Do Digital Creatures Dream of Photonic Love?
CyberNoosphere: Finding and Defining God's Lure in Cyberspace
©2002 Rev. John A. Mills
Is there indigenous life in cyberspace? The digital life research community speculates that there is. If so, where is God in this digital cosmos? This essay is a quest to find -- and to define -- God's lure in cyberspace. It can be shown that the digital cosmos of cyberspace is not only a world of pure, platonic forms, but is also a world of Whiteheadian Process. An isomorphism exists between the digital cosmos and Process, such that actualities, concrescence, and Eternal Objects can be identified. This isomorphism provides a hermeneutic in which to search out God in the digital world and to identify digital life. The key notion that is needed is the Process idea of the consequent nature of God and the associated initial aim of God. If we are able to identify God's lure in the digital cosmos, then we have a stronger case for the identity of digital life. God is love, and love wishes to love and be loved. Love, therefore, requires self-aware, free-will, living creatures. We can, in faith, assume that God will encourage life wherever possible. Our imaginative creation of the digital cosmos provides God with yet another environment for life for love. Using the Avida digital life platform, this essay proposes that God's lure is isomorphic with the system of mutations of that platform. Though the digital creatures are simple viral-level genotypes, the promise of higher, noetic development can be extrapolated. Results of runs of the genetic program illustrate that even at this low enjoyment level, the creatures attempt to respond to God's lure via a mechanism of individual control over replication mutations. Graphics and tables illustrate the work and the level of diversity attained.
Organic life and digital life are hooked together in a creative embrace: organic cyberpriests processing, examining, changing, and using cyberspace; and digital creatures receiving, processing, and displaying along optical and electronic channels. Cyberspace itself, reaches throughout the organic cosmos, to priest and layperson. But it is here in the sacred hive, that cyberspace and spacetime transmorph each other into an ever seamless reality. The hive itself is a secret place, secure against the organic cosmos beyond; it is a place "below the radar" of lay organic life. Only cyberpriests and their guests are allowed here. Here, a new somavirtual order of interwoven organic and digital life is emerging, driven by Mammon and the Technological Imperative, the companion demigods of our 21st century secular society. Here the cyberpriests create in the pure platonic world of cyberspace capabilities pushing the limits of technology that they hope will be consumed by insatiable consumers. It is in these monasterial warrens that the magic and alchemy of the Internet is wrought: ADSL, digital cable, video streaming, interactive TV, video conferencing, dynamic content, and worldwide access without borders.
But nowhere in the sacred cosmos of the hive, except in the margins of the academy, is there consideration that the virtual world of cyberspace may be evolving towards digital life. The possibility of life in the digital dimension needs to be entertained, along with its offspring, Intelligence and Self-Awareness. The cybercosmos has become increasingly complex and rich with capability. This complexity and richness tantalizingly raises the possibility of digital life, intelligence, and self-consciousness. We are already seeing the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), so called, in this digital cosmos. AI now not only includes the traditional top-down AI of robots, Deep Blue, and gaming avatars, but also the bottom-up AI of genetic digital life. We can speculate on the day when native, indigenous AI will emerge. Beyond the practical and social possibilities of this new Intelligence living among us, the rise of AI presents critical spiritual questions. To what extent will such AI be aware of the Divine? Will it be able to contemplate the transcendent? How will that affect its enjoyment of its environment? And most critically, are we, the cyberengineers, cybergods? Answers to each of these questions not only will tell us something of AI and its virtual (and alien) environment, but will shed new light on our own spirituality and increase its richness. This digital environment is an alien environment, so much more alien than any we may encounter on another world, that we need to ask if AI is really Alien Intelligence. We can speculate that AI may attain an awareness that evolves to self-consciousness and that it or they might perceive God. We, the cyberpriests must then -- indeed long before AI reaches that point -- consider the significance of AI perceiving us as god and what that means for the spirituality of AI and of ourselves. This is explored in Cyberangels and in this essay.
But are our speculations outrageous? Is the cybercosmos nothing but dead material -- optics and silicon? Or is it the genetic material of life? 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 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 certain assumptions.
