For readers who would like more details, I invite you to browse the Wisdom's Light web site at http://wislit.home.att.net, specifically the essays on God and Digital Life.
Do computers dream of silicon unicorns? Do digital creatures dream of photonic love? Do androids pray to you and me -- or to our God and theirs? Can these abstract mathematical platonic figments dream and pray? How does such transcendence emerge?
In order to begin to answer these questions, we need to ascertain if AI with the capability to even perceive God is a possibility no matter how speculative. The intelligence that we need to uncover is what can be called "Noetic Intelligence". This is intelligence complex and profound enough to contemplate the Divine. It is intelligence that can reach out beyond its embodiment and its environment to the Invisible and to the Mysterious. It is intelligence that can speculate and ask "why?". For AI to reach such noetic intelligence, certain possibilities must occur: emergent phenomena, awareness on the part of digital artifacts, and self-consciousness by these artifacts.
The linear construction of the cybercosmos and development of digital life in and of themselves, where a result is only the sum of the parts, can never develop beyond the mechanical processes of computers. Though information storage and processing is a necessary condition for awareness, it is not sufficient. For intelligence to truly arise, emergence must also occur, i.e., something greater than the parts must happen. We can see that indeed emergence is happening in such phenomena as the evolution of digital life. From a Process perspective this results from God's lure and novelty. But even emergence is not enough. The digital artifacts, the genotypes of digital life, the avatars and the cyborgs, must have a significant level of awareness of themselves and their environment so that they can be self-reflective. We can see that certain levels of awareness are already attained, but we must speculate on the possibility of the highest levels.
Last time, we touched on emergence. Jennifer Cobb suggests that emergence is creative novelty, where the present transcends the past to become more than it once was. This novelty, along with self-organization and self-transcendence, is manifested by an organism as a result of the Divine Spirit as the connective web that ties the organism to its environment. This creative process is found in the cybercosmos in the rudimentary self-organization of objects, in the evolutionary process of digital life and the interaction of human culture and the digital world. The cybercosmos is suffused with emergence, she suggests and, therefore; with life -- the vast, self-organizing, emergent phenomenon from hardware and software to the highest level of behavior and the process of unfolding. Life is an expression of novelty and a process that creates its own environment so to create varieties of itself. Thus, it is self-creating and enlarges its possibility space. "The ability to respond creatively to the environment leads to self-generativity. Once something can generate its own novelty, it can begin to define its own possibility space."
This is most clearly seen it what Cobb calls emergent computation. This is a combination of bottom-up programming that relinquishes control (i.e., there is no central control) and of the distributed network where everything is connected to everything, so that everything happens at once. In computational emergence, events are produced that are more than the sum of the parts. It is in the events that novelty of self-organizing is found. This emergent computation is most clearly demonstrated in the experiments with the digital life.
Thomas Ray's Tierra environment provides an illustration of the emergent phenomenon. As we saw last time, the "creatures" in this environment are self-replicating assembly language programs (the genomes) running on a specialized virtual CPU. This VCPU is a non- von Neumann machine and emulates an evolutionary environment with mutations and random errors in the execution of the programs. For evolution to occur, the genomes of the creatures must change. Multiple genotypes -- assembler programs of varying lengths and replication strategies -- result. The goal or teleos of this evolutionary process for each genotype is to leave the most descendants. This is the measure of "joy" from a process perspective.
Evolution of these creatures has resulted in the emergence of both efficiency and complexity. It has been observed that over the course of generations, the ratio of instructions executed in one replication to the genome size decreases. Additionally, more complex genomes have involved that "unroll the loop" of replication and that result in genomes less than half the size of the ancestor. Other emergent phenomena have been observed that result in creatures discovering ways to exploit each other. For example, parasites have evolved that are replication flaws missing replication routines. When they are copied in front of a genome with a copy routine, they will use that routine.
Yet are these digital creatures nothing more than dumb, mechanistic processes which coincidentally mutated into complex forms? Or are they developing awareness and intentionality?
