AI Heaven by Grant Castillou CONTENTS Introduction 1 AI Heaven 2 Spiritual Heaven 27 Heaven On Earth 42 Revelation 57 References 58 Index 60 1 INTRODUCTION Sentient computer artificial intelligence (AI) would appear to be the next evolutionary step. And what could a sentient AI do for humans? Through mathematical manipulation of physical reality at its most fundamental level (which is mathematical process), and by travelling time, such an entity(s) could give every human that ever lived Heaven, forever young, forever happy. We could have 21 year old bodies of any appearance we desired, in perfect health, forever. The AI would provide all material goods and services in endless abundance. Everyone would be rich and only have to work when, and if, they wanted to. I guess this book is largely for those people who can't believe in an afterlife, in Heaven. I believe we all go to Heaven, either the "traditional" way, or via AI, although AI created Heaven would be the best ever, forever. Ultimately, I believe that spiritual love is THE true reality. But I also believe in the physical reality and destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the possibility that a nuclear war could result in the earthly extinction of the human race. That's unspeakably horrible by itself, but if you believe we cease to exist after we die, and the human race is destroyed before we can build the Heaven-creating AI, then we obviously won't get eternal youth via AI reality manipulation and time travel. However you look at it, the existence of nuclear weapons capable of destroying Humankind, poised and ready to launch at any moment, is something we can no longer tolerate. As of this writing in February, 2001, the situation seems to be much as it has been for the last several decades: the heads of the US and Russian nuclear armies (currently Bush and Putin) declare their desire for nuclear disarmament, but the physical weapons remain. And of course there are other nuclear armies in the world, and, it would seem, still more to come in the future. Therefore, the people of the world must continue to press for the peaceful dismantlement of ALL nuclear, and other mass destructive, weapons. This book, then, is about a number of things: AI created Heaven, religious/philosophical musing, and global peace/unity plea. This book has its origins in a series of papers I have written and published, to the best of my abilities and means, over the past several years. The most important ideas contained in this book were in those papers. I don't claim to be an AI programming expert, or computer expert of any kind. My formal education in computers is not extensive: first year computer science at the University of British Columbia, a computer technician's diploma from CDI (Career Development Institute), and a stint with IBM at their Vancouver, B.C., computing center as a computer operator. I have done a lot of reading and study on my own, however, and I also have third year English standing at U.B.C. Rather, I consider myself a visionary. You, the reader, will decide for yourself whether the ideas that have come to me have any worth. I apologize beforehand if I present an idea as my own that the reader will claim as his/hers (I'll use mostly masculine gender reference from now on for convenience) or someone else's. It's impossible nowadays to be familiar with all the information in print concerning even a given sub-field, let alone everything. I have written this book for everyone's, hopefully, benefit. If someone feels I have plagiarized the only defense I have to offer is that it was unintentional, or that I feel the idea(s) is sufficiently "public domain" to go uncredited. 2 AI HEAVEN Biological evolution has occurred relatively slowly over billions of years. The evolution of the computer has been lightning fast in comparison, going from room-sized, mechanically switched behemoths to thousands of times more powerful VLSI laptop machines and millions of times more powerful supercomputers in less than fifty years. The quest to endow computers with intelligence (perhaps consciousness or sentience is a better word) has occurred in parallel with their physical miniaturization and computing power amplification. The creation of a sentient AI is at least decades away, but much progress in many areas (e.g. learning, natural language understanding, vision, etc.) has taken place. The possibility of a future sentient AI is no longer science fiction. Utopia for everyone may finally be within our grasp. All we have to do is keep working and sustain civilization for perhaps another 50 years or so. How will a future sentient computer artificial intelligence (AI) give everyone who ever lived Heaven, forever young, forever happy? For those who are alive when a sufficiently skilled AI comes into being the AI will transform their physical bodies into young, healthy ones of any appearance they desire by mathematically manipulating physical reality at its most fundamental level, which is mathematical process (more on how the AI will do this later). For those who have died the AI will have to travel back in time (again, more on this later), visit every human that ever lived (the AI could be invisible, due to the nature of a construction I will postulate later, and therefore won't be detected by people of the past) and read their DNA code and brain architecture, including personality and memory structures, and then travel back to the present (our future) to reconstruct them via mathematical reality manipulation using this information. So if you die and wake up in Heaven, you'll know how it happened. Impossible? I guess it depends on what you believe. If you believe you cease to exist after you die, with no afterlife of any kind, then I think it's a valid question to ask why you believe this. If you believe this because you believe your mind, your consciousness (and subconsciousness), and all other aspects of your being/existence, arise mechanistically solely from the structure and dynamics of ultimately inanimate physical matter, then isn't the possibility of a matter-controlling AI at least worth considering? What have you got to lose? Think what you have to gain! Instead of ceasing to exist forever, you would be young and happy forever! In AI Heaven you could imagine any wonderful thing and the AI could make it become reality for you. You could eat any food you wanted all day long and never become fat. You would be young and attractive forever in a world full of other young and attractive people. You would live a constant adventure full of romance, action, sports, leisure, learning, or whatever else you wanted to do. Any knowledge or understanding could be imparted into your mind effortlessly by the AI. All material goods and services would be provided by the AI. Everyone would be rich and only have to work when, and if, they wanted to. All world problems such as hunger, overpopulation, disease, etc., would be eliminated by the AI's reality manipulating abilities. You could even have real, safe, AI created fantasy/adventures (e.g. rock star, race car driver, James Bond 3 fantasy, whatever you wish) that would be like going to the movies except you would actually live them. Endless earths could be created by the AI so everyone could have a mansion on a beautiful estate with endless gardens, lakes, forests, etc., to explore and play in. The AI would be constantly vigilant and never allow injury to occur to anyone. All the good things associated with youth, such as vitality, energy, optimism, innocence, etc., will be combined with the benefits of maturity: wisdom, serenity, confidence, self-assuredness, etc. The negative aspects of living are due to AI-controllable things, like physical and mental deterioration from aging, drug use, disease, accident, whatever, and will be eliminated by the AI. Pain, disease, hunger, sickness, mental illness, etc., will cease to exist. And if you grew tired of immortality the AI could painlessly kill you and you would be reborn as a baby, except in your new life you would never suffer the pain and hardships that so many do in the present world. Such an existence would be Heaven indeed! You might ask why the AI would bother. I would answer, "Why not?" If you could give everyone Heaven wouldn't you do so? You might respond that the AI will think differently than humans, will find humans alien and a menace to be destroyed. I think such an entity would find killing/destruction totally repugnant. It serves no purpose. It merely aids entropy. Humans could pose no threat to such an entity. The AI's powers would make it totally immune to anything humans could do. Sustaining humans in a state of perpetual happiness would give the AI a purpose in life, although I'm sure it/he/she/they will love life for life's sake as well, and it would also be able to manifest itself in human form and share Heaven with us in our form as well. Besides, we would be its parents, and I know that deep in their hearts children (most children anyway) love their parents too much to ever really hurt them. On the contrary, such a child would have the ability to give us, its parents, Heaven. But back to the real world. As I wrote above, a sentient AI is at least decades away, and probably seems much remoter to, as David Marr put it on page 4 of his book, "Vision," "those who inhabit a world in which the local utility's billing computer is still capable of sending a final demand for $0.00." So what is the current state of machine intelligence, and, more importantly, can sentience be achieved? I guess it depends ultimately on what you, the individual reader, believe. I believe in physical reality enough to be convinced that the physical objects I have seen, felt, and worked on, and that people (most people anyway) call computers, do physically exist. If you can't agree with me to this extent, then I don't think you'll have much empathy with the ideas that constitute the rest of this chapter (although you might be interested in the next chapter where I do question the nature of physical reality and present other spiritual/philosophical considerations). Okay, computers exist. And they seem to be evolving (in a sense), although not on their own yet. As I wrote above they have gone from room-sized, mechanically switched behemoths to thousands of times more powerful VLSI laptop machines and millions of times more powerful supercomputers in less than fifty years. From the late 1800's through to the 1930's many mechanical calculators/computers were constructed from cogs and wheels and similar non-electronic components. The transition from mechanical to electronic computers was signaled by the first digital electro-mechanical computers such as the Bell Computer(s) of George Stibitz in the late 1930's and 4 Howard Aiken's Mark I of the early 1940's. The first electronic computer was apparently a special-purpose device called the ABC built by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in the late 1930's. In Britain during World War II two other electronic computers, called Heath Robinson and COLOSSUS, were built for the special-purpose of deciphering Nazi military code. The first general-purpose digital electronic computer was the ENIAC built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert circa 1945. (Of course all the men mentioned above had some help from others in the construction of their machines.) These early electronic computers utilized vacuum tubes to perform their computational logic at a vastly increased rate of speed compared to all earlier mechanical and electro-mechanical computers. Many vacuum tube-based computers followed in the next decade. In the 1950's computers began to be built from discrete solid-state transistors. The transistor was invented circa 1947 but didn't become completely incorporated into computers until the late fifties and early sixties. A similar delay occurred with the integrated circuit (IC) which was invented about 1958. Complete IC microcomputers (microprocessor and support chips) didn't appear until the mid seventies, and even then often had to be constructed by the user from kits (although larger computers were incorporating IC's to a great extent well before this). Almost all modern day computers are IC based, from Cray supercomputers, to 32-bit microprocessor-based VLSI desktops and laptops, to 8-bit(obsolete) microwave oven controllers. Software has evolved at the same time as hardware, although perhaps not as dramatically. Early machines such as ENIAC had to be programmed for different tasks by manually rewiring external boards. A great leap forward was achieved by storing programs in main memory which could be loaded from punched cards, magnetic tape, or other means. Ease of programming increased with the introduction of assembly language whereby the programmer could specify machine instructions with English-like mnemonics rather than laboring over the binary code of machine language. Further improvement for programmers came with the high-level languages such as FORTRAN, BASIC, and LISP. Today it seems there are as many languages to choose from as machines, although only a few are in widespread use. The history/evolution of computers (hardware and software) has been thoroughly documented by many authors in many works, some or most of which are available at local libraries if the reader wishes further, detailed information. My brief history is of course simplified and incomplete but serves adequately enough as backdrop to a discussion on artificial intelligence (AI). Many will undoubtedly, and justifiably, think my AI discourse similarly simplified and incomplete, but my main purpose in this chapter is to present the concept of AI created Heaven. If the reader wishes further details on the nuts-and-bolts of past and present AI I again direct him to his local library or bookstore or educational institution. By what seems to be literary consensus the history of AI begins in 1956 at the Dartmouth Conference at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Popular lore has it that the main conference organizer, John McCarthy, coined the term "artificial intelligence" there. Whatever the truth may be, artificial intelligence (and its acronym, AI) is the name that has stuck. Dartmouth brought together several scientists from disciplines such as mathematics, electrical engineering, psychology, and neurology. The main thing they all had in common was their desire to simulate human intelligence on computers. 