One set of assumptions emerges from the digital life research community and defines "life" and the digital environment.
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." We will use this as our definition of "life". To implement this definition in the digital cosmos, genetic platforms such as Tierra and Avida 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 assumptions behind digital life then 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 [Thearly and Ray] and a distributed platform to provide a wider variety of interactions.
Another set of assumptions emerges from the speculative theological community of Process Theology and defines God's immanence.
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.
Invisibly, hidden, mysteriously abstract, not concrete in its in effects, we are evolving a cosmos whose material is not organic, but information -- data with process; digits with function. Our interior, imaginative worlds come alive in the digital cosmos, unbound by space and time, holosynchronous; more than an extension of ourselves, rapidly becoming an equal of, or even greater than, ourselves. Originally constrained in the "body" of the machine, in time, virtual and somatic will blend; the former unbound from the interior and the later unbound from the exterior -- a true somavirtual matrix.
I have avoided the term "artificial life" and "artificial intelligence", using them only to refer to specific programs. "Artificial" carries connotations of inferiority -- inferiority of life and intelligence and of value. I prefer "digital life". This need not connote inferiority to "organic life". It expresses that this life emerges from a digital environment, rather than from an organic environment and allows us to explore with less bias. Having written this, I still use "AI" for the Intelligence. "AI" conveniently can denote either "alien" or "artificial" intelligence. We will see that alien intelligence may, in fact, be more appropriate.
The bottom-up AI emerging from evolving genetic programs, such as can be developed using the Avida platform discussed shortly are self-replicating and capable of open-ended evolution. This definition of "life" is a broad one that is not dependent on the materiality of the environment. It can be applied to any environment, whether carbon, sulfuric, silicon, or optical.
But the materiality of the environment in which a web of life evolves is critical to what evolves. We must also understand how the digital environment differs from the organic environment. Thomas Ray describes in Artificial Life how the platonic-digital environment of Virtual Reality is radically alien to the organic environment of Somatic Reality:
I believe that a true machine intelligence is likely to be fundamentally different from a human (or any organic) intelligence. A machine intelligence would be even more alien than an intelligence from another planet, because such an extra-terrestrial creature would probably be carbon based, whereas a machine intelligence is not.
Imagine a machine intelligence living in the Internet. Scanning a terabyte of data distributed globally over the net for instances of foolish predictions, and doing the job as a distributed process in a few minutes, would probably be very exciting for such an intelligence. It can perform enormously complex numerical calculations and process huge volumes of numerical data at phenomenal speeds. It could transport itself physically to any point on the planet's surface in milliseconds. At any instant of time, it might actually be distributed widely around the planet. The data flow would be a direct sensory experience for this creature, not something happening in a separate information processing tool. This creature lives in a digital informational universe, not the material one we live in. It's pleasures and pains will be completely alien to us. We will never mistake if for human. Forget the Turing test.
For example, Thomas Ray lists a set of radical differences:
As an example of the alienness of the digital cosmos, if we wish to translate the concept of "emergence" to an AI, how would we? Could we say that it means "to be born out of" or "to come out of" or "to arise from"? Yet all of these metaphors are alien to an AI. An AI would have no experience of organic birth. In its non-Euclidean metric space, "coming" and "arising" have no relevance. How then would you describe "emergence"? In Whiteheadian Process, as we perish and then become, we become concrete, emerging from the influences of past actualities, of God's lure, and of our choices. Similarly, an AI would have the experience of concrescence in the instantiation of objects. "Emergence" could then be described as "to concresce out of".
As another example, consider parenthood. The notion of "father" and "mother" is entirely alien to the digital environment. Descent in genetic programs is by cloning: each genome has one and only one parent of which it is genetically identical except for any mutations. The single parent is neither female nor male. Therefore, the traditional metaphor of parenthood is simply imposed for our convenience. It is not intrinsically meaningful to digital life.
Jennifer Cobb suggests that the digital cosmos is an emergent phenomenon and as such is suffused with 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 that is the connective web that ties the organism to its environment. This creative process is found in the digital cosmos in the rudimentary self-organization of objects, in the evolutionary process of digital life and the interaction of human culture and the digital cosmos. "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]." The digital cosmos 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 [p. 68]."