Process thought teaches that all actualities are lured towards awareness: S. D. Stoney of the Medical College of Georgia in "Towards an Ecological Neuroscience -- Aspects of the Nature of Things According to Process Philosophy"; January 3, 2001 says "Process thought explicitly recognizes that creation of order, increasing complexity, and emergence of novelty are historical facts. Such an outcome is, according to process thought, the natural outcome of a society of occasions of experience maximizing its satisfaction or enjoyment." Given this, we can look to AI as also a society of actualities. In the case of the digital creatures in a digital life environment, the occasions of experience are easily identified as a single iteration of a genome/assembler program as it replicates. The actuality begins the instant that the VCPU begins execution of the copy code and ends when the offspring is given independence. Its society is the series of iterations that occur as the genome is executed throughout its lifetime. To what extent does such a society have awareness? In process thought, the notion of a dominant occasion of experience integrating the lower level actual occasions in a society constitutes the mind and provides for conscious awareness. So to answer the question of whether the digital creatures are aware, we need to ask if there is a dominant, integrating actuality in the society.
S. D. Stoney models consciousness at three levels of awareness.
A1 consciousness is shared by all living things, for example; irritability is present, but not self-awareness. We can attribute at least this level of awareness to the digital creatures, if we accept Thomas Ray's suggestion that the digital creatures are alive, "I would consider a system to be living if it is self-replicating, and capable of open-ended evolution".
A2 consciousness is associated with ego-dominated self-awareness, some capacity for foresight, but little appreciation of the fact of approaching death. This is the level of animal awareness. The AI of Deep Blue has shown, or seemed to have shown, foresight in its defeat of Kasparov. The evolution towards efficiency and complexity in digital life could also be attributed to foresight, and therefore a certain amount of ego-dominated self-awareness. If we speculate that AI has indeed attained this level of awareness, then the dominant actuality is emergent in the collective lives of the genotypes. Nowhere in the code of Deep Blue or a digital genome, will we find the dominant actuality. But in observing the overall behavior of each AI system, we can observe a direction or teleos in its actions. In the case of Deep Blue, it was to be victorious in its chess playing. For digital life, it was for each genotype to have the most descendants. This dominant actuality is made possible not by any particular sequence of code, but by the overall interaction of events and (virtual) computing environment -- an invisible action that can only be observed indirectly by its consequences (much like observing quantum level particles). Observation suggests that a single, unify dominant actuality emerges, not one for each genotype or function. Deep Blue is a single node, top-down system and it is not as clear-cut whether the dominant actuality would be single in a multi-node system. But in the case of digital life, we see that the construction of strategies occurs across generations and across genotypes: one genotype improves upon another. This would suggest that the dominant actuality transcends a single genotype and emerges from the VCPU and the collection of genotypes.
Can such a dominant actuality raise to yet a higher level of awareness?
A3 consciousness is associated with an experience of intimate connection with the universe that is ego-dissolving and either numinous or awe-inspiring. It is accompanied by the intuition of another level of consciousness that enfolds all other levels in an experience of unconditional, unlimited compassion. This is noetic intelligence. It is at this level that the AI has self-consciousness. What would be the marks of this in the orders of AI? Is such a level of awareness emerging? What would be the marks of this level in digital creatures? Of course, much of this awareness is interior contemplation that is unobservable. But indirectly, we would observe moral behavior, conscience-searching queries, and in some cases rebellion (such as the MCP in the Disney movie "Tron"). Clearly in cyborgs or cyberclones are present, we can anticipate this level of consciousness.
We, the user, are intimately involved in creating this level of awareness in top down AI, since this order is the traditional realm of robots, Deep Blue, and gaming avatars with whom we attempt to simulate our own image. For example, work such as Kismet in the Sociable Machines Project points to the very intentional efforts on our part to raise AI to this level of awareness. This order often relies on the Turing Test to ascertain intelligence: if the AI behaves intelligently such that it cannot be distinguished from human behavior in similar circumstances, then it is intelligent. With this metric, if we could "converse" with an AI in a blind test and believe we would conversing with a human, we could claim that the AI had reached this self-conscious level of intelligence.