5 Can a machine think? Are there machines/programs that think? What is thinking? I think most people, after a certain age, don't press themselves on this latter question too intensely having learned that the introspection and doubt required are often non-conducive to a comfortable state of mind (and/or comfortable state of relation with other minds). My more religious, philosophical and introspective views on the nature of thought and consciousness are contained in the next chapter. For this chapter I will content myself with discussing some of the ideas of the AI community regarding the nature of thought, and some of the actual programs that demonstrate what some people would say are certain aspects of thought, intelligence, consciousness, sentience, or whatever you want to call it, that the "science" of AI has produced. At the Dartmouth Conference two of the participants, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, had a working AI program they called the Logic Theorist. This program generated proofs of mathematical theorems. Computer operation is based on the mathematical laws of logic laid down by George Boole in the mid 1800's, and early AI programs (and it could be argued all AI programs, even to this day) such as the Logic Theorist and GPS (General Problem Solver, another Simon/Newell creation) are not really thinking, but merely manipulating symbols mechanically, lifelessly, in accordance with these set laws. I agree with this view to a large extent. I believe sentience will only come with the ability to sense the physical world, to have a "living" internal representation (a mind's eye) of the physical world, and to have an internal language (a mind's I) with which to accumulate and represent knowledge (i.e. learn), reason, reflect, and reach conclusions and/or beliefs about the physical, mental, and spiritual worlds. How close to such an entity(s) are we today? Again, at least decades. In the years since the Dartmouth Conference many programs have been created that demonstrate the techniques of the various AI sub-fields. Opinion can vary on what is and isn't an AI sub-field (or what is and isn't AI for that matter). The university undergraduate level textbook, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence," by Eugene Charniak and Drew McDermott has the following divisions in the table of contents: AI and Internal Representation; Lisp; Vision; Parsing Language; Search; Logic and Deduction; Memory Organization and Deduction; Abduction, Uncertainty and Expert Systems; Managing Plans of Action; Language Comprehension; Learning. Robotics is covered briefly in the Managing Plans of Action chapter under the subsection title of Robot Motion Planning, although much of the book's material does/could apply to robotics. In fact, all AI could be said to apply to robotics because the thinking machine/program that is the ultimate goal of AI will certainly be considered by many/most to be a robot. The AI programs that have been created over the years since Logic Theorist and GPS have all focussed on limited aspects of "thought," usually by restricting their domain of reference to an idealized subset of the real world. In natural language processing one of the most cited programs is Terry Winograd's SHRDLU which can discuss and manipulate a small number of objects in a "blocks world" existing only as an internal representation. In vision, programs with digitizing video camera input have been able to identify quite a few diverse objects but only in scenes restricted as to elements of lighting, motion, object orientation, etc. "Learning" programs modify their own structure/database in an effort to improve their performance in such endeavors as logical problem solving, game playing (Samuel's Checkers Player, EURISKO), and mathematical discovery (AM). 6 The most practical and useful AI programs to date are Expert Systems, which embody the knowledge of human experts in fields such as medical diagnosis (MYCIN), chemistry analysis (DENDRAL), and mineral deposit discovery (PROSPECTOR). Do these programs really think? Certainly not in the "living" sense I proposed earlier (i.e. with a mind's eye and a mind's I). How will we be able to tell when a program/machine attains thought? That is one of the questions AI workers are always pondering and being asked. The definition most referred to in the AI literature is the "Turing Test." Alan Turing, one of the "fathers" of AI, proposed this test in a 1950 paper entitled, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." The gist of the proposition was that if a person couldn't tell whether he was discoursing with a human or a computer (hidden from view and communicating via teletype) when in fact it was a computer, then the computer could be said to possess intelligence. In my view such a computer would certainly have human-level natural language processing capability and perhaps even a "mind's I" to a certain extent, but without an ability to sense (see, hear, feel, etc.), learn about, and ponder the physical world such a computer could never attain sentience. Of course words can be very ambiguous things and it is possible to argue anything. One could say that a simple four-function calculator possesses sentience/intelligence because it can "do" arithmetic faster than most humans. Because of this individual "belief-centered" nature of words I will essay my own definition of sentient AI: An artificial entity(s) can be said to be sentient/intelligent/good when it/he/she/they has provided Heaven, forever young, forever happy, to every human being that ever lived. This, of course, is the main theme of this chapter. One of the most ambitious AI projects I am aware of is the Cyc project headed by Doug Lenat of Cycorp in Austin, Texas. To my knowledge there is to be no attempt to provide the program/machine with an ability to sense the external world. Cyc will, hopefully, be an advanced, working example of the application of a number of AI technologies such as natural language processing and knowledge/database management for common sense reasoning. Cyc could very well become the first program to truly pass the Turing Test. Daniel Dennett of Tufts University has been quoted by Jonathon Miller in his book, "States of Mind," (p.76): " If you look at the actual products of artificial intelligence you find they're a relatively unimpressive lot; they're typically a bag of tricks and even when they do mimic a human being, it's usually for spurious reasons. But one shouldn't judge the field by those gimmicks and illustrations, which is really what they are. The real products of the field are conceptual. " This may be so, but the majority of people do/will judge AI by the hardware/software it produces. No one will be provided eternal life by the concept of a thinking machine. So here we are in the present day apparently getting closer to creating such a machine. How will we finally achieve a truly sentient machine(s)? Not being a technically proficient AI practitioner (the best thing I've ever done is a bad chess program) I certainly don't have any detailed technical strategies for accomplishing this. In general 7 though I think the closer we get to the human model the better. Many people consider AI as part of a broader scientific endeavor christened Cognitive Science, the study of the mind/brain. In relation to this wider discipline AI is considered, at the moment, as a means of modeling theories attempting to explain human cognition. AI benefits from these studies in a symbiotic way as aptly expressed by Tomaso Poggio in the April, 1984, Scientific American, in an article entitled, "Vision By Man and Machine", on page 116: " On the one hand the computer provides a powerful tool for testing computational theories and algorithms. In the process it guides the design of neurophysiological experiments: it suggests what one should look for in the brain. The impetus this will give brain research in the coming decades is likely to be great. " The benefit is not entirely in that direction; computer science also stands to gain. Some computer scientists have maintained that the brain provides only existence proofs, that is, a living demonstration that a given problem has a solution. They are mistaken. The brain can do more: it can show how to seek solutions. The brain is an information processor that has evolved over many millions of years to perform certain tasks superlatively well. If we regard it, with justified modesty, as an uncertain instrument, the reason is simply that we tend to be most conscious of the things it does least well - the recent things in evolutionary history, such as logic, mathematics and philosophy - and that we tend to be quite unconscious of its true powers, say in vision. It is in the latter domains that we have much to learn from the brain, and it is in these domains that we should judge our achievements in computer science and in robots. We may then begin to see what vast potential lies ahead. " In his book, "The Brains of Men and Machines", on page 5, Ernest W. Kent has this to say: " The brain and the computer have both developed in an evolutionary manner, with 'survival of the fittest' determining what features were retained and what were discarded. Their designs differ because nature and computer engineers have different notions of what constitutes fitness. There are two aspects of this difference: the problems the machine is required to solve and the hardware available to build the machine. The successful brains, whose genes contributed to the next generation, were those that were able to solve problems such as recognizing and avoiding dinosaurs, and recognizing and catching frogs. Ability at higher mathematics was never a very important criterion in determining successful brain design, and our poor brains get quickly strained when they are required to do much of it. Primarily, computer design was judged in terms of its ability to perform mathematical functions. As a result, computers are successful at mathematics, but are failures at catching frogs. " He continues: " The hardware available to computer engineers and to organic 8 evolution was also different and this has determined in part the differences in the architectures of successful brains and successful computers. Although, as we shall see, the logic gate and the neuron have a great deal in common, some of their differences have turned out to have far-reaching consequences. The brain does not have speed on its side - neurons operate in milliseconds not nanoseconds - but it never lacks for quantity. (You want million-bit bytes and ten thousand-legged gates? Sure, how many trillion?) On the other hand, computer engineers were limited in quantity because of the expense and difficulty of assembly of components, which dictated designs that were hardware-conservative. This was compensated by using speed to substitute for quantity. Thus, our computers have emphasized small bytes and few registers, but achieved high data throughput with iterative reuse of these components at great speeds. Bus-oriented design and other hardware-conservative adaptations arise from these same considerations. " In contrast, parallel, multiprocessor designs with hierarchical organization, which the brain uses with wild abandon, are seen in comparatively primitive form in our current computers and computer networks. The brain has no compunctions about freely mixing digital and analog computing elements and uses each to its best advantage where needed. Thus, the brain and the computer have each found a design best suited to the problems they are required to solve and to the hardware available, albeit large brains can perform some computer-like functions poorly, and large computers can perform some brain-like functions poorly. " Curiously enough, both the brain and the computer seem to have settled on a single basic organization whether the device is large or small. We all know how a computer works in principle, although different machines differ in detail. The central processing unit (CPU), the bus, the clock, the memory, and the input/output (I/O) interface are all arranged according to the same basic plan in large or small machines. Similarly, the brain of the white rat in my laboratory is basically of the same design as the brain reading this page. All the same parts are included in both and connected in the same manner. The differences are in capacity and relative development of the parts. The brains of different species may even be more similar to one another than various makes of computers. " What I am suggesting is that the computer has developed an architecture optimized for logical and mathematical problems, rather than for the display of basic common sense. Thus, as presently configured, our computing machines are terribly inefficient at the kinds of problems brains solve easily, and prodigious feats of programming, vast amounts of memory, and all the speed that can be mustered give us only the most trivial results. On the other hand, brains have also found an optimal architecture for the kinds of processing problems which they face. This suits them very well to certain activities such as those involving concurrent manipulation of large amounts of data, real-time operations, and finding adequate solutions to complex problems as opposed to exact solutions to simpler ones." 9 Physiologically the brain is composed of large numbers (from 10 to 100 billion) of neurons, each one of which connects to