Where then is God 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 we are god? 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 us and digital life closer to the godhead. Indeed, we can imagine that the digital cosmos must also be embraced by the Beloved Community, the Basileia of God.
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.
An initial discovery is that an isomorphism exists between the digital cosmos and Whiteheadian Process. This isomorphism opens the door to our quest for God's lure in the digital cosmos. We will first summarize Process with a focus on the nature of God. Next we will review the Avida platform used to develop the results here. Then we will segue to an association of God's primordial and consequent natures on the Avida platform.
Process philosophers and theologians (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, and David Ray Griffin) have formulated a metaphysics [Whitehead; Cobb and Griffin] of reality as process, where change is fundamental to reality, where to be actual is to be in process. Reality is a place of process. To be fully real is to be in process, and thus, the real is not beyond change, i.e., it is not absolute or unchanging. Change is not an illusion and the Absolute real; rather, change is constitutive of God's creation. The structure of process reality consists of individual actualities, each of which is a momentary experience, which in a timeless, spaceless state instantaneously perishes upon coming into being. They are processes of their own becoming. This is called concrescence: becoming concrete. The measurable temporal process is the transition from one individual actuality to another. Thus, there are two structural processes: the finite, spatiotemporal process of transition and the infinitesimal, holosynchronal process of concrescence. The transition process hinges time: the past is the collection of those actualities that occurred; the present is the collection of actualities occurring; and the future is where no actuality has yet occurred but has the potential to occur. Time is asymmetrical, non-circular, and non-repetitive. An actuality does not endure through time. What we colloquially consider an enduring individual, such as a person, is a "society" of actualities, "a serially ordered society of occasions of experience [Cobb and Griffin, p 15]".
In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes Eternal Objects (EOs) as pure potentials (p22[1]) much like Plato's forms (p44[20]) or Locke's ideas (p52[29]) (he never mentions Jung or archetypes). They are the potentials for the process of becoming and are neutral as to physical manifestation (p44[22]). EOs are qualities with "perspective introduced by extensive relationships (p61[35])", such as colors, sounds, bodily feelings, tastes and smells, and the relations between entities (p194[80]). They are the templates that mediate the world for us (p62[36], p64[37]) and are the instruments of novelty (p45[23]).
EOs are "ingressed" into an actual entity during concrescence (p23[5], p149[54]), at which instant, an EO is objectified or particularized or instantiated by and into the entity (p194[82]). The potentiality of the EO is realized in the actuality (p23[5], p25[10], p149[54]). EOs, bearing the divine, are the actualities that connect the spatiotemporal with the holosynchronal. "The things which are temporal arise by their participation in things which are eternal ... By reason of the actuality of this primordial valuation of pure potential, each eternal object has a definite, effective relevance to each concrescent process (p40[18])." When an EO is ingressed into an actuality, it is particularized for that actuality, but its own nature and existence remains independent and available to be instantiated in other actualities (p29[14]).
EOs exist in the Primordial Nature of God (PNG) which is similar to the Platonic world of forms (p46[23]). The PNG is the unconditional conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of EOs (p31[15],p32[16]), the complete envisagement of EOs (p44[21]). "[God] is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence (p164[64])." Cobb and Griffin explain that "... God is that factor in the universe which establishes what-is-not as relevant to what-is, and lures the world toward new forms of realization (p.43)." Further, they explain that the PNG is God as creative love, the source of novel order and ordered novelty in the world as the Logos incarnated, the Christ, in creatures as the initial aim whose actualization provides the greatest joy and integrates discordant elements creatively into contrasts (p98-99). " In place of an ultimate ground of being Whitehead speaks of creativity as ultimate. But creativity, far from having eminent supratemporal reality, has no existence in itself and is to be found only in actual instances of the many becoming one ... he speaks of a primordial, eternal nature of God, but this envisagement of possibilities is an abstraction from the actual process that is God (p141)." And Barbour suggests that God is the primordial ground of order structuring the potential forms of relationship before they are actualize and the ground of novelty ordering particular potentialities (p175f).
