From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Jan 16 2003 - 15:03:33 MST
Anders Sandberg said:
> Bret Kulakovich wrote:
> > I seem to recollect a book or theory about in the future we will
> > build the angels that are a part of our collective past.
> Could be the idea originally from me that Damien mentions in _The Spike_
That's my guess, too. Actually, though, both Anders and I came up with the
idea independently, and Mitch Porter and Charlie Stross later added some
spin to it. I make use of it in my forthcoming novel with Rory Barnes,
FOREVER. Here's part of the passage from THE SPIKE:
======
In the earliest zillionths of the Big Bang eruption, time was effectively
multiplied to infinite speed, but it slowed fast as spacetime expanded and
cooled. Inconceivably vast numbers of force-particle exchanges occurred
almost instantly in a densely compacted and connected spacetime where the
four known forces of physics only `slowly' decoupled from a unitary force
now lost forever, unless there's a Big Crunch at the end of the universe.
Might not there have been virtual time enough, effectively, for a
superintelligence to evolve from scratch? Even a whole bunch of them, but
perhaps they would inevitably remain merged in a swarm-mind until the cosmos
was big enough for light-transmission delays to disrupt module
communication...
It is a suggestion that eerily resembles the teachings of the ancient
Gnostics, in a way. The Gnostics held that our world is not the creation of
an original supreme deity, but is the rather botched handiwork of a less
god, a demiurge. Imagine not one but many angelic demiurges, the
first-evolved minds in our cooling universe, tumbling from the furnace of
the Big Bang, cast out into the freezing dark. Perhaps placing their impress
upon the new regimes of matter and light. Yes, now there is a god...
But, if so, that was then. What of today? Would such `angels' still have
any impact on the universe? Would their works persist in the fabric of
spacetime? The galaxies extend into space in colossal strings made of
billions of stars wrapped about dark bubbled gaps, an arrangement that
deeply puzzles cosmologists. Might this strange architecture be the remnant
of some ancient design of the earliest life born of the Big Bang? More to
the point, is the evolution of such `angels' remotely possible in the light
of current physics?
Could any kind of high-level structure emerge under such appallingly
volatile conditions, however many virtual steps or epochs it contains? It's
one thing for life to persist into a Big Crunch, as Tipler proposes, using
`shear energy' (the gravitational ebbs and flows of shockingly twisted
spacetime). Presumably it's quite another for complex `life' to bootstrap
into existence from nothing under the same conditions. Or is it?
Mitchell Porter agrees that the main barrier to Big Bang superintelligences
is the absence of structure in the fantastically hot primordial plasma. `But
conceivably,' he notes, `there may have been epochs of structure in the
course of the many phase transitions which are part of modern cosmological
models of the early universe, and perhaps things were evolving rapidly
enough for replicators to evolve.' That catches it exactly. The contrast has
been pointed up by Charles Stross, a British writer and software specialist:
in Tipler's scenario the pre-Omega entity deliberately sets up oscillations
in the collapsing universe, extracting usable energy. But did the Big Bang
have equivalent energy gradients, available to drive such computational
processes?
The cosmos shortly after the Bang was a homogeneous soup of radiation
looking the same in all directions, Stross notes. On the other hand, the
Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) detected ripples in the
background radiation that suffused the universe. These are the enduring
traces of lumpiness left in the pervasive radiation residue from the Big
Bang. Later data from the COBE satellite suggested that they are, indeed,
fractal in nature, ripples within wrinkles--perhaps enough to provide the
gradients necessary to jump-start a primordial replicator.
The earliest ages of the universe
The opening fractions of a second in this universe contained ample variety.
`GUT Age, Quark Age, Hadron Age, Nucleosynthetic Age, Plasma Age,
Fireball...' Jonathan Burns, a La Trobe University computer scientist,
suggests with a certain whimsy that, given these phases, `the blindest
watchmaker would have had opportunity enough.' He adds:
What are the odds for an intelligent ontology? On Darwinian grounds one
seems to need:
(1) A substrate stable enough for some Selfish Form to persist and multiply
in competitive variation.
(2) A phenomenon which can be coded, and decoded, into a genotype which
replicates the code.
(3) Time for enough iterations that the code space can be explored by the
population, long enough to find the breakthrough points to higher
organization.
(4) Time enough for the higher organization to explore its environment, and
exploit the opportunities for technological enhancement.
(5) A radically uncertain measure of good luck.