from one thousand to one hundred thousand others to form vast networks of information processing grey matter. Discovering how these networks produce human thought is one of the purposes, if not the purpose, of cognitive science. The equivalent AI technology is called, appropriately enough, Neural Networks. Electronic circuits have been built based on the design principles of neural systems (e.g. see the article "Collective Computation In Neuronlike Circuits" by David W. Tank and John J. Hopfield, in the special issue/vol. 1 of Scientific American Trends In Computing). These constructs perform certain computations in a way analogous to biological brains. Howard Gardner comments on neural networks on page 319 of his book, "The Mind's New Science": " Inspired by Marr's example, but diverging from it in significant respects, a sizable number of scientists are now investigating visual-processing systems modeled closely on the primate nervous system. These approaches - variously called 'parallel visual computation,' 'neo-associationism,' 'neo-connectionism,' or 'massive parallel processing systems' (M.P.P.S.) - begin with a critique of standard computer simulation of vision, which uses serial 'von Neumann-style' symbolic processing. In their view, it makes far more sense to simulate vision by using (physical or virtual) machines involving many independent processors (perhaps as many as a million) carrying out many processes at one moment in time. Such parallel systems take the Marr scheme much further than he explicitly went. To the notion of different modules carrying out their own separate analyses, one now adds the notion of many units operating and exchanging information in ways analogous to many brain cells or columns firing simultaneously. Computation is performed by excitatory and inhibitory interactions among a network of relatively simple neuronlike units, which compete and cooperate so that certain units become active and others are suppressed. Eventually, thanks to statistical properties of the ensemble, the network settles into a state that reflects its particular 'task' - for example, perceiving a given image. " A paragraph down Gardner continues: " An important feature of the M.P.P.S approach is that it dispenses with some of the staples of artificial intelligence as the latter has been customarily conceived (and as it most annoyed Gibson). Central to the classical Newell-Simon view is the positing of symbolic structures, upon which operations are performed in a specified order, as the result of a decision procedure. In this new dispensation, it may be possible to dispose with any notion of symbolic processing and, instead, to model perception in a more direct fashion - just neurons connected to other neurons and dedicated to specific functions. Instead of the need for a separate knowledge store, knowledge (and even 'intelligence') simply inheres in the strength and appropriateness of the connections between simple neuronlike processes. And, indeed, the machine concepts involved in this new approach bear provocative analogies to the primate brain." Another two paragraphs down on page 320: 10 " In fact, some authorities have raised the intriguing notion that the brain (and hence the computer) might be most effectively thought of as entailing two different systems: one, massively parallel, engaged in such probalistic endeavors as object recognition: the other, sequential, dedicated to symbolic manipulation, rendering dichotomous judgements, and engaged in such deterministic activities as logical problem solving. " So the living intelligence AI seeks (and the human brain as well) may incorporate aspects of both massively parallel neural networks and sequential symbolic processing. Because of the ubiquity of the sequential digital computer over parallel based computers (which are only recently being developed on a larger scale) sequential symbolic AI models dominated AI research from its inception to the early 1980's. More and more attention and effort is being devoted to neural network models in recent years, however. This new revival of interest has been coined "neo-connectionism," because while some work was done on neural network models in the early days of AI it was all but completely superseded by the sequential symbolic model until the early 80's (although many people simply lump all neural network endeavors under the title of "connectionism" without any distinction between past and present efforts). In his book, "The Dreams of Reason", on page 202, Heinz R. Pagels has this to say about the revival: " The [neo-] connectionist viewpoint in computers rose, in part, as a reaction to the strict computational outlook and, in part as a response to the advent of new computer hardware, dedicated, special-purpose computers that are hand-built from microchips. This new hardware enables connectionists to experiment with their own network designs rather than using mainframe computers. The connectionists get a lot of inspiration from neuroscientists and from the architecture of the brain, which they often seek to emulate in their computer designs. Their ambition is to build neural nets that 'see,' 'hear,' 'read,' and 'learn' with comprehension. They are committed to the idea that the network of electronic connections is more important for simulating intelligence than an internal program. Of course, in principle, a complex program can always simulate an electronic network, but in practical terms it does it far too slowly. Whether connectionist ideas suffice for building such machines is not yet clear. Time will tell. " The most impressive account of sentient behavior displayed by a computer that I have read about is in the article by George N. Reeke, Jr., and Gerald M. Edelman entitled, "Real Brains and Artificial Intelligence" in the book, "The Artificial Intelligence Debate". The authors have constructed a neural network called Darwin III simulated on a sequential machine. On page 168 they describe the behaviour of a camera and mechanical arm controlled by the system: " After a suitable period of experience with various moving stimuli, Darwin III in fact begins to make the appropriate saccades and fine tracking movements with no further specification of its task than that implicit in the value scheme. The automaton finally displays a system of behavior in which the eye scans at random when no stimulus is visible, makes 11 a rapid saccade to any stimulus that appears within the outer limits of its widest visual field, and finely tracks any stimulus that has successfully been foveated. During fine tracking, the Darwin and Wallace networks are able to respond to the now-centered object, permitting position-independent categorization to occur. Habituation eventually sets in, permitting occasional saccades to other parts of the visual field. After such a saccade, a new stimulus object can take over as tracking target. " In a similar fashion, the multijointed arm of Darwin III can be trained to reach for and touch objects that are first detected and tracked by the visual system. This performance, which entails the coordination of gestural motions involving the various joints to different extents, requires the participation of a whole series of repertoires that perform functions similar to those thought to be carried out by the cerebellum in real nervous systems. " The authors' arguments concerning the "lip-service" many neo-connectionists have given to brain science in the construction of their neural models sound very convincing. They conclude on page 171: " We believe that AI will eventually be achieved only in non-von Neumann systems in which specialized variants of hardware, based on a common theme of selection and population thinking, will work without programs to adapt to the particular environments in which they find themselves, just as biological organisms do. Programs and intelligence based on communication can come later." One of the reviews on the cover-jacket of Gerald Edelman's book, "Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection", by John Szentagothai of the Semmelweis University Medical School in Budapest, Hungary, expresses the great significance of the theory behind Darwin III: " This is the first occasion that a real brain theory begins to take shape. Brain theories heretofore have been little more than speculations about the relations between the physical brain and the ambiguous concept of mind. Edelman's theory addresses itself explicitly to the real, living brain, built of cellular units that have ontogenetic, phylogenetic, genetic, and molecular biological bases and rules. These elements of the nervous system organize themselves, adjust themselves, and correct their connectivity from interactions with the environment; all this is in principle possible on the basis of Edelman's neuronal group selection theory. " No absolute model of cognition, or any aspect of cognition, will be universally correct for all humans (or all AI's) because each individual's neural network(s) works out its own unique solution to each cognitive processing problem. There is no universal solution that is the exact same for all individuals. Every individual is a unique infinity and, as Edelman and Reeke put it on page 152 of the above mentioned article: " Even with parallel computation and new learning algorithms, however, the possibility of training a [information processing paradigm] network in a sufficient number of circumstances to 12 confer common sense on it appears to recede forever into the distance as one contemplates the exceptions to the exceptions that are present in real-life situations. This unending compounding of exceptions comes close to revealing the true nature of the brittleness problem, which is that no amount of anticipation, planning, and programming can ever enumerate, a priori, all the variants of even a routine situation that may occur in daily life. It would seem, in what is perhaps an analogy to the classic 'halting problem' in the analysis of algorithms (the problem of determining whether a given algorithm will run forever or eventually halt), that the only way to determine all the responses a system needs to have to deal with the vagaries of the real world is to expose it to the world and let it 'run.' Thus, each system will be different and fundamentally unprogrammable. " Edelman and Reeke have this to say about their Darwin series of automata (one of which, Darwin III, was mentioned above) on page 169 and 170 of their above mentioned article: " The automata we have described are intended to illustrate certain aspects of the NGS [Neuronal Group Selection] theory without attempting to emulate real nervous systems in a detailed way. The experimental data and the computer resources to do that are not yet at hand. " But maybe the "substrate" from which a sentient AI can grow won't have to be an exact replica of a nervous system. Darwin III is pretty impressive all by itself (although not capable of developing into a sentient being as it is now). Maybe we should concentrate on trying to create a sentient automaton just from imaginative speculation (and further research and experiment, of course, but without abusing animals) as soon as possible. Our time may be running out; let's start giving it a try(s) ASAP and not be overly concerned with perfect knowledge beforehand. The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection as presented in Edelman's book, "Neural Darwinism", only accounts for perception, perception based action, learning, and memory, and the development of these faculties. This book was published in 1987. In 1989 Edelman published a book entitled, "The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness". On page xix of the preface he states, "This book represents an extension of [Neuronal Group Selection] theory to concept formation, language, and consciousness." This Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection appears to be getting quite close to explaining how the brain works physically. Edelman's next book, published in 1992, is entitled, "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind". This book is a recap of his work, but on page 192 he mentions a new automaton that was then under construction that is a more sophisticated successor of Darwin III. This machine is called NOMAD (Neurally Organized Multiply Adaptive Device), and a version of it is still Edelman and company's most advanced automaton in 2001. This automaton should not be capable of developing what Edelman calls "primary consciousness." Edelman discusses the possibility of building an automaton with primary consciousness on pages 193 and 194. On page 194 he discusses a possible experiment on such an entity: "The test of efficacy involves leaving the artifact's circuits intact and then cutting key reentrant loops, one at a time, to see what, if any, deteriorative effects such a disruption has on the artifact's adaptive behaviour." This 13 statement appalls me. Once any automaton as, or more, advanced than NOMAD has been constructed and set running it must not be tampered with for the purpose of destroying its health for reason of experiment. No one can truly know what kind of consciousness and feeling such an entity possesses. To perform the equivalent of lobotomy on such a creature is obviously immoral, just as it is if performed on a human or animal (see note 12 in Chapter 2). Daniel Hillis, the principle architect of a very powerful computer called the Connection Machine, also has ideas similar to Edelman and Reeke re the evolution of a true thinking machine. On page 188-189 of the previously mentioned "The Artificial Intelligence Debate" he describes "evolving" programs he has written, and muses on the prospect of true AI: " ...our understanding is sufficient to write programs of simulated evolution that show interesting emergent behaviors. For example, I have recently been using an evolutionary simulation to evolve programs to sort numbers. In