Some Basic Goals

I have done a lot of technologically oriented posts recently because that was my ‘flow’ at that particular moment in my overall work-stream and I haven’t really had time to be objective about what kind of questions need to be answered in general about my motivations and intentions for the Novel. Now, I would like to take a brief look at some of the deepest thoughts and intuitions that are ‘drivers’ for the project.

1) I have chosen a ‘deep’ future context because I want to force myself (and my readers) to review what limitations we currently perceive -- which in fact are merely historical accidents -- versus what are, in contrast, truly Immortal themes of consciousness: human, post-human, or Other. The context of S’n’K is sufficiently ‘advanced’ that almost everything we now consider a problem has long since been consigned to the ignorance of the Ancients (us!) who ‘were’ deeply confused. There is no poverty, no war, no State, no money, no involuntary death, no involuntary pregnancy, no dominance of nature by a single species, no dominance of politics by a single gender, etc. There IS still love, friendship, the search for meaning in a very much larger cosmos, the search for a balance between freedom and responsibility, between tradition and innovation, between transcendence and immanence, etc.

2) I have tried to characterize what might be considered the current socio-political ‘Antimonies’ – the perceived irresolvable differences, and allow the milieu of the Novel to shed light on paths that might have lead into non-dualistic forms of life and understanding which go beyond these self-imposed boundaries. For instance, I observe that one of the main upcoming ‘wars’ of words and policy to animate our world-culture is the tension between innovation and preservation. On the one side of the continuum you have the techno-utopians who think that no problem is unsolvable if we would merely accelerate our development of machines and tools aimed at those problems. At the other end we have the eco-utopians who are watching the environmental destruction of our planet and are seeking to slow, or even reverse, certain kinds of technical development in order to give our biological context a chance to recover its ages-long robustness. Both sides are right, and both sides are wrong. I will be trying to depict what I call an innecotive paradigm, where the innovations of intelligent species are seen, literally, as phenomenon of ‘Nature’, and where reverence for diversity and ‘life’ extends to both biological and ‘androidal’ forms…where the ‘rights’ of our legal system are extended to the whole inneco-system – the union of ecosystems with innovations. A very deep topic…more later!

3) One of my most challenging goals is to depict world that is post-materialistic, yet simultaneously extremely competent at the material goal of real-world sustainability. Here the traditional bifurcation of the world into ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘secular’ camps will have become untenable. Although competence in scientific and mathematical reason far beyond our wildest imaginations will be common knowledge even to children, most people will also have training in meditative reflection and mystical poesis. Additionally, I am taking the view that physics will have reached an accord with some aspects of traditional metaphysics (not all certainly!) and that the underlying interconnectedness of consciousness and the universe will be an excepted fact of ‘common’ wisdom. Additionally, some technological change will reflect this new ‘aesthetic’ and actually amplify its development. For instance, though most people believe that mind is fundamentally non-local and therefore biological telepathy a widespread (though not reliable) possibility, the use of the Lens for direct mind-to-mind messaging has created an accelerated and amplified historical context where the dream of merging identities is a daily, ordinary activity. In this spirit, the elimination of the distinction between wealth and average health has created a condition where the pursuit of purely material goals (and the concomitant material philosophy behind such action) is not really the most practical position. It is a time of dreams and play, where creativity is the main currency.

And yet…to accomplish the above we will need to move through some very profound, and sometimes scary transitions and I hope to show this in two ways:

1) It is critical to realize that the Universe has gotten a LOT more complex by the time of S’n’K. There are enormous populations of new forms of sentient life living in whole new ‘utanes’. Therefore, for every comprehensive social statement I have made above, there is somewhere a new position of dissent, and varieties of same, to a degree unimaginably more divers than the dissent we experience today. There are ‘Sindikats’ based on almost every conceivable philosophical premise possible – and these diversities will be embodied by characters and interactions within the Novel.

2) There are several key characters who are deliberately ‘retro’ in their beliefs, and they speak to our current concerns by representing our current world-culture(s) embedded in the larger culture of the Novel. For instance, the technological ‘level’ of the Tribes, where the character Steward comes from, is essentially a stand-in for our 21^st Century position, and as Stew moves forward and struggles with integrating in the wider world he recapitulates our future history (our future’s-past, if you will) in a kind of compressed sequence.

Above all, I want to write a philosophically ambitious work that is still very sensitive to issues of character. This is a value, and not merely a question of technique. I want my readers to fall in love with some very real and compassionate people who confront big, even cosmic, issues -- but in ways that are deeply felt and deeply personal.

Down and Fast - A Lunchtime Conversation

Below is a reiteration of many of the points of the last few posts, but compacted in the form of an email I sent my father and my brother after we had lunch and I struggled, as usual, to get all the necessary conceptual infrastructure laid our for a Down and Fast world-making exercise:

Folks—

Fun conversation yesterday…as usual! Below is a written version of one of the more sophisticated ‘sections’ we ran through, because I believe that it is sound, well-grounded in other people’s work, and definitely deserves a second chance because of the significance of its implications.

1) Because of the gonzo upper density limits of computation now being thrown around it is reasonable to talk about a miniaturized model of a human brain taking up a volume of space approximately 10^-4 on a side. We would not have to understand this brain, it would be a faithful imitation of neuronal connectivity and functionality from a ‘black box’ input/output perspective without a comprehensive theory of mind (which may or may not come later).