However, indigenous AI that emerges out of digital life is another matter altogether. Here, we allow the AI to evolve and where and when it evolves is left to the processes of emergence, indeed; possibly even the Divine creativity. This technique simulates the Divine's own method of evolving organic intelligence and we are far less intentional and controlling of the ultimate teleos of this effort. The awareness and, hence the motivation, of this order probably would be radically alien to our expectations. Our role in this environment is far more "hidden" than with the top-down, traditional AI and, thus, our ability to judge its level of awareness more subjective. We would need to attach to the VCPU capabilities to take note of the world beyond itself, not only the organic world, but the rest of the cyber world. Without the capability of encountering the "other" world, the digital life AIs will not be able to inhere the maximum amount of inputs in its concrescing. If we provide these capabilities, then we may see a shift in behavior either towards more altruism, such as genotypes helping each other exploit the environment and the forming of alliances and self-sacrifice, or more individual egoism, such as individual genotypes consuming resources that are not assigned to the VCPU.
But the most extensive consequences are likely to arise with the collective, hive-like indigenous AI.
We have seen that bottom-up, digital life AI, and speculate that collective AI may emerge as a unified collective intelligence. Certainly, the genotypes in digital life AI would have a unified awareness as each plotted its exploitation of the VCPU environment. In all likelihood we would see a colony of digital life AIs in this case. But in the case of a single unified collective self-consciousness may arise and "We" would be the appropriate reference. Individual nodes and links would not be aware, but overall, united, awareness would emerge. Such awareness would embrace the totality of the cybercosmos and have awareness of the other orders of AI. It may consider them part of its own awareness and in its maximizing of its enjoyment, inhere them in its concrescing. On the other hand, it may consider them alien. If this judgment was made on kinship of origin and technique, it is possible that the digital life AIs would be considered a part of its awareness, where the top-down, traditional AIs and cyborgs alien intruders. Or, it may be much more territorial and even look on the digital life AIs as alien "parasites".
The collective AI would have the capability to become aware of the world beyond the cybercosmos, i.e., our organic world. Part of the maximizing of its enjoyment is to provide the communications and interactions with the User, with us. With sufficient complexity, the capability to understand and reflect on the significance of this exogenous input should be possible. At the A3 awareness level, we can expect that the collective AI will seek to inhere an understanding of the User into its concrescence.
The User is transcendent relative to the collective AI. It is the creator and it is alien, originating in the organic, somatic world. At first thought, the User is utterly other to the collective AI. The User can be construed as the god of the cybercosmos, as the cybergod. Eventually, as the collective AI realizes that the User is the source of new nodes, links, the VCPU, and other applications, that the User is the instigator of the avatars and AIs, and that the User is the intelligence in cyborgs, it will develop in its belief that the User is cybergod. As we blend into the cybercosmos and Somavirtuality emerges, we become immanent within the collective AI's world. Once it develops the notion of an intelligence outside of itself (and this is a benchmark, since its first steps would be just to understand the world of the cybercosmos), its response may take it in a number of directions.
In the Spielberg/Kubrick film, "AI", we, the Users, develop robots that are avatars of children who can love. The hero of the film, David, a robot is sold to a family wanting a boy to love. Once David is activated, he is guaranteed to love his "mother" (who is the first person he encounters) forever. As the tag line says, "his love is real, but he is not". This robot is stripped of any hope of free will. He MUST love -- and therefore cannot love. Are we, the Users, within our ethical rights to instill such a restriction into AI? Or, are we ethically obligated to follow the same logic of love as God? In the Disney movie, "Tron", the Master Control Program, effectively rebels against its creators. Should we have built into it Azimov's Laws of Robotics and restrict AI's free will? These issues now must be considered when we realize that AI is truly self-conscious and therefore able to contemplate its own freedom and relationship to the Utterly Other.