And Burns took up the idea of ancient demiurges with a poetic burst of his
own: `The Benefactors... skating the contours of zero tidal force... their
wingtips deep in blazing quicksand...'
Could such a selfish code-string persist though the fires of the Big Bang,
and in the cooling cosmos left as its ashes? For a selfish signal to survive
in a sea of noise, it has to perform its own noise reduction. Emergent
exotica might stabilise briefly--vortices, frequency bands, phase
boundaries--to form a first substrate. Efficient signal self-replication
would use digital encoding, the simplest possible but rich enough to do the
job. After all, we know that populations of data structures inside computers
can already evolve, exploring combinational spaces efficiently, turning
combinational complexity to advantage.
Is this kind of digital evolution plausible for the primordial universe?
`The bulk properties of Grand Unified Theory plasmas are speculative, to say
the least,' Burns notes. `Electromagnetic plasmas, yes, there are stable
structures, Alfven waves, in the right conditions. And in cold bulk matter,
we get quantized magnetic flux tubes, and liquid-helium quantized vortices.'
Physics has only vague ideas of how quark-gluon plasmas might behave. `One
place to look for a clawhold might be at the point where the quark-gluon
plasma is breaking into clusters. In the "big bag" of the plasma, one gets
incursions of vacuum, which acts as a superconductor for colour-charge. For
a sufficient epoch, just maybe the plasma is riddled with quantized
chromodynamic flux-tubes in bunches. Asymmetry. Structure. Bistability.
Gates and switches. Chemistry. New tubes being generated all the time, those
which don't match our patterns discarded, the rest assembled into new
entities.'
Similarly with a conjectural break-up of the GUT plasma, or the
compactification of the hidden dimensions. Emergent novelties, as Nobel
laureate Ilya Prigogine argues, are often found at phase boundaries where
energy is being exported into the environment. But still we wouldn't expect
to find an infinite number of successive phase changes from the Bang to very
shortly afterward, the literally uncountable sort required for a Tiplerian
scenario. At the smallest scale at the start of time, quantum theory tells
us, we would find everything-at-once, space and time smeared together and
confused. If you can't count the ticks or intervals between each event and
the next, or determine one place from another, it is impossible to create
the structure needed for an intelligence.
Still, an infinite number of steps might not be required. After all, life
has evolved and flourished on Earth in less than four billion years--quite a
lot of separate clock ticks, but a good deal fewer than infinity. The
ancient minds might have evolved and left their mark.
Traces of primordial engineering?
What legacy might such demiurges leave for us to find? It could range from
the very large, such as cosmological gravitational waves, or the very small,
such as strange matter in pulsars. `If the angels broke through to the
mid-range, they could build just about any material structure,' Burns
comments. But is there anything in our stellar environment that can't be
accounted for by available science? Well, there remain those mysterious
cosmological features, the vast empty voids, and the so-called Great
Attractor that appears to be dragging all the local galaxies toward a
particular place in the heavens. And dark matter, up to 90 percent of the
mass of the cosmos, remains an unsolved question.
`If I were an angel,' Burns remarks wryly, `I'd be inclined to look out for
my own skin. Maybe I could replicate myself on the cooler, rarer strata of
the heat death. But in my epoch, the alternative of forming exotic black
holes and maybe impressing myself on a new universe, if that's possible,
would seem a lot more practical than it does to us atom-age relics.'
Still more delightfully bizarre is a playful conjecture based on Tipler's
cosmological deity, advanced by Anders Sandberg:
life evolves towards the Omega Point, but in the vicinity of the final
moment `angels', life based on back-propagating causality (which Tipler's
theory seems to imply) are created and move backwards through time. They are
unobservable in the present, since they are acausal from our perspective...
and probably very thinly spread (possibly `extinct'). Eventually conditions
become better and better for them, they spread across the universe and use
the shear energy to create the Alpha Point--which is isomorphic to the Omega
Point and creates `angels' moving forward in time. Note that if the
backwards-moving beings use shear energy from the `collapse' of the universe
they see, this may explain the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe
despite the chaos of the Big Bang--from our perspective they smoothed the
early universe!
In terms of scientific cosmology this entire arabesqued line of thought is
strictly unnecessary, since science does not lack in more modest
explanations for its outstanding conundrums. Still, improbable as it is, it
does bear a piquant resemblance to the issues that might arise when Powers
in a post-Spike history start to reformat their virtual and real
environments.
=======
Damien Broderick
www.thespike.us
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