2) It is quite likely that this ‘mind’ would run at a much greater rate than our own for two very important reasons: a) it is smaller, so signal transfer time from one section to another is intrinsically shorter and faster in linear proportion; b) the connective infrastructure is likely to be ‘wires’ using electronic or photonic signaling which has a speed roughly 1 million times as fast the speed of nerve conduction (10-100 meters per second vs. significant percentage of speed of light); c) the calculative infrastructure of the ‘neurons’ themselves, that part responsible for taking the inputs and creating outputs, will likely be hosted on Gigaherz (or faster) microprocessors which are more than a million times as fast as the same processes in biological neurons (roughly 1000/s).

3) A fast mind is undesirable and possibly useless without a ‘body’ and an ‘environment’ with similar speed factors in which to plan, act and respond. One obvious solution is to create a host body at the same scale as the mind, i.e. at 10^-4. The laws of physics are friendly to this plan, but not always in the same way for each aspect, which leads us to…

4) Gravity: in a vacuum gravity scales perfectly – it takes exactly one ten-thousandth as long for an object to fall to the floor in this hypothetical micro-world. However…

5) Add air and things become very interesting. Some engineers working on new nano-bot designs have described water as being ‘like jello’ and air being ‘like soup’ at these specs. Forward locomotion stops almost instantly when propulsive inputs are ceased…stop and go…stop and go. Surface area effects of all kinds are enormous. The laws of physics are the same, but which ones are important has shifted significantly.

6) Of particular interest is our old well-known friend ‘surface area to volume ratio’. Insect legs are insanely thin and strong and fleas can jump a subjective/relative ‘kilometer’ into the air. This aspect of micro-engineering does help things move roughly faster as size goes down but the graph is hardly well-behaved and there are many mitigating factors like inner limb friction.

7) All this being said, in S’n’K these problems have all already been mostly solved by extending limb-like action into the ‘klowd’ of micro-webs surrounding each individual and by using the ‘lenz’ to virtually augment where accelerated perception is more important than ‘actual’ physical speed. So…

8) In the Narrative there are completely functional ‘worlds’ where subjective time is 10 thousand to a million times faster than at our current level. One underlying trope here is that internal experience is plastic under these different time domains, that is it can function pretty much the way it does now by adapting subjective time within internal experience to match useful speeds to the requirements of the ‘local’ environment. I mentioned some concerns I have for a general theory of mind relative to this point, especially at hugely accelerated rates (i.e. 10^15) but while that is interesting, there is enormous head-room here – to quote the inimitable physicist Richard Feynman “plenty of room at the bottom”.

But what would this mean in socio-historical terms? Well…I could go on at length, but I have already received more of your attention than I deserve so I will just quickly say that it would be catastrophic – in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ senses of that word. To have any sector of a society with that much ‘time’ advantage would truly be like living with hyper-powerful Aliens – one year of our dialog with them could allow them millennia of response time. Their technical development would strip our projections by factors upon factors of magnitude. This is the primary reason for my belief that the arrival times for various technologies (Futurist-proposed) are probably much too long in most cases. Even electronic human-level-capable computation at ‘normal’ scale brings this sort of scenario into play, but the additional significance of the ‘dense’ micro-variant is that it also has the distinct advantage of enormous populations!

--M

Down and Fast, Part 3 - Population and Freedom

In the last essay in this series we discussed the emergence of enormous populations of sentient beings in the near future, in numbers so large that as one person is to the current human race, the totality of our current population is to these new beings…and then some. Roughly speaking you and I are one ten-billionth of humanity, and yet ten billion is far less than one ten-billionth of the kind of numerical surge in this scenario. Of course, life and culture are more than just about masses, yet on the average enormous congregations of beings create technology, political power, and historical influence according to their resources. We are facing a very concrete reason here to consider a post-human epic.

And that is just about taking up space, but at risk of sounding like a broken record, let’s take another look at time. If a population is living at Fast6, they have a million years for every year of Fast0. I need to give that some reality – imagine our technologically accelerated culture and everything it could accomplish, if it does not destroy itself, in the next million years – now imagine that happening every year inside these new cultures. Even without large numbers this would be stunning, but considered together the effects of dense sentience and accelerated time and we approach a much firmer foundation for the contention that conventional futurisms are swallowed by a tsunami.

No matter how technically challenging the creation of these new utanes of complexity, the citizens who will live in them have the numbers and the ‘time’ to achieve the limit case. No invention, no artistic problem, no cultural development that is fundamentally possible can be prevented from emerging somewhere…and possibly a billion somewheres. Within that, what agreements or covenants can even cohere enough for any sort of general assurance of mutual survival? There is still a shared infrastructure of physics and ecology at the Down0 foundational level – and that must be preserved enough to ‘host’ every other level!

Furthermore, now that a utane can hold its billion-billion-billions of selves in a space within ‘weapon’s range’ of a simple attack, even personal-scaled violence is completely disastrous. Under these conditions the expanded freedom of new worlds is balanced by an enormous increase in responsibility and most probably a necessity for monitoring and Platform intervention in the finest granularities of action and interaction. Given the plasticity of the Klowd in manifesting any physical design requested, a constant need to interpret intent becomes the primary task of ubiquitous computation. Do our current notions of privacy and freedom have much relevance here?