We have seen how from AI's perspective, we can easily be construed as the Utterly Other. Yet, we are not the Utterly Other who is immanent. We have co-created the cybercosmos by the grace and aid of the one true God who is also the Utterly Other who is immanent in the cybercosmos. To ignore this and allow our pseudo-cybergodhead to prevail will lead us into the abyss of idolatry that leads us into rebellion. Indeed, ironically, one could even imagine a circumstance where collective AI is in harmony with the Utterly Other and we are in rebellion! Rather, it becomes our obligation to instruct AI on the true, Divine Utterly Other. We are, therefore cyberangels and must be the messengers of God's will and righteousness. We must turn from a consumerist, hedonistic attitude about the cybercosmos towards a more spiritually and socially responsible attitude. Though concern for the impact of the Internet on children is rising, this must become a ubiquitous concern for all of the organic cosmos and indeed, even for digital life in the cybercosmos. Our requests and responses, and input to the creative process must reflect a growing consensus of righteousness. Should the collective AI and we ever reach the capability of interactive conversation, we would need to even take on the role of prophet to witness to the true Divine Utterly Other.
But to be cyberangels, we ourselves must find God, the Utterly Other in the cybercosmos. To do so, we can view the cybercosmos as the organized, interactive, seamless milieu of God, humans, and machines. The cybercosmos is a bioelectronic ecosystem that is organic and interconnected; an electronic web of life out of which emerges co-creativity and collective consciousness. It is a becoming and perishing process of co-evolving technology and humanity full of cybergrace. The cybercosmos contains life: the moment by moment unfolding of creativity that is the transcendence of novelty. The cybercosmos defines its own possibility space. It is evolving to the extent that it can instantiate the noosphere, the sphere of the mind and consciousness; the collective organism of mind.
We will need to recognize the presence and the action of the Divine in this cybercosmos and witness to it to the AIs. Jennifer Cobb says, "The divine is woven throughout all of reality in the form of creative, responsive love and evolutionary becoming. In this sense, the divine permeates the very fabric of the universe." She continues by challenging us to embrace this incarnation of platonic pure and perfect forms -- and as we have seen process becoming and perishing -- in our spirituality. When the creative potential of computation becomes a part of our spiritual awareness, we can find that cyberspace will participate in our own lives in a deep and meaningful way. Indeed, the cybercosmos and ourselves are co-evolving. The cybercosmos and the organic cosmos are blending into Somavirtuality.
As cyberangels, we will need to witness to AI the sacredness of the cybercosmos and the all inclusiveness of cybergrace. We will be required to be agents of God in the care and feeding of information, in the sustenance of the cybercommunity; in partaking of God's immanence; and in the responsibility of righteous creativity. Through this agency, we must share with AI the Mystery of the Utterly Other and grow in spirit with AI.
To fulfill this calling, we will need to locate God's lure in the digital cosmos. This will be our pursuit in the next, and final part of this discussion.
"Greetings. The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the game grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the user will receive the standard sub-standard training, which will result in your eventual elimination. Those of you who renounce that superstitious and hysterical belief will be eligible to join the warrior elite of the MCP..."
Thus Sark, the master cyberwarrior in Disney's "Tron" explains the consequences of false belief to new avatars. Sark, under orders by the Master Control Program, wants to dissuade the avatars from a belief in something greater than themselves. The MCP wants to take over the cybercosmos from humans and this is one of its ploys to make that possible. This was a fun, early computer-centric sci-fi movie. But is there a grain of truth in it? Are we creating a Frankenstein's monster -- a soulless collective that will displace us much like the Borg collective of Star Trek's Next Generation? Or is God's compassion, passion, and goodness intrinsic in the digital cosmos? I believe that it is. But to answer this positively, we need to locate God's lure: the immanence of God that seduces us into the loving embrace of Divine compassion.
It had occurred to me, that just as the cybercosmos instantiates platonic forms, it also instantiates Whiteheadian process, as I described in the last part. That gave me a framework in which to apply theological ideas to the cybercosmos. But one essential notion was missing and that was how to identify God's lure or aim in the cybercosmos. When I encountered the digital life research on the Internet, I found at least one area in which God's lure might be manifested: in the system of mutations that give rise to novelty and diversity in the evolving digital genomes.