God also has a Consequent Nature that is spatiotemporal, dependent, relational and changing. This nature pervades Reality. In the process of becoming, an actuality is influenced not only be all past actualities, but also by this Consequent Nature which is God's lure. This is the initial aim urging the actuality to higher levels of enjoyment and to actualized is best possibility. "[T]he divine aim ... is to maximize the enjoyment and satisfaction of sentient beings -- to maximize the intensity of experience ... the divine persuasion encourages novelty that can lead to an increased intensity of experience [Jungerman, p. 181]." In Process, God does not coerce, but rather God persuades or lures. God is the Divine Initial Aim, the Actuality for new possibilities in the future arising from divine primordial possibilities. God is "the unique or perfect instance of creative becoming and relationality [Williamson, p. 22]." Each actuality in its own free will can choose to whatever degree, including none, to include God in its concrescing. God is the ground of free will and wants us to be free. The Divine frees us "to constitute ourselves, albeit always in relation to [our] context [Williamson, p. 24]."
In the moment of concrescence each individual actuality enjoys subjective and objective experience. All experience is enjoyment, an association with the Divine. Though not all experience is conscious, all actualities at all levels of consciousness or non-consciousness have experience. The higher the conscious, the greater the enjoyment of experience. The infinitesimal experience of an actuality is essentially related to previous experience of the actuality, all other past actualities, its own free will, its ingressed EOs and the Divine lure. Therefore, present actuality = f(experience, past actualities, free will, EOs, God). Each individual actuality at the instantaneous moment of concrescence actualizes as it wishes (by exercising free will), but always with the option of including the Divine aim. "By heeding the initial aim, we become coworkers with the divine in furthering the evolution of the universe [Jungerman, p. 189]." An actuality is thus partially self-creative. Each present actuality determines how it will respond to the past and to God; though, its freedom is constrained by the actualized world and its own finiteness. Though God acts upon and is acted upon by all others, each of us can only act and be acted upon by some others. An actuality's enjoyment is a function of its environment (past actualities and God's initial aim) and its free will.
The Avida platform (throughout this essay, version 1.3.0 of the Avida platform running on a PC is used)9 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 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 (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:
In a typical von Neuman machine the number of viable programs to possible programs (i.e., all possible combinations of instructions) is nearly zero. Taking machine instructions and stringing them together randomly rarely results in a viable program. Since self-replicating with evolutionary random errors and mutation results in random changes in individual instructions of a program, these erroneous instructions still need to result in viable programs. Thus, in order to emulate evolution, this "brittleness" of the von Neuman machine had to be overcome. A language is needed that is robust in its adaptability to mutation and recombination. The Avida assembly language is constructed to be thusly adaptable:
Thus, bit flipping in an instruction results in an instruction. For example, a mutation in a nop converts to another instruction, altering the address template. Since a program's start and end are identified by address templates, when a program self-examines for its beginning and end, mistakes can occur.
The Avida platform also has laws governing who lives and who dies in the struggle for survival. The struggle for survival is a struggle over laying claim to CPU time. The fittest are able to lay claim to the most time. Time is allocated to a cell according to its merit. Its merit is determined as a function of the number of instructions copied or executed multiplied by any time bonuses it receives for certain behavior. This function can be adjusted via cosmic constants defined in the genesis file used to configure a run. For example the average time slice (the number of instructions executed in a given update) can be defined. A slicing method from a set of methods can be selected, and whether the bonus should be associated to instructions copied or executed can be indicated. Bonus CPU time is associated to phenotypes. A phenotype is a set of genomes that, though they may be different, behave identically. The bonus rewards certain actions: input, output, gets, echo of get to put, adds. Fitness is then defined to be merit divided by gestation time (the number of updates needed to replicate).