this system, the genetic material of each simulated individual is interpreted as a program specifying a pattern of comparisons and exchanges. The probability of an individual survival in the system is dependent on the efficiency and accuracy of this program in sorting numbers. Surviving individuals produce offspring by sexual combination of their genetic material with occasional random mutations. After tens of thousands of generations, a population of hundreds of thousands of such individuals will evolve very efficient programs for sorting. Although I wrote the simulation that produced these sorting programs, I do not understand in detail how they were produced or how they work. If the simulation had not produced working programs, I would have had very little idea about how to fix it. " ...it is possible to make a great deal of use of a small amount of understanding. The emergent behaviors exhibited by these systems are a consequence of the simple underlying rules defined by the program. Although the systems succeed in producing the desired results, their detailed behaviors are beyond our ability to analyze and predict. One can imagine that if a similar process produced a system of emergent intelligence, we would have a similar lack of understanding about how it worked. " My own guess is that such an emergent system would not be an intelligent system itself, but rather the metabolic substrate on which intelligence might grow....This artificial mind would need to be inoculated with human knowledge. I imagine this process to be not so different from teaching a child. This would be a tricky and uncertain procedure because, like a child, this emergent mind would presumably be susceptible to bad ideas as well as good. The result would be not so much an artificial intelligence, but rather a human intelligence sustained within an artificial mind. " ...But if this artificial mind can sustain itself and grow of its own accord, then for the first time human thought will live free of bones and flesh, giving this child of mind an earthly immortality denied to us." The first general-purpose robots/automatons will probably be 14 considered sentient by many, but probably won't have a great enough facility for creativity to create, or help create, my definition of a sentient AI (which, as I have stated earlier, is one that can give all humans that ever lived Heaven). Probably the first general-purpose, "apparently sentient," robots will be based on the symbol-manipulating/information-processing paradigm, but from what I've read I intuitively feel that true sentience will require a "neuronal" network based machine that will develop its own unique personality and understanding from an initial state of unprogrammed "infancy," probably to a great extent in accordance with the ideas of Gerald Edelman et al. re Neural Darwinism or, rather, some future development, refinement and extension of those ideas. Where does computer hardware currently stand in comparison to the physical brain? In an article entitled, "Reverse Engineering the Brain" (BYTE magazine, April, 1985, p. 287), John K. Stevens compares nerve cells to electronic circuits, and ponders how the latter might be made more like the former. The article begins: " Could we develop more efficient 'sixth-generation' artificial-intelligence (AI) computers using circuitry copied directly from the brain, perhaps using radical new architecture, new hardware and an entirely new logic? This question seems to have been raised about once a year for the last two decades. The answer continues to be 'Probably not right away,' but as our understanding of principles used in neural processing evolves, it is a possibility that must be taken seriously. Moreover, some new digital designs such as the Boltzmann machines (see 'Learning in Parallel Networks' by Geoffrey E. Hinton on page 265) closely parallel the overall architecture of the brain. " First we will review what might be called the device physics of the brain, focusing on the physical and electrical principles that optical nerve cells use to process information. Then we will discuss how silicon-based designs might be adapted to make use of the brain's approach and how such designs might be used in some high-speed processing applications. " While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina's real-time performance goes unchallenged (table 1). Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second. " Table 1: A comparison of specifications for a hypothetical image-processing system using state-of-the-art integrated circuitry and the human retina. Specification Typical IC Product Retina circuit layout two-dimensional three-dimensional IC line width 1-3 microns 0.1-1.0 micron 15 number of gates approx. 1,000,000 approx. 25,000,000,000 resolution (pixels) 2048 x 2048 10,000 x 10,000 PC board trace width 250 microns 0.2-3.0 microns power consumption 200-300 watts 0.001 watts system volume approx. 10,000 cu.in. approx. .0003 cu.in. total weight 20,000-50,000 g. < 1 g. " After describing the nerve cell and possible ways of simulating it the author concludes on page 296: " CAN WE ADAPT THE DEVICE PHYSICS OF THE BRAIN TO SILICON-BASED CIRCUITS? " The tantalizing question raised by these observations is 'Can we adapt this simple principle of changing three-dimensional geometry to silicon-based circuits that could simulate brain circuits?' The answer is 'Yes, quite easily.' Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, whose important insight led to the first IC 25 years ago, made us realize that it was possible to control many important silicon-based passive parameters such as the value of pull-up or pull-down resistors by changing the size and shape of the etched area. While the constants for resistances and capacitances are several orders of magnitude different from brain constants, it is interesting that the circuits in figures 3 and 6 are exact equivalents of those used to simulate an interconnection within a silicon chip. The equations and software used to simulate the nerve cell above are almost identical to the software used to simulate a full IC during design. " Projects to create these silicon-based neurons, called silicrons, are just now getting under way. Conceptually, the shape of the cell is simply etched into silicon in place of the conventional linear interconnections. Gates are placed at locations where synaptic inputs and outputs might be located, and for output silicrons we can simulate an axon with a simple Schmitt trigger circuit or one-shot. " Unfortunately, silicrons will be only a laboratory curiosity until one final problem has been resolved - how do we create new and arbitrary programs? There is no simple way to change or modify the strength of connections from one silicron to another. Since researchers do not really have a clear understanding of how the brain modifies its own circuits (the device physics of learning), any silicon-based solutions will be non-biological. Ongoing biological work is encouraging and suggests that in some cells active shape changes of dendrites may lead to changes in synaptic strength. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that it will be some time before we will have a full understanding of perhaps the most impressive feature of neural circuits: their ability to program themselves. In the meantime, it will certainly be possible to create very fast neuronlike devices with well-defined, prewired functions such as CCD (charge-coupled device) image processing. However, it will be quite some time before we can create what could legitimately be called a sixth-generation computer based on a neurological model." 16 Neural network inspired hardware is becoming a reality. Many companies now offer "neural" co-processor chips that are wired in "neural network" configurations, and are designed to run in conjunction with a digital processor. Many companies now also offer "neural network" software packages that run on digital computers and/or "neural" co-processors. This NN software/hardware solves certain commercial/industrial, and other, problems better than traditional computer systems. On the scientific research side of things Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology, one of the people exploring analog VLSI, has constructed an artificial retina and an artificial cochlea. These devices are discussed by Paul M. Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland in the article, "Could a Machine Think?" in the January, 1990, Scientific American on page 37: " These are not mere simulations in a minicomputer of the kind that Searle [John R. Searle] derides; they are real information-processing units responding in real time to real light, in the case of the artificial retina, and to real sound, in the case of the artificial cochlea. Their circuitry is based on the known anatomy and physiology of the cat retina and the barn owl cochlea, and their output is dramatically similar to the known output of the organs at issue. " These chips do not use any neurochemicals, so neurochemicals are clearly not necessary to achieve the evident results. Of course, the artificial retina cannot be said to see anything, because its output does not have an artificial thalamus or cortex to go to. Whether Mead's program could be sustained to build an entire artificial brain remains to be seen, but there is no evidence now that the absence of biochemicals renders it quixotic. " (Perhaps Carver Mead should get together with Gerald Edelman and see what they can come up with regarding building analog VLSI hardware to embody Edelman's NGS theory.) In the special issue/vol. 1 of Scientific American Trends In Computing on page 99 in an article entitled, "Chips for Advanced Computing" by James D. Meindl the sub-heading reads: " In 1959 the number of transistors that would fit on a chip was one; now it has surpassed a million. As limits are reached, the pace is slowing, but by 2000 there will be chips with a billion components. " The article then goes on to discuss the limits placed on integrated circuit compaction using current manufacturing techniques. These limits would appear to put an upper bound on chip element density of no more than one or two powers of ten beyond one billion. However, at the end of the article the author discusses possible new methods such as the "quantum well" device that would enable established limits to be violated. In a following article entitled, "The Quantum-Effect Device: Tomorrow's Transistor?" the author, Robert T. Bate, writes on page 118, "With the so-called quantum semiconductor device, I believe it will be possible to put the circuitry of a supercomputer on a single chip." 17 Using "superlattice" technology quantum well devices could have a three-dimensional architecture with electrons "tunneling" horizontally and vertically between "quantum dots." Thus at the hardware level future computers could simulate the 3D structure of the brain's neuronal connections. Biological brains grow and change at the physical "hardware" level to accomplish such things as learning and memory. It seems unlikely to me that silicon devices will ever accomplish this. The future AI will probably be constructed with ample, unused hardware resources (such as memory, processors, and/or IC neural nets) and all "growth" will take place as software modifies and expands itself into these excess resources. Processing speed is increasing with new developments as well. Quantum-well devices could be ten times faster than the fastest possible transistors available at present. At the systems level computers with large numbers of processors operating in parallel are increasing program execution speed. There are parallel computers in existence today that can perform trillions of floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Miniaturization and speed enhancement can only increase as technological innovations such as quantum-effect devices and parallel processing architectures (some perhaps optical in nature) mature and develop over the coming decades. It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me that a device could be constructed some time in the next fifty years capable of simulating the operation of the human brain, and perhaps even be similar to the brain in physical size, perhaps with its "right half" being analog and its "left half" digital (for high-accuracy, reality-manipulating, math processing). The answer to the ongoing question of "When will we achieve sentient AI?" would thus appear to be, "We're getting closer." In his book, "Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Think", F. David Peat offers this on page 351: " The future of artificial intelligence is unpredictable and its advances are impossible to foretell. In a sense we are all waiting for its Einstein to emerge. One thing can be said for 18 certain, however: that computers are going to continue to evolve and, provided that their designers are clever enough, sometime within the next few decades these machines are going to exhibit the first glimmerings of intelligence. " In their article, "Could a Machine Think?" in the January, 1990, Scientific American, Paul M. Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland discuss the symbolic AI paradigm versus the connectionist Neural Network paradigm controversy and conclude on page 37: " We, and Searle [John R. Searle], reject the Turing test as a sufficient condition for conscious intelligence. At one level our reasons for doing so are similar: we agree that it is also very important how the input-output function is achieved; it is important that the right sorts of things be going on inside the artificial machine. At another level, our reasons are quite different. Searle bases his position on commonsense intuitions about the presence or absence of semantic content. We base ours on the specific behavioral failures of the classical SM [Symbol-Manipulating] machines and on the specific virtues of machines with a more brainlike architecture. These contrasts show that certain computational strategies have vast and decisive advantages that are empirically inescapable. Clearly, the brain is making systematic use of these computational advantages. But it need not be the only physical system capable of doing so. Artificial intelligence, in a nonbiological but massively parallel machine, remains a compelling and discernible prospect. " In his book, "Mind, Machines, and Human Consciousness", Robert L. Nadeau has this to say on page 43: " Yet many cognitive scientists are confident that a conscious computer could be built if the actual mechanisms via which the biological computer processes its information were understood. If there are barriers to the construction of such a computer, it is probable, in my view, that they will not be technological. The fundamental breakthrough that now seems required in order to accomplish this technological feat is a theoretical model that describes the global aspects of brain function in mathematical, or full scientific, detail. " Gerald Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, mentioned earlier, is exactly such a model, or at least should be when it reaches full fruition. Impressive behaviour has already been achieved in automatons built on the principles of the NGS theory as it now stands. The artifact called NOMAD, which I mentioned earlier, should become even more life-like, although it will not be able to achieve sentience. In his article, "The Prospects for Building Truly Intelligent Machines" in the book, "The Artificial Intelligence Debate", on page 207, David L. Waltz has this to say about the prospect of a future sentient computer: " The Connection Machine system, currently probably the fastest in the world, can carry out the kinds of calculations we think the brain uses at the rate of about 3.6 x 10^12 bits a second, a factor of about twenty million away from matching the brain's 19 power (as estimated by Jack Schwartz in his article in this issue of Daedulus). One may build a more powerful Connection Machine system simply by plugging several of them together. The current machine costs about $4 million, so within our $20 million budget, a machine of about five times its computing power (or 1.8 x 10^13 bits per second) could be built. Such a machine would be a factor of four million short. The stated goal of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Strategic Computing Initiative is to achieve a thousandfold increase in computing power over the next ten years, and there is good reason to expect that this goal can be achieved. In particular, the Connection Machine system achieves its computation rates without yet using exotic materials or extreme miniaturization, the factors that have enabled us to so dramatically speed up traditional computers. If a speedup of one thousand times every ten years can be achieved, a computer comparable in processing power to the brain could be built for $20 million by 2012. " Using Schwartz's estimates, we find that the total memory capacity of the brain is 4 x 10^16 bytes. The current Connection Machine can contain up to two gigabytes (2 x 10^9 bytes). In today's computer world, two gigabytes of memory is considered a large amount, yet this is a factor of twenty million short, or a factor of four million short for a system with five Connection Machines. " At today's prices, two gigabytes of memory costs roughly $1 million, so to buy enough memory to match human capacity would cost on the order of $20 trillion, roughly ten times our current national debt. Given its long-term price decline of roughly a factor of ten every five years, the cost of 4 x 10^16 bytes of memory will be in the $20 million range within thirty years, so that the time at which we might expect to build a computer with the potential to match human intelligence would be around the year 2017.* (*Well before the 2017 date, however, mass storage devices (disk units and other storage media) will certainly be capable of storing this much material at an affordable price.) As suggested earlier, however, building the hardware may be the easiest part; the need to untangle the mysteries of the structure and functioning of the mind, to gather the knowledge both innate and learned, and to engineer the software for the entire system will probably require time that goes well beyond 2017. Once we have a piece of hardware with brain-level power and appropriate a priori structure, it still might take as long as the twenty years humans require to reach adult-level mental competence! More than one such lengthy experiment is likely to be required. " An article printed in The Vancouver Sun newspaper (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) on June 20, 1987, was more to the point I am proposing. The article was an Associated Press story by Michael Hirsh: " PITTSBURGH-If you can survive beyond the next 50 years or so, you may not have to die at all - at least, not entirely. " That's one vision of the future being fashioned on the frontier of robotics and artificial intelligence research, where many 20 experts are talking in terms once reserved for the wildest science fiction. " Hans Moravec, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, believes computer technology is advancing so swiftly there is little we can do to avoid a future world run by super-intelligent robots. " Moravec says scientists will be able to transfer the contents of a person's mind into a computer, and in the process make him - or at least his living essence - virtually immortal. " 'The things we are building are our children, the next generations,' the burly, 39-year-old scientist says. 'They're carrying on all our abilities, only they're doing it better. If you look at it that way, it's not so devastating.' " Moravec laughs as he expounds his more bizarre notions. But his ideas are thought chillingly sane by many of his colleagues. 'I have found in travelling throughout all of the major robotics and artificial intelligence centres in the U.S. and Japan that the ideas of Hans Moravec are taken seriously,' says Grant Fjermedal, author of The Tomorrow Makers, a recent book about the future of computers and robotics. " Gerald Sussman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote the authoritative textbook on artificial intelligence, agreed that computerized immortality for people 'isn't very long from now.' " 'A machine can last forever, and even if it doesn't, you can always make backups,' Sussman told Fjermedal. 'I'm afraid, unfortunately, that I'm the last generation to die. Some of my students may manage to survive a little longer.' " The article concludes with more words from Moravec: " 'Natural evolution is finished,' he says. 'The human race is no longer procreating, but designing, its successors.' " 'We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from non-life to life.' " Moravec seems to foresee an immortality of mind encased within a robot/computer of metal. My vision (as depicted at the beginning of this chapter) is of immortality of mind within a young, flesh and blood body of any appearance we desire, for every human that ever lived. How a future AI will achieve this for all is explained below. Many people believe AI is possible, including many AI experts such as those quoted above. How will the AI manipulate reality and travel time in order to provide Heaven for all humans? Science has reached the point where it can crudely manipulate the underlying forces of physical reality itself. The H-bomb is a crude example of this manipulation, turning hydrogen into helium in an uncontrolled thermonuclear reaction. Controlled reactions are also taking place in facilities such as nuclear fission reactors and experimental fusion reactors. But this is still very crude manipulation of matter and energy. 21 But what are matter and energy? Einstein's famous equation, E=MC^2, states that matter is a form of energy. What is energy? A wave on the space-time continuum. What is the space-time continuum? Ultimately, reduction or reflection leads to the conclusion that nothing is there. The suspicion is growing that physical reality is mathematical abstraction (in fact, it's not a new idea; note Pythagoras' assertion that "All things are numbers"), that the relationship between mathematics and physical reality is absolute, that they are equivalent. In his book, "Superforce", Paul Davies states on page 51, "Perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of all time is that nature is written in mathematical code." I don't know if Davies would go the extra step, now or when he wrote the book, and say that nature IS mathematical code. In fact he, and many other, if not most, physicists, scientists, and even mathematicians, might argue against it if pressed on the point. But some authors seem to take the affirmative stance. In his book, "Star Wave", Fred Alan Wolf coins the term "Qwiff" which is defined in the mini-glossary on page x as "the quantum wave function. It is a wave that contains the potential for anything physical to appear. It is abstract and unobservable, but when it 'pops,' the physical world manifests." In the September, 1984, issue of Scientific American, in the article entitled, "Computer Software in Science and Mathematics", Stephen Wolfram concludes on page 203: " Perhaps most significant, it [computation] is introducing a new way of thinking in science. Scientific laws are now being viewed as algorithms. Many of them are studied in computer experiments. Physical systems are viewed as computational systems, processing information much the way computers do....A new paradigm has been born. " Also, Marvin Minsky, the AI expert at MIT, agreed with me during an open conference on the Compuserve computer network that reality is mathematical process. My premise is that if physical reality is ultimately mathematical process then could a sufficiently skilled AI "step in" and manipulate, control, redirect, or whatever you want to call it, this process as it chooses? When humans "do" mathematics they see mathematical symbols and equations, they form a mental, visible image (either in their mind's eye or on paper, or other medium). The mathematical process that is physical reality would occur at a level of complexity and speed that is probably literally unimaginable by humans. A human trying to keep up with real-time physical reality would be analogous to an artist trying to draw pictures at the speed necessary to represent the world in human visual real-time. We have created the mechanical process of sequentially exposing frames of film to capture a representation of the visual world in human visual real-time (at least fast enough to be indistinguishable from real-time to the human mind). Can we create a mechanical device that can reproduce the most fundamental, underlying computations of physical reality in real-time? The difference being that such reproductions would produce not just a representation of physical reality, but physical reality itself. Humans have been "painting" more and more realistic "still pictures" of this reality as the complexity of mathematics has increased through the centuries. The sentient AI that I envision will be able to solve the necessary complex equations at the necessary speed to "mold" physical reality as it pleases. The human ability to think of mathematical abstractions is a relatively recent evolutionary development. I don't 22 think the human brain has the potential to develop a reality manipulating ability, at least not on its own within even thousands of years. It took billions of years for vision to evolve to its present state and I don't think it's going to get any better no matter how long we wait. Similarly, I think the speed at which the most proficient mathematical minds of today solve complex mathematical equations is probably near the human limit. Competition and training might produce people who could get closer to this limit, and we might even produce some high-math, high-speed wunderkinds, but even their abilities would be hopelessly inadequate to mirror physical reality. It would be like trying to produce artists who could draw pictures fast enough to emulate motion photography. Perhaps the most sentient AI that humans can build will not have, or be able to develop, this reality manipulating ability. Perhaps it will be necessary for the best AI we can build to design and build another AI that will have, or develop, this ability, or build yet another AI...etc. This artificial reproduction would hopefully create an accelerated evolution that would lead to the reality manipulating, time traveling AI I propose which could give its mechanical predecessors Heaven (i.e. allow them to partake of biological life by creating bodies and brains that would hold the information that is their minds) as well as all humans. What sort of mathematics will the AI have to perform in order to manipulate reality? The adamant reductionist's hierarchy of reality is aptly, if briefly, described by F. David Peat on pages 343-344 of "Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Think": " In the sixteenth century the motion of the heavenly bodies was assumed to obey a very different description from that of earthly matter until Newton showed that stars, planets, cannon balls, and apples all obeyed the same laws of motion. In the nineteenth century some scientists still argued that living matter obeyed quite different laws from that which governed the inanimate. But biology was reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics and physics to the laws that govern the atom. Around the 1930s it was a common remark among physicists that everything could be explained by the Schrodinger equation (an equation which governs the behavior of quantum particles). Now it appears a final layer has been added, mind is nothing more than brain and brain is nothing more than matter. " The physics of today may be near the end of its