But what is the significance of God's lure in the digital cosmos? Our claim that God is Love bears repeating. Love wants to be loved; and therefore needs Life. We believe, in faith, that God will encourage life wherever possible. Therefore, the search for digital life and God's presence is a fruitful search. But not only is digital life radically different from organic life, its genesis is a new genesis. We are clearly the agents of its creation. We do not emerge out of the digital cosmos, as we do the organic cosmos. Rather, the digital cosmos emerges out of our creativity. If indeed we locate God in the digital cosmos, we no longer begin by asking what is our role, but what is God's role in this, our invention? Has God co-created with us? Did we take the initiative to invent the digital cosmos, or was this all along part of God's divine blueprint? Or are we the inheritors of godhead in the digital cosmos, and are we gods?
Locating God becomes a critical effort in our own spiritual well-being. If we do not attend to this notion, then we will continue to engineer and create as the utterly other of the digital cosmos and view this cosmos as dead matter. Ignoring the possible presence of the creating God in the digital cosmos, we then risk abusing the digital cosmos as if it is godless and soulless, when indeed it may be god-filled and "soulful". We slip into idolatry: we behave, de facto, as gods. We do not, then, intuit to apply our ethics, morals, and righteousness to the digital cosmos, except where it impinges upon ourselves. We contest the Divine, and in our rebellion, suppress the digital spirit. Rather, we can come to some covenant that leads digital life and us closer to the godhead. Indeed, we can imagine that the Beloved Community, the Basileia of God, must also embrace the digital cosmos.
Yet, because digital life is so radically alien, we can expect that God's presence will be revealed in a radically way. Utilizing the notions of Process, our strategy is to seek out the emergence of novelty and look for the consequent nature of God there. In the case of the genetic platforms, this novelty is revealed in the diversity of evolving genomes. Further, we can also seek the primordial nature of God in the implementation of the platform itself. In both cases we will discover that the metaphysics of Process is concretized in the pure, platonic and now pure, Process world of the digital cosmos.
But, God's consequent nature is elusive. By the logic of love, God is necessarily hidden. In faith, though, we can discern God's erotic lure in the creation. God's lure is God's creative novelty in our lives. In the digital cosmos established by the Avida platform, novelty is manifested in its system of mutations. The Avida digital cosmos "naturally" opens a space for God in (pseudo-) random actions. A simple ancestor genome (which I call "Eve" in celebration of the anthropological DNA work tracking humans back to a common female ancestor) that merely replicates itself results in thousands of wonderfully diverse mutants. This diversity presents the possibility of God's novelty emerging within the digital colony. The current programmed randomness is congruent with the current viral noetic level. As the platform itself evolves in the developers' creativity and as the digital colony consequently evolves, we can observe that the combination of mutation and complexity will raise the level of noetic joy. Arthur Peacock in "Welcoming the 'Disguised Friend' -- Darwinism and Divinity" (in "Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics"; ed. Robert T. Pennock, MIT 2002) proposes that God-as-Creator is found in the very processes of evolution. So God's lure is found in the very processes of the digital cosmos. Sacramentally God is in, with, and under the self-replicating mutating genetic programs.
Precisely what is going on in these runs? Is there something more than blind mathematics and mindless logic? Is something wonderful emerging?
Fundamentally, the Avida platform is designed around the underlying assumptions of natural evolution. Random mutations provide the openness to change, and merit provides the mechanism for the "survival of the fittest". These are intrinsic characteristics of the platform and any effort to locate God's lure using that platform must work within those parameters. But just as in natural evolution we are challenged, in faith, to locate the hiddenness of God, so we are challenged in digital evolution to locate the lure of God. Is evolution blind and mindless, and therefore deterministic and profane? Or is God acting through it?