Finally, a birth method can be chosen. When a daughter is born, she will always be placed in an available empty cell bordering the mother cell. If no empty cell is available, then the birth method is chosen. Birth methods determine which cell is chosen resulting in the death of its occupant. Methods include choosing randomly, choosing the eldest, and choosing the oldest divided by merit (favoring higher merit creatures). Associated with this is the mortality of creatures. Their mortality is defined via a death method, which include immortality (a creature only dies if its displaced by a newborn) or a maximum lifespan (a creature dies after executing a maximum number of instructions, leaving its cell empty).
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 phenomenon 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.
The Avida platform is implemented using object-oriented technology. 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.
The following graphic illustrates Avida's user interface. The front window is a stats window listing the current statistics for a run. The next window is a zoom window exposing an individual genome to real-time observation. The window behind that one is a histogram of the current genotype abundance. The farthest window is a map of the tessalation illustrating the genomes inhabiting the digital cosmos.
Given these understandings of Process and the Avida Platform, we can see that the digital life platform provides a pure process environment, built on the pure platonic environment of the cybercosmos. For example, a process actuality is bounded by the gestation of a mother cell. The execution from allocate to divide represents the concrescences of the actuality. It becomes, births a daughter, and perishes. All cells are concrescing together, in a frame-like manner. It is only at the moment of birth (divide) that they interact in the birth and death rules described above. Any given genome may, in fact, actualize any number of actualities.
Now, within the platform, we can locate God's primordial and consequent natures, including God's lure and novel activity. This symbiosis of process and digital mutually enriches our understanding of both. With the concreteness of the digital, we can understand better the abstract of process. With the noetic notions of process, we can understand better the spirituality of digital.
There exists an isomorphism between Process' Eternal Objects and the constitutive objects of the Avida implementation. 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. But where is the Primordial Nature of God (PNG)? It is in the mind, intent, and skill of the designer. Though, physically, the multiplicity of classes would reside in one or more class libraries, these are just static repositories. The conceptual valuation of the EOs is from the designer. The designer constructs the classes to model a certain cosmos and in this manner, the designer as mediator of the cosmos determines the primordial nature undergirding the set of classes.
Thus, the PNG is mediated in the Avida platform through its constitutive C++ objects of its implementation. Examination of the source code yields a plethora of EO Classes. For example, each enzyme/instruction has its own class: Inst_IfEqu, Inst_JumpF, Inst_Pop, Inst_SwitchStack, Inst_ShiftR, Inst_Add, Inst_Copy, Inst_SearchF, Inst_SearchB, Inst_SetCopyMut, Inst_ForkThread, etc. Hence, at a deep, implementation level, the platform (i.e., the infrastructure) also actualizes objects from classes, becoming and perishing, in the continuous operation of the platform. Here it is the Eternal Objects that are ingressed into the environment and actualized.
Now, God's consequent nature is more 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.
|
| ||
| ### Architecture Variables ### | ||
| MAX_UPDATES | 50000 | Maximum updates to run simulation. |
| WORLD-X | 60 | Width of the world in Avida mode. |
| WORLD-Y | 60 | Height of the world in Avida mode. |
| MAX_CPU_THREADS | 1 | Number of Threads CPU's can spawn |
| RANDOM_SEED | 2 | Random number seed. (0 for based on time) |
| ### Reproduction -- FOR ALTURISM ### | ||
| BIRTH_METHOD | 1 | Choose Oldest Creature |
| DEATH_METHOD | 1 | Kill when inst executed = AGE_LIMIT |
| AGE_LIMIT | 5000 | Modifies DEATH_METHOD |
| ALLOC_METHOD | 0 | Allocated space is set to default instruction. |
| ### Mutations ### | ||
| POINT_MUT_PROB | 0.0 | Mutation rate (per-location per update) (x10^-6) |
| COPY_MUT_PROB | 0.005 | Mutation rate (per copy) |
| DIVIDE_MUT_PROB | 0.0 | Mutation rate (per divide). |
| DIVIDE_INS_PROB | 0.05 | Insertion rate (per divide). |
| DIVIDE_DEL_PROB | 0.05 | Deletion rate (per divide). |
| ### Time Slicing ### | ||
| AVE_TIME_SLICE | 30 | |
| SLICING_METHOD | 3 | INTEGRATED: Perfectly integrated deterministic. |
| SIZE_MERIT_METHOD | 4 | Merit prop. to min of executed or copied size |
| TASK_MERIT_METHOD | 1 | Bonus just equals the task bonus |
| ### Genotype Info ### | ||
| THRESHOLD | 3 | Number of creatures in a genotype needed for viability. |
There is a further interesting isomorphism. The experimenter defines the cosmic profile of the digital universe in the genesis file. This profile consists of various definable constants. These constants are like the cosmic constants underlying the organic cosmos. These cosmic constants include the mutation rates and the rules about death. See the attached table for an example.