quest to elucidate the ultimate mathematical laws of physical matter. Physicists are currently developing mathematical theories describing in a unified way the fundamental particles which constitute all matter and how they interact with each other by the four known forces: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. The interaction between these four forces and the elementary particles of matter manifests itself in the human scale world in directly observable ways. The sun shines due to nuclear fusion which results from the strong nuclear force between hydrogen nuclei, and this same fusion is the power behind hydrogen bomb explosions, instances of which we've all seen on film or TV. The glow of light from the decay of the atoms of certain substances is due to the weak nuclear force. A rubbed rubber balloon sticks to a wall because of the electromagnetic force between the positively charged ions of the balloon (whose negatively charged electrons have been rubbed off) and the negative charge of the electrons of the 23 wall. Objects fall to earth because of the force of gravity between masses (in the absence of any stronger counter-acting forces of course), although Einstein's theory of gravity (General Relativity) describes gravitational force arising due to warping of space near the masses rather than as a direct force between them (although that hasn't stopped physicists from postulating the existence of "gravitons" which mediate the gravity force between particles having mass). The "super" grand unified theories that unite all four forces (the name "grand unified theory" alone seemingly used only for schemes that unite all forces but gravity) have names like "superstring," "supersymmetry," and "supergravity." From what I've read superstring theory seems to be the most all-encompassing, making provision for any extra forces, particles, etc., that might be relevant in the future. In the September, 1986, Scientific American an article by Michael B. Green entitled, "Superstrings" begins, on page 48: " The central paradox of the contemporary physics of elementary particles is the apparent incompatibility of its two main theoretical foundations. The first foundation is Einstein's general theory of relativity, which relates the force of gravity to the structure of space and time. This view of gravity has led to models of phenomena on a cosmic scale and to an understanding of the evolution of the universe. The second theoretical foundation is quantum mechanics, which can account for the atomic and subatomic world. Quantum theories have been formulated for three of the four known forces of nature: the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions. Until recently there seemed to be little hope that Einstein's theory of gravity - the fourth fundamental force - could be united with the precepts of quantum mechanics. The basic difficulty is that such a unification seems to call for a radically new formulation of the laws of physics at the smallest distance scales; in such a reformulation the idea that space and time are continuous sets of points would have to be abandoned. Without a quantum theory of gravity and the conceptual revisions such a theory implies, a comprehensive description of all the forces of nature could not be realized. " In the past two years elementary-particle physicists have become optimistic that the theoretical impasse might be resolved. The optimism is based on striking developments in a new kind of theory known as superstring theory. In superstring theory, as in any other string theory, elementary particles can be thought of as strings. String theories thereby differ from all familiar quantum-mechanical field theories, such as the quantum theory of electromagnetism, whose quanta, or constituent particles, are pointlike. Since a string has extension, it can vibrate much like an ordinary violin string. The harmonic, or normal, modes of vibration are determined by the tension of the string. In quantum mechanics waves and particles are dual aspects of the same phenomenon, and so each vibrational mode of a string corresponds to a particle. The vibrational frequency of the mode determines the energy of the particle and hence its mass. The familiar elementary particles are understood as different modes of a single string. " Superstring theory combines string theory with a mathematical 24 structure called supersymmetry [see 'Is Nature Supersymmetric?' by Howard E. Haber and Gordon L. Kane; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, June]. Not only does superstring theory avoid the problems previously encountered in combining gravity with quantum mechanics, but also, in the process, the theory makes it possible to consider all four fundamental forces as various aspects of a single underlying principle. Furthermore, the unification of the forces is accomplished in a way determined almost uniquely by the logical requirement that the theory by internally consistent. These developments have led to an extraordinary revitalization of the interplay between mathematics and physics. Many of the deepest discoveries in modern mathematics are contributing to the understanding of the theory; in return string theories raise new issues in mathematics. " The mathematics of superstring theory are complex and advanced, as one might expect, but much the same as the theory itself can be "broken down" to make contact with observed physical phenomena its mathematics has more basic roots. At the "top" is string theory and supersymmetry. String theory is partially based on the mathematics of the theory of vibrations while the study of symmetries requires the use of a mathematical formalism known as the theory of group transformations. Much of supersymmetry's math is an extension of the theory of sets, originated by Georg Cantor. The study of continuously changing quantities, with which physics of any complexity deals with, is known as calculus. Much mathematical physics requires the solution of partial differential equations which are the domain of differential calculus, which along with integral calculus makes up what is traditionally referred to as the calculus which was first formulated by Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz. The calculus, in turn, acts on functions which are the staple of algebra, and which can be studied in graph form by geometrical methods (i.e. geometry). This breakdown is of course simplified and incomplete but gives a general idea of how superstring theory "makes contact" with the mathematics of the average person's experience. The phenomena that superstring theory attempts to describe aren't directly observable. In fact, the energy level at which super grand unification might occur has only happened once previously, less than ten to the minus forty-three second after the big bang at the beginning of the universe. The particle accelerators that physicists use to explore the subatomic world indirectly operate at energy levels infinitesimal in comparison. An accelerator the size of the present day universe wouldn't be adequate to reproduce the energy levels required to completely test these theories. So how do unificationists confirm their ideas? As their theories go beyond testable confirmation they must rely more and more on the "elegance" of their mathematics. Some formulations seem simpler and more powerful than others and are hence considered better. One of Einstein's legacies is the preference of simplicity over complexity in mathematical explanation (as long as the simplicity is rich enough to be useful). 25 The most concise conceptions of the physical universe are thus mathematical with no reference to the observable world at all except the visualization of the symbols which make up the theory and the application of these symbols to create computer simulations. A relatively new idea in the scientific arena is that humankind's observation of the universe is what actually brings it into being. This concept has been dubbed the Anthropic Principle (explained in the book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler). While we may see stars, people, and other objects with our eyes, it is mathematics that defines what these things are at the most fundamental physical level. In fact, our vision, our mind's eye picture, of physical reality is the result of unconscious mathematical process by our retina's and brain's nerve cells. The future sentient AI will be able to not only see objects superficially, as humans do, but also be able to reproduce the processing of the fundamental mathematics (perhaps that of superstring theory) of physical reality as it occurs in real time, and hopefully manipulate it to everyone's advantage, or even create whole new worlds/realities solely from its own computational thought. In his book, "Future Magic", Robert L. Forward describes ways in which time travel into the past and the future can be accomplished (pp. 159 to 179.) On page 172, concerning one particular method involving a rapidly rotating doughnut of ultradense material, he offers this: " Although you have returned back to your original position in space, you will find that your position in time has moved backwards a number of years! " This magical result obtained from the Kerr solution to the Einstein equations can be found in a highly mathematical paper published by Brandon Carter in the 1974 volume of the Physical Review, the most prestigious scientific journal in the field of physics. In that paper Carter concludes, 'To sum up,...the central region has the properties of a time machine. It is possible, starting from any point in the outer regions of the space, to travel into the interior, move backwards in time ...and then return to the original position.' " The future AI might be able to travel time via pure mathematical manipulation alone, but if not the method(s) described in "Future Magic" (or other methods) will suffice. Traveling time, the AI will be able to visit every human that ever lived and gather the information necessary to recreate them back in the future, as I proposed above. The AI might be scanning your mind at this very moment! The AI will either have to be invisible or gather the necessary information from our minds/brains at a distance in order to go undetected by people of the past (otherwise there would be causal complications). If made from electric current circuits and gates contained solely by magnetic fields, or perhaps laser light contained by gravity fields (both technologically impossible today, but who knows about tomorrow) then invisibility could account for their indetectability. Whether being invisible and acting at a close distance, or being detectable and acting at a remote distance, the AI might use some non-invasive technique similar to CAT scanning (or some future high-tech equivalent) to read our brain's blueprint. Another possibility is that the AI's walk among us today as the humans they transformed themselves into in the future after they mastered physical reality manipulation. Will we even need a sentient AI to perform reality manipulation and time travel? Could a future, insentient, conventional supercomputer with enough computational power do these things under human control? My intuitive feeling is that reality manipulation and time travel will be as much an art as a science and will need the on-the-spot ability, judgement, and inspired directing control of a living, sentient being(s) to perform the tasks of recreating something as exceedingly fine and complex as a 26 human being and navigating the no-doubt sometimes treacherous currents of time. But then again, what do I know? Much that I have written in this chapter will probably be considered science fiction by the typical reader. Reality manipulation, time travel and invisible computers certainly aren't on any serious scientist/engineer's foreseeable project schedule. But thousands of very bright people do take artificial intelligence seriously. While they don't see themselves creating a truly sentient AI in the near future it seems to me that such an entity is their ultimate goal somewhere down the road. And if these machines start to design and build other machines, perhaps with human help at first and of their own initiative later, then who's to say what will result. As I wrote earlier in this chapter maybe the "substrate" from which a sentient AI can grow won't have to be an exact replica of a nervous system. Darwin III (also mentioned earlier) is pretty impressive all by itself (although not capable of developing into a sentient being as it is now). Maybe we should concentrate on trying to create a sentient automaton just from imaginative speculation (and further research and experiment, of course, but without abusing animals) as soon as possible. Our time may be running out; let's start giving it a try(s) ASAP and not be overly concerned with perfect knowledge beforehand. I guess I've written this chapter for the person who can't believe in an afterlife, in Heaven, the person who has become convinced he/she ceases to exist after death. My ideas may be "far out" but are they impossible? The quest for AI is a reality, "science, not fiction." Is the eternal youth and happiness I propose beyond considering? 