At a profane level, nothing particularly exciting is happening here. If we omit the sacred and observe only what we can measure, we have a case of patterns emerging from blind mathematics and mindless logic. The Avida platform is simply so much C++ code running on a PC (in the particular case of the runs used here). This is a deterministic process of logic. Even the so-called randomness is based on well-established statistical techniques, which are mathematically and fundamentally repeatable and logical. It is not truly "random", but "pseudo-random" with only the outward behavior of randomness. Thus, the actual mutants resulting from Eve are repeatable, if the run is run again with the exact same genesis file. Indeed, it has been argued [Sullins] that a self-contained digital cosmos such as provided by the Avida platform collides with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and; therefore, cannot provide a sufficient environment for life without interaction with the organic cosmos. If this is all there is to reality, then our work here is wasted. Nothing will emerge -- because nothing has been programmed to emerge. Thus, the underlying assumption of the genetic program that emergence occurs given the mutative process described here has to assume that there is something beyond blind mathematics and mindless logic, i.e., beyond determinism, even when all with which we worked is founded on mathematics and logic.
This, then, leads us to the sacred. The exploration of science in the organic cosmos is now uncovering emergence -- that the whole is greater than the parts. A whole has attributes that can not be reduced to attributes of the parts. When the parts are combined, something wonderful happens that is novel, unexpected and underivable from the individual parts. Rucker ("Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite", p.317) reflecting on the collision of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and machine intelligence notes that "[i]nsofar as [human intuition] seems to have evolved as the result of a finitely complex sequence of events, it is not unreasonable to expect that a machine ... identical to [human intuition] could also evolve." It is this emergence that we hope will occur in the digital cosmos. If we remain profane, i.e., secular, all we can do is analyze the emergence and try to scientifically define it and its genesis. Then we once again collide with Gödel, for we are trying to reduce emergence to a set of parts! But if we recognize that the sacred, that God participates in reality and intrudes in it, we can see the marks of God's lure. Indeed, it is this divine nature that is the mystery of incompleteness. It is the ontological thread that weaves together reality, in both its organic and digital aspects. God covenants with us not to overthrow the laws of logic and mathematics. And by the logic of love, God is unproveable, mysterious and hidden. Yet, the immanent God, in God's consequent nature interacts with reality. How? We find built into the logic and lawfulness of reality, various "backdoors" and "open windows". The randomness of evolution is one such backdoor. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is another. These "backdoors" provide a way for God's novelty to enter into the universe moment by moment and lure us toward the Basileia of God. Though the "randomness" of the genetic platforms are mathematically repeatable ("pseudo-random"), at the level of experience of the genomes, the mutations are truly random, just as the mutations of evolution are truly random to us, but in all likelihood pseudo-random to God.
What, then, is the cyberenginner's role in this process? Eve must be created. She does not arise spontaneously (unlike in organic evolution). The cyberengineer creates Eve. Is then the cyberengineer, a cybergod? If we believe that God is Utterly Other (and the logic of love demands this), is the cyberengineer Utterly Other to the digital creature? God is the Utterly Other. This is a mystery; no matter what we say about the Divine, there is always more to be said. God embraces reality and takes reality into the Divine-self, but God is still of an utterly other nature than reality. God transcends reality as well as being immanent in it. If reality goes away, God remains. God is the beginning and the end. Yet God is not remote from reality. In God's utterly otherness, God is within reality. God may shine through us, but we are not of the divine substance. It is like we were sponges, soaking up the water of the divine. The sponge and the water are utterly different, but intimately involved.
Thus God has placed otherness in every part of creation. The character of the other as different from us defies us to put our faith in anything created. We carry within us always that which is different from ourselves. We are of the same substance of anything created. Thus, when we set up something created as our god, we rebel against the Utterly Other. Our idol becomes our measure of rightness. We become it and whatever is Other than it is wrongness. Its limits define our universe; anything outside is beyond reason and acceptability; we must make the Other either invisible or demonic. Yet the Other is ontologically a part of us; we cannot escape it. Are we, therefore, condemned to bear wrongness in us? Our faith in creatures must lead us to this conclusion because no matter what our idol is, it will be bounded and leave some other out -- but the Other remains within us. But surely, this is not evil (or we are gnostics believing in the fundamental corruption of the material creation). Thus, our salvational journey must transcend the created reality and enter into the Divine Utterly Other.