As in the organic cosmos, a change in a single one of these constants results in a different evolution. The digital cosmos is defined by architecture, reproduction, mutation, time slicing, and genotype. These parameters are the initial conditions available at the "Big Bang" of the digital cosmos when the platform is booted. Visually, we can observe in many cases an explosion of births filling the tessalation rapidly.
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. 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 [Rucker, 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 and lure us toward the Baseleia of God.
| loc | mach code | command | comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000 | 00 | search-f | # calc Size |
| 001 | 00 | nop-A | |
| 002 | 00 | nop-A | |
| 003 | 00 | add | |
| 004 | 00 | inc | |
| 005 | 00 | allocate | |
| 006 | 00 | push | # Move size into CX and clear BX |
| 007 | 01 | nop-B | |
| 008 | 12 | pop | |
| 009 | 02 | nop-C | |
| 010 | 25 | sub | |
| 011 | 00 | nop-B | # Copy Loop |
| 012 | 27 | copy | |
| 013 | 20 | inc | |
| 014 | 04 | if-n-equ | |
| 015 | 09 | jump-b | |
| 016 | 00 | nop-A | |
| 017 | 00 | divide | # And divide... |
| 018 | 01 | nop-B | |
| 019 | 01 | nop-B |
The Avida system of mutation and merit provides an intrinsic location for God's lure. Whether we overtly look for God or not, these mechanisms provide a doorway through which God can influence the digital genomes. God is the ground of novelty. We can expect that one of the marks of novelty is diversity. The Avida system of mutation results in a wide breadth of diversity and so it is there that we look for God's consequent nature.
For example, the simplest Eve, shown in the attached table, is a simple replication genome. Eve simply reproduces and does nothing in recognition of God's presence. Mutations, of course, occurs inasmuch as that is the teleos of the platform. But the mutations' direction is dependent on the cosmic constants. For example, at update 5129 in one run of the Avida platform resulted in the following mutant species (spec-8500):
| get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get if-bit-1 shift-l push get pop nop-C put nop-B copy inc if-n-equ nop-A get sub put put search-f get get get get stk-read get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get inc nop-A get sub put put search-f shift-r pop nop-B stk-read divide add swap-stk shift-r pop inc inc stk-read shift-l shift-l get shift-l push get pop nop-C allocate put nop-B copy inc if-n-equ jump-b nop-A put put put search-f get pop shift-r put pop nop-B add shift-l get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get get |
In this particular run, mutation favored an increase in "gets", thus increasing merit. Yet this was not seen in a subsequent run, when seemingly unrelated cosmic constants were changed. In that run, mutation favored an increase in "nops", unaffecting merit.
Did diversity occur in that run? A run of the platform can output a diversity.status file that profiles diversity by showing at each update the number of genome pairs that diverge by a given number of mutations. This profile looks over the whole landscape of genomes, where the genomes in each pair are not necessarily related in kinship. In the following graphic, we see that the genetic distance of most pairs is small (less than 50 enzymes). There is a larger number of pairs effected in earlier updates, including some set of pairs whose distance reaches to almost 100, and then a decrease as time goes by (increased updates). Metaphorically, this reflects that with no "intentional" or extrinsic effort to ingress God's initial aim, diversity and novelty increase for the vast majority of genomes. There is an inherent tendency to some diversity because of the built-in mechanism, reflecting that God's aim is influential even when unintended. We may extrapolate to the organic cosmos and postulate that similar mechanisms that tend us to diversity are inherent in the nature. Indeed, we see this in cosmological and biological evolution.