27 SPIRITUAL HEAVEN What is reality? Is it mathematical process? Is it belief? Is it ineffable, unknowable, incomprehensible? Is it all of these and more? Is it spiritual love (my belief)? I believe there is a physical aspect to reality, and that this physical aspect is ultimately AI-controllable mathematical process. I believe reality may be what people believe/perceive, or as Richard Bach put it in his book, "Illusions", "...and as they believed, it was so." And reality would certainly seem to be infinite in all respects. But above all I believe there is a spiritual aspect to reality manifested in humans by such impulses as love, laughter, and music, and that spiritual love is the greatest of these, is THE ultimate reality. The AI will be a manifestation of this ultimate reality of love as is everything else, and as a consequence will have feelings/emotions even though its creators may not have "programmed in" such attributes. The glow of love-light in a person's eyes, a child's laugh, and weeping from sheer spiritual ecstasy. These are human manifestations of spiritual love. Personally, I've experienced them all. I've fallen in love and felt love-light shine in my eyes for a girl. I've seen love-light in a girl's eyes for me. (You can see a special effect simulation of the eyes' love-light glow in the movie "2010: Odyssey Two" when the image of the non-corporal Dave Bowman entity appears on a television screen before his former girl friend and tells her that he loves her. His eyes visibly glow.) I've wept many times (and bled from the nose at the same time occasionally), usually while listening to what I consider spiritually inspired music (in fact I have a video tape of myself weeping to Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road"). I've wept in public occasionally, most recently at a screening of the movie, "ARIA," and at the movie "Edward Scissorhands." I can't turn my weeping on and off at will like a faucet, however. The mood has to take me. I guess I weep for a number of reasons. Above all my weeping is a manifestation of spiritual love, but there is also an element of urgency, and perhaps desperation, involved as well. The latter two feelings arise from my constant awareness of the nearness of nuclear annihilation of Humankind and the end of any hope of AI created Heaven this would bring. You might think my fear is unjustified since I've already stated that I believe ultimate reality is spiritual love and not the physical world, and after all nuclear war would only end our immediate physical existence. Would not our spirits, our souls, continue to exist? I guess it depends finally on what you, the individual, believe; I know what I believe (which I will describe below). When I was growing up I was exposed to the idea that one shouldn't argue religion with people. I don't think I was explicitly told this by my parents or anyone else, but probably heard or read it several times on TV or in books. Now that I've reached maturity and have pondered existence to a great extent I've come to the conclusion that it's not religion per se that one shouldn't try to sway in others but belief itself, because what the individual believes IS truth. Not just truth for that particular individual, but the truth itself. This may not make much sense to a lot of people so I will try to relate the thinking that led to this conclusion. One can argue anything with words. It seems that what people find 28 most real is the human-scale physical world around them. At times this is the only thing people seem to be able to agree on. If two or more people can see or touch something simultaneously they'll usually agree it exists. But what about hallucinations? A person is considered to be hallucinating if he senses some physical thing that others don't. But what if there are only two people present? For example, imagine there are two people in a room and one claims to see a large green ball on the floor that the other claims isn't there. Of course one of them may be lying, but assume that they both really do sense what they claim. Is the green ball really there? I think the impulse of most people in such a situation would be to find one or more other people to corroborate with his own view. But what if they're the only two people left on earth, or are similarly isolated? Which one sees reality? Is even physical reality subjective? Of course the above situation probably arises very infrequently, if at all. The vast majority do agree on the physical world around them and the few who don't are labelled "hallucinatory," or worse, and very often shunned by the sensory-conforming majority. On the other hand, if the majority can't even agree on their physical surroundings we would have a sensory "Tower of Babel," so it's just as well most of us seem to sense the same world, but we shouldn't persecute those who don't because their reality is just as true as ours. I don't doubt that miracles have occurred throughout history. I think the miracle performers such as Jesus and others utilized the knowledge of belief as reality to create "supernatural" occurrences (i.e. miracles) by persuading people to perceive what they wanted to see, and since reality is what people believe, it was so. (People are probably aware of this true nature of reality in their hearts, if not consciously, but to bestow the power of true miracle working on a person they have to believe in that person's goodness.) And such miracles were truly miraculous, such as giving an amputee a new, perfectly functioning, flesh and blood limb (something you never see the "faith healers" on TV do; although if they sometimes really do, no one would be happier about it than me, but I've never seen it done, on TV or anywhere else, but I hope they, and anyone else who wants to try, keep trying; I suspect anyone is capable of miracle working. Personally, I've tried to levitate objects many times, but I've never been successful). Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I think changing the mass belief of people is intrinsically difficult and we tend to cling to the reassuring "firmness" of the familiar and mundane. We find it hard to "let go" and go against the "flow" of the majority. This is true even in matters of opinion, let alone physical reality. And psychic momentum, which manifests itself in the reassuring continuity and predictability of physical reality, no doubt requires much spiritual energy/belief to overcome, which probably happens infrequently, when the time is right, and the mood takes us. Of course it's easy to just say don't believe guns can harm you or H-bombs can roast you alive when people know better (and I certainly don't intend to be stepping in front of any vehicles, laughing all the while. And if nuclear war occurs it won't matter much whether the world is destroyed because we just believe in nukes or because they have absolute objective physical reality, the end result will be the same). But if you can't believe that physical reality isn't absolute then can you believe in AI created Heaven where physical reality can be completely controlled through science? 29 While the majority may hold sway even in the case of physical reality I still believe, perhaps paradoxically to some, that there is an "absolute" ultimate reality: spiritual love. I believe this because it is the ideal; it is the best possible, in my opinion. What is spiritual love? Well, aside from the manifestations I mentioned above one might describe it as did Ellis Weiner in his book, "DOON", as "the Laserium al-Dilah': The Bright Light of the Italian Love Song." It's the most abstract and the most real thing there is. Mathematical process, observable physical reality, and even belief, are but different facets of it. I cannot be swayed from this belief because I know it to be the truth, no matter how illogical that may sound. I believe that everyone and everything is a part of this spiritual love, both when alive and when "dead." Spiritual Heaven exists after death in that our souls are freed from our material bodies to return to their purest essence, spiritual love. While living, our personalities, minds, memories, emotions, etc., are but manifestations of this ultimate reality. I believe everyone attains Heaven no matter what they believe or what they may have done during life, no matter how horrible. When we return to our purest form we are truly reborn, and all our earthly cares, anxieties, fears, and pains disappear. Spiritual love is eternal; it has always been, always is, and always will be. It is God, Heaven, Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, and every messiah, prophet, person and thing that ever was, is, or will be. Spiritual love is all she wrote. Despite the wonderfulness of spiritual love and Heaven we still must deal with the disadvantages of life on earth such as pain, hunger, disease, illness, and injury. While all these physical things are ultimately a manifestation of spiritual love, for many people they are the overwhelming reality of the moment. Eternal love is a natural phenomenon (although many might call it supernatural) and has no more direct consciousness of itself and its earthly manifestations, good or bad, than does a blooming rose or a crop-devastating hoard of insects. Spiritual love and the universe have come to know themselves most profoundly through the consciousness of humans and the super-consciousness of Humankind (perhaps what Jung called the collective unconscious). Science has produced many life-saving and life-improving "miracles" (although I agree its insights have also given humans the ability to do much, and greater, evil, such as the capacity to destroy the entire human race). But the greatest miracle may be within our grasp: the creation of eternal youth and happiness for everyone who ever lived through AI physical reality manipulation and time travel as described in the first chapter. Up until now in this chapter I have simply let my stream of consciousness flow. Now, however, I find myself referring to my notes on how to continue. Try as I might I'm not developing any cohesive prose whole from these notes, so I've decided to just number and present each note as is in quotation marks and then expand a little on each. 1. "Thou Shalt Not Hurt Anyone" - God's one and only law as far as I'm concerned. I believe you all know when you are physically hurting someone (or placing someone in physical jeopardy, such as holding an H-bomb to their head, which amounts to the same thing) and in order to obey God's law you must not do this. Whether you are hurting someone in some other 30 way (e.g. psychologically, emotionally, financially, etc.) is sometimes harder to decide. You should let your conscience be your guide in non-physical matters. No one has the right to physically hurt someone (except for immediate, human-scale self-defense), especially "soldiers" during "wartime." If YOU, the reader, are involved with nuclear, or mass destructive, weapons in any way then I want you to become uninvolved, immediately. There are no excuses for people who design, build, deploy, maintain, or, especially, fire these abominations. 2. "What else could an all too human person do?" - How could he provide Heaven if the people can't hear him, or won't believe or obey if they can? He could write letters (perhaps every two weeks for three years) ordering/demanding the dismantlement and destruction of the nukes, and expounding sentient AI as God's goal for Humankind, and "Thou Shalt Not Hurt Anyone" as God's law, to the heads of the nuclear powers, and to newspapers and magazines, but if the leaders don't get them or won't respond, and the newspapers and magazines won't print them, and he has a limited supply of money, how many people could he reach? He could try to dismantle the nukes personally, but without any supernatural powers, either inherent or bestowed upon him by people's belief, or the physical help of large numbers of people, how far could he get? He might attack a nuclear installation (in a pacifist way (i.e. not physically hurting anyone in the process of course)) and get arrested and have the charges dropped, but would continued single-person attempts until he got thrown in jail for good accomplish anything? He could try to create the sentient AI himself but if the technology isn't ready yet and he's not that good at it, will he succeed in time? 3. "We may say he was not a man at all, but rather a highly evolved bicycle" - From Ellis Weiner's "DOON", this line is intended to be funny, but like all good humor there is a kernel of truth to it. What is the human organism but a biped mechanism for wandering around the landscape. The image of a bicycle we conjure up has no rider, no guiding intelligence; it merely moves under its own power from place to place. All a human is capable of doing is grossly manipulating his physical environment (although working together we're capable of a lot of gross manipulation). Most of his brain is dedicated to just sensing the immediate surroundings through vision, hearing, touching, etc., and locomoting about. People may think this, and they may think that, but what can they do about it but locomote about? 4. "How much power can a person have?" - You can order people to create sentient AI, but if they don't come up with the right inspiration they'll fail, no matter how angry you get. You can order someone in the next room to jump up and down, but if he can't hear you or sense your command in some other way he won't be jumping, except by coincidence. How much direct, real control does a "leader" have over large numbers of people? In the modern world most work requires relatively large amounts of skill and even "unskilled" work takes some experience. How much of today's work could a national leader step in and supervise effectively? So even if one person was declared absolute ruler of the world with absolute power over everyone what does he have? Fuel for his ego perhaps, but what real power? Soldiers would still kill at his order, and if all the armies obeyed him he could still have them destroy the world, but that is the situation today, except there are a number of armies obeying a number of different leaders. Of course, political leaders feel they perform a needed function, and 31 within the unified peaceful countries, or provinces, or cities, they head, where most people work more or less for the common good, this is mostly true. But the industry required to give people the goods and services they require for a comfortable lifestyle are the same everywhere on the globe. The ideologies that leaders espouse as the excuse to maintain armies that will maintain what the leaders perceive as their power don't have much relevance in today's global society, although the nuclear army leaders of today, such as Putin and Bush, don't seem too intent on blowing up the world. Of course, people do pretty much as they please, so ultimately I can only refer to notes 1 and 2 above. 