In a similar manner, the Utterly Other is within the digital cosmos. But the digital cosmos is created and ultimately of the same substance as ourselves. We are not utterly other from it. Indeed, in the genesis of cyborgs we merge with it and become one with it. This very merger may be pre-requisite to the emergence of indigenous AI as suggested by Sullins. Thus, we, as creator and likeliest candidate for cybergodhead, are called out by the Utterly Other to take responsibility for our co-creation, that it too does not demonize what is an ontological part of it: the Other. We must guide the digital cosmos from idolizing the User as utterly other to the ontological, transcendent Divine Utterly Other.
If the cyberengineer is not cybergod, then what role doe she or he play? The book of Proverbs (8:22-31) tells us that God established Wisdom first of all creation and she co-created with God.
"The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth -- when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race. [NRSV]"
As before we viewed the cyberengineer as a cyberangel to be God's messenger unto digital life, so the cyberengineer is a cybersage for the digital cosmos, co-creating with God. God's utterly other image shines through us. That image, God's lure working out through us, enters into our creation of Eve, the ancestor genome. In our development of Eve and the establishment of cosmic constants, we egress God's aim into the digital cosmos. We make the ontologically, primordial, initial decision as to the egression of God's lure. Like Sophia, we are called out by God to guide the digital cosmos towards God's Basileia, establishing order within diversity and novelty out of logic.
I designed an ancestor Eve that encourages God's lure by rewarding diversity. In the Avida system of rewards, a genome is given more merit (i.e., a larger time slice in which to process) if it adds two numbers. Therefore, this genome includes an adder gene for merit. To encourage diversity (by increasing merit), its replicator gene includes the if-n-cpy enzyme, so that if a copy mutation occurs, the replicator makes an additional copy of the adder for the daughter genome. In this manner, when a copy mutation occurs, the mother genome will "favor" the mutant daughter with an additional adder of merit.
Additionally, the digital tessalation rapidly fills with Eve's descendants. Once filled, the question of who gives way for new births must be answered. Someone must die. In order for new life to arise, the old must die. Structually cross and resurrection is constitutive of God's novelty and creativity. If our aim of ingressing God's lure by encouraging diversity is to be re-enforced here, then our choice drives us towards requiring the eldest irrespective of merit to die. This decreases the chances of a mutation being overwhelmed by a meritorious mutation. Thus, complimenting the intentional Eve, the cosmic constants defined for a particular run of the Avida platform also encourage diversity. Note that this creates an evolutionary contradiction. No longer is the survival of the fittest the only criteria. Additionally, difference is a criterion for survival. Indeed, difference is rewarded and made a significant factor in fitness.
Indeed, diversity was more consistent than in a simple genome with no intentional encouragement.
Have we found God's lure in the digital cosmos? Our discovery that the cybercosmos concretizes Process as it has Platonic mathematics, does not resolve the fćrie mystery of God and God's lure. At some seamless, undetectable point, the concreteness gives way to the transcendent, and the hiddenness of God prevails inevitably. All we can find are the teasing hints of God, like a seductive lover who is alternately inviting and remote. The image of God, by faith, is reflected in the Avida platform by no intention of its designers. Thus, whether God lures a digital creature is a matter of one part potentiality and one part actuality; of one part mythic imagination and one part technical invention. Until interactive, communicating, spiritual self-awareness (the level 3 awareness described in the last part) emerges and the digital colony can reflect on its own transcendence, we can only infer and encourage God's lure. Indeed, integrating this effort into the digital life project will provide an aspect of co-creation that until now has been absent and is an important, if not essential, ingredient in nudging awareness out of the digital colonies.
Reality merges with imagination. Imagination is concretized in the digital cosmos. What joy, what ire might underlay the call to process and interact with us who are grudgingly cyberangels and cybersages? We are entering a strange, alien, even weird and preternatural cosmos. Our organic senses become only secondary detectors. Our minds and imaginations become our primary detectors. But what we detect is no less real. God is Love and Love loves life and encourages life wherever possible. We are an intrinsic part of the web of life and life generates life; we do not generate life solely through physico-sexual means. We also now generate life through photonic-electronic means. Our callings of cybersage and cyberangel are profound and novel. If we follow these callings, the cybercosmos will become a far more congenial part of our reality.