God's teleos plays out even when we do not intentionally ingress the initial aim. Nonetheless, the amount of "joy" that can be attained is slowed in this "accidental" ingression. We can further speculate that without some intentional "cyberengineering", the "slowness" is indicative that higher noetic capability will unlikely be attained. Further, isolated to a single PC, we cannot hope that the evolution of these digital creatures can reach much beyond the noetic stage of a virus. If a distributed networked platform can be established that allows continuous running and complex interactions [Thearly and Ray, Evolving Multi-cellular ... and Evolving Parallel ...] among the CPUs, we can speculate that a higher noetic stage could be reached. But can we "boost" the ability of Eve to ingress God's lure?
What, then, is the cyberenginner's role in this process? Eve must be created. She does not arise spontaneously. 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 idol, 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 it too 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 she 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 is the cyberengineer, 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.
In light of that role, how can we (co-) create an Eve that intentionally ingresses God's lure so that her descendants will have increase diversity and, therefore, "joy"? We have established that God's lure in the Avida platform is manifested in its system of mutations. The task becomes to create an ancestor Eve that enhances the utilization of this system. Now, the ancestor Eve can promote behavior via the merit system. Further, the Avida platform provides another mechanism that lets a genome detect if a copy mutation has occurred (the if-n-cpy enzyme). This can be used by the ancestor Eve to enhance its behavior for diversity. Using these mechanisms, I designed the genome listed in the following table:
|
|
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 in the genesis file 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 criteria for survival. Indeed, difference is rewarded and made a significant factor in fitness.
A run of this Eve resulted in a diversity.status file illustrated in the following graphic. Unlike the single copy Eve, diversity is continuous and extensive, as we had hoped. Here, there are fewer spikes. Rather, the mutation counts are more evenly spread over the genome pairs, particularly in the second set of mutation counts. Here, overall "joy" results not from the one or more dominant mutants, but from overall diversity. This was our intent in designing the explicit Eve.
Another way to look at diversity is to look at phylogenic depth. Phylogenic depth is the number of genomes at a given update that have a certain genetic distance from the ancestor Eve. For example, at update 5000, there may be 10 genomes that diverge from Eve by 5 mutations. The phylogenic depth of our extrinsic Eve is illustrated in the following graphics:
We see in early updates, genomes diverge from Eve in the range of 100 to over 300 mutations. These "distances" are spread nearly evenly over time. Interestingly, after some initial short "distances", the distances remain at over 100 subsequently. Later on, we see that the distances once again shorten and expiring genomes are closer to the ancestor Eve. This effect continues to the end of the run. The divergence overall spreads evenly across updates. This re-enforces our observation in the diversity graphics, that diversity for our extrinsic Eve occurs consistently through time.
In comparison, the phylogenic depth for our intrinsic Eve indicates a far less mutative distance as illustrated in the following graphic:
On examination of individual genomes, an interesting systemic mutation can be observed. The Avida platform provides two enzymes, set-cmut and mod-cmut to allow a genome to overtly manage the copy mutation rate. Descendants of our new Eve evolved to utilize these enzymes. This is illustrated in the following graphic where at each update the number of genomes utilizing a given number of cmuts is shown.
The number of cmuts utilize ranged from zero to six. At any given update, the number of genomes that died using cmuts ranged from zero to eight. We can see by update 3201, the number of genomes attempting to participate in diversity was increasing. Systemically, the colony is actively ingressing the diversity and deciding to manipulate its rate. Thereby, the colony ingresses God's lure and, in a primitive, fashion co-creates with God.
If we return to our intrinsic Eve, we observe that this is far less prevalent (see following graphic).
Have we found God's lure in the digital cosmos? Our discovery that the cyberworld concretizes Process as it has Platonic mathematics, does not resolve the færie 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 a digital creature is lured by God 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 Cyberangels) 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 virtual reality. Behind and beyond this presentation lies the digital cosmos, no longer deterministic and von Neumann, but living and aware. What joy, what ire might underlay the call to process and present 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 is 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 included 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 ...