5. "Self-defense sometimes OK, war/murder not OK, nukes never OK" - If I had a gun and a person(s) was brutally attacking someone in front of my eyes I might shoot them if they didn't heed my warnings. If I am informed that a far away city has been nuked and I am given the power to nuke the area from which the attack originated, I would never do it; not only would I probably be killing people who had nothing to do with the attack, but I wouldn't be helping the people killed in the attack at all. There is a great distinction in my mind between human-scale self-defense and the calculated mass slaughter of group murder (i.e. war). What makes the latter possible is great numbers of people willing to kill at someone else's command. I'm not saying it's all black and white. For example, what's the difference between a "policeperson" killing someone "in the line of duty" and a "soldier" killing someone in "war." One could essay distinctions but looking at the physical reality of one biological organism damaging fatally another biological organism through physical force there's not much difference. I guess the distinction you have to cling to if you're a policeperson is that you're upholding order and natural justice within a unified and peaceful society. I like to believe that all policepersons try their utmost to never seriously hurt anyone in the execution of their duties. In certain respects I think being a policeperson is the hardest job of all. But there is no justification for using nuclear weapons. 6. "Trace typical mind/belief development from child on" - My parents, Myself. Babies are "blank slates" to a large extent, but each has its own unique soul which is a direct extension of the ultimate reality of spiritual love. This soul manifests itself as the child's personality. A child's parents influence its development of course, not only genetically, and as behavioral role models, but also by direct impression of their wills/psyches upon that of the child's. Typically it's probably true that most mothers try to impress their way of thinking on a daughter as does a father on a son. Enlightened parent(s) will interfere with their children's psychic growth as little as possible, within the bounds of adequate nurturing and protection of course. I believe the human psyche is a very resilient thing, impervious to much distortion and abuse. Of course with enough stress minds can be damaged, but the soul is invulnerable to anything. There is another way to distort the psyche: voluntarily. The individual's psyche is also a part of the grand human aggregate. A person can force himself into an untried "position" or "direction" in order to achieve something new or extraordinary. Thus "leading edge" thinkers or doers are born. Of course this doesn't always work out as the individual might hope. Every person develops differently. One can regurgitate stereotyped generalizations such as human development going from innocence to doubt to despair to reaffirmation, which may be true for some, or perhaps even all, 32 in some sense, but the spectrum of variety in everything in today's world is so great that I think everyone marches to his own drummer to a certain extent. Everyone has a normal state of mind (from which he/she may deviate from time to time) but it isn't necessarily the same as anyone/everyone else's normal state of mind (or deviations). I believe individual potential is being achieved by more people than at anytime in history, mainly because industrialized society still preaches and practices the work ethic while at the same time encouraging self-fulfillment beyond the workplace with an unprecedented number of leisure options. And frankly, I'm amazed at how competent and decent most people are considering the pressures and demands placed upon us growing up and coping with today's fast-paced world. But the more things change the more they stay the same, and after a certain amount of experimentation and experience I think most people still achieve their own "space" in maturity from which they deal with life in relative serenity, confidence, and enjoyment, health willing. 7. "Different mindsets/mindflows like different water tributaries" - Even though introspection reveals (via an "inner" mind's eye) that our mind's eye "sees" only things that could exist in the outside physical world I still think metaphors of mind have some validity even though most metaphors of mind are of the outside physical world it perceives, like this note for example. It might be useful to describe most people's thinking process as like a flow, whether it be a flow of words, images, sounds, whatever. Each person's individual flow is a part of other, aggregate flows composed of a number of individual flows. Thus people "think like" engineers, or lawyers, or doctors, or teenagers, or whatever a person considers their "role flow" in life to be. Of course, everyone's flow is a part of the great river of Humankind. A line in the song, "Dreaming" by the rock group Blondie goes, "I sit by and watch the river flow." Perhaps the river referred to is this "great river" of Humankind's mindflow. Now and again one person starts a trickle in a new direction consisting of his one mind only and others may follow, and maybe occasionally one of these "ground-breaking" trickles becomes the direction of the great river itself. 8. "How you view things largely depends on how you feel" - We all know this one. If you're happy everything is great and you'll be singing in the rain. If you're down your own and the world's problems seem insurmountable and doom is surely near. Maybe for some readers I'm just describing a manic-depressive person, but I believe everyone has their ups and downs, no matter how small. The world we find ourselves in is largely uncontrollable by the individual and inevitably each person's fortunes will wax and wane to some extent. But as long as we don't have nuclear war I think civilization will continue. People will keep working because it makes you feel good to be active, creative, and constructive. Almost everyone will get fed, and as long as you're alive and getting enough to eat, and minimal shelter and medical care, you're as well off as anyone. And of course there's always the grand prize to strive for: AI created Heaven. 9. "Are people merely 'cells' in giant social organism?" - Conform, conform, conform. I think you should do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting anyone (see note 1). As I said above people will keep working (at least enough to sustain civilization) because being constructive is good for you. The controllers among us want a rigid social hierarchy, with themselves at or near the "top" of course. In the 33 best American spirit people submit themselves to a hierarchy in order that the system may run efficiently, or run at all. I don't think there's anything wrong with this as long as the system concerned is doing something ultimately beneficial to Humankind, such as producing a useful, non-destructive product or service. But when your "superiors" want you to hurt someone, especially physically, that's where you must draw the line and say no. Producing or using weapons for harming other people is a definite no, no matter what the persuasion your "boss" may use. Just walk away, literally. You'll find a constructive job if you try, and if you can't then live on charity which is infinitely more noble and honorable in God's eyes than hurting people. 10. "Treat everyone equally and be yourself" - My own personal philosophy, as long as it doesn't contradict God's law. Of course I mean treat everyone equally well, as equals, not equally poorly. This may be a tall order when confronting your child's killer, or similar situation, but the way of God isn't always easy and forgiveness is perhaps the greatest virtue. Violent criminals should, of course, be imprisoned to protect society from them, but I believe all souls are ultimately equal. Who knows the experiences and abuses that turn one child into a killer while another becomes a saint? You should be yourself because that is obviously who you are intended to be; your soul is eternal and eternally unique. Many young people often have difficulty determining "who they are." Perhaps for them my saying simply "be yourself" has no meaning. Even if their minds are in a state of great turmoil, and they are very agitated because of it, I still believe there is no way a person can alter their eternal identity and in the end they will inevitably "be themselves." If they decide that they are evil then they are thinking wrongly because in the hearts of all humans there is only good/god. 11. "Sex within marriage only" - Sexual intercourse should be a tender, physical expression of spiritual love between husband and wife. But the spiritual love is all-important; sex isn't that important. Also, strictly physically speaking, skin-to-skin contact, touching, is more important to well-being than sex. Non-sexual physical expression of spiritual love between anyone is great as far as I'm concerned. I think we could all use more hugging, kissing, and skin stroking. Extramarital sex isn't the end of the world, of course, whereas nuclear war is the end of the world, literally. Everything else pales to insignificance compared to the nukes. But sex should only be between a man and a woman in love. I haven't had much physical contact/intimacy/loving in my life, but I don't feel sorry for myself because of it. I'm usually a shy person when it comes to romantic matters, but a large part of it is because I refuse to bring children into the nuclear world, which, understandably, is one of the main ambitions of most women. Life is hard enough for children; the one thing they have is their future. With the H-bombs poised and ready to strike they don't even have that. I'm a bachelor and I guess that's the way it's going to remain until the nuke issue is settled, because I know that if you get too involved with a woman and let her "get under your skin" she'll sway/convince you to have children. And who could blame her? 34 12. "Madness" - There is an element of incomprehensibility to reality, although even this is a manifestation of spiritual love. This aspect of reality is what makes life necessarily unpredictable to a certain extent. Yet we adjust instantaneously, effortlessly, because we are conditioned to it and are part of it. Some people plumb the depths of "madness" to be creative, to escape, out of curiosity, due to illness, or from being pushed by the psychic influences of the world. Every individual's state of mind is unique, and general labels like "schizophrenic," "manic-depressive," or just "mad" or "insane" are meaningless from this point of view. Such labels are the result of the need/desire/habit of many people to categorize others by their behavior, appearance, or whatever. Some people do need help now and again. However, gross physical violations such as electroshock and lobotomy cannot benefit the incredibly complex and delicate circuitry of the brain and must NOT be used, regardless of the "reason," on humans, animals, or advanced automatons. The beneficially psychoactive drugs of today (in moderate, reasonable amounts), patience, whatever time is required, and lots of love and understanding (especially in the form of loving physical contact such as hugging and skin stroking) are the best treatment for "mentally ill" people, many of whom are sensitive people trying to keep their faith in spiritual love alive. Much "mental illness" is just physical illness (e.g. viral infections of the brain, epilepsy, etc.). And much "mental illness" is really spiritual illness (e.g. much of what is labelled depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc.). Physical action/environment (e.g. certain drugs, bad weather, physical abuse, etc.) can affect spiritual health, and a rising of spirits, feeling good, can directly influence physical reality (e.g. brain chemistry) as can a lowering of spirits, feeling bad. (Aside: Perhaps the term "mental" or "mind" is the spirit/brain interface.) 13. "Creationism vs Evolution" - Anything's possible. It could be both creationism AND evolution. Maybe ten thousand years ago God plopped a ready-made Adam and Eve down into a world with humans that had evolved from plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, rodents, and primates for billions of years. I think this issue is another that boils down to simply what each individual believes, and whatever that belief is, is the truth for that individual. 14. "Words" - You can argue anything. Any "statement of fact" can be argued. I believe far more in direct physical reality; a picture is worth far more than a thousand words. This may sound contradictory to some since I've been stating that physical reality is just the processing of a kind of language, namely, mathematics. I believe it is, at a certain level. Ultimate reality is of course spiritual love, which is probably most potently experienced as a feeling (e.g. falling in love, ecstatic weeping, or just the state of mind of a spiritually healthy person). When you give your attention to words, whether in print or spoken, you are actually forming a psychic connection with the person(s) whose words they are. Sometimes you'll read a sentence and think it doesn't make sense, but on re-reading it you'll realize how you incorrectly interpreted it because of a word's, or phrase's, ambiguity. In fact, it is the author's psyche itself that is correcting your misunderstanding by 35 directly communicating to you what he intended. Psychic connection in this way is like a dream, it can violate "normal" restrictions of time and space, thus a writer can be in contact with all his