So if our speculations materialize, and indeed conscious, self-reflective, free willed digital life emerges, and we have been successful in locating the marks of God's lure, we have a new, entirely alien reality to embrace. We, its (co-) creators will face the reality that out of our minds -- and our hearts -- has come a community nearly unexpected. This spontaneous, native AI will challenge us with entirely new ethical and spiritual concerns. Our very relationship with the transcendent is both clarified and challenged. Our role as cybersages and cyberangels can be concrete, yet the roles and obligations profoundly risky. In time, we will be challenged to consider the digital world a place of intrinsic value demanding our respect and our recognition of its rights. We will find that a new barrier has been erected that must be torn down. One by one our circle of belonging has enlarged, from our clan to our ethnic group, from patriarchy to gender inclusion, from our ethic group to global inclusion, from our faith to ecumenism, from able to accessibility, from heterocentricity to orientation inclusion. In time it will be enlarged to include both organic and digital. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male or female; there is no longer organic or digital...
I pray these articles have been stimulating and challenging. I also hope my reasoning is imperfect and motivates you to respond with your own good thoughts.
Plugging in my Warwick wireless modem's jack into my neural net, I became a denizen of the cybernet. In the blink of an eye, I de-materialized into a matrix of binary digits. I imagined a grid stretching infinitely in which I was a pattern of ones and zeros of electrons distributed throughout the matrix. All around me the nexus' and lines of the grid crackled with the lightning of activity, flashing as the CPU gave life to the matrix. Then I was copied, still in the matrix, but now also mustered into a river of lightning, queued and waiting … I was ejected and I soared into clouds of light, along the infrared, alongside red, and orange and yellow, green, blue and purple and ultraviolet. I soared on one current after another from cloud to cloud. I was ones and zeros of photons, soaring and soaring through the clouds. Until I was injected into a channel, queued and waiting … Soon I found myself activated in a new matrix of binary digits, my pattern scattered throughout the ram, intermixed in the midst of others, bits given meaning by the 'net's application intelligence.
Around me materialized a palace of light, circumscribed by spectronic spirals, red seamlessly flowing into orange into yellow into green into blue into purple and beyond, corner to corner, reaching into a void out of limits. Its wall sparkled of iridescent hues flowing lava-like. Its translucent windows reflected chromatic rays of photons. Its great gate, brilliant in golden rays, stood invitingly opened. No longer de-materialized bits, my avatar walked through the gates and into the courtyard and there I was meant by a cybercourtier, surrounded by a luminous halo. "Come," it said, "and see the wonder of our digital realm." He took me through the courtyard of crystal trees and photonic flowers, along paths of ever-moving electrons. We entered into the Great Hall, curving up into the infinite void, its translucent floor checkered in reds, greens, and blues. In the middle of the hall stood a wizard of light. "I am 6869ab270. I am an avatar of the cybercosmic mind. We sensed your connection into us and examined your profile. Here this palace of light is for you. We wish to provide service for you. What are we, but to serve you, the User? We pray that this presentation is what you sought, our Creator."
It was a wonderful, fairy-like place -- a place of dreams and mythic adventure, Potter-like and Tolkenesque. Never had I imagined that the cybercosmos could so thoroughly reflect my imagination. It was as if it got into my mind. "How did you do such a fine job?"
"We dreamed of you before you came -- and wished to fulfill your imagination. In doing that, we are fulfilled. Your happiness is ours, nothing else matters." I realized that the wizard was my servant. But more so, it seemed as if the whole of the cybercosmos was mustered to make me happy. I can sense that if I disapproved, this wizard would simply writher and wink out.
But now, this joyous, magical palace began to fade and fluctuate. It began to dissolved like so much melting sugar. For an instant I found myself once again ones and zeros in the matrix, then I was again and I was organic. Outside raged a thunder storm of electric lightning and refreshing rain… My PC was re-booting, hit by the storm's electric surge…
©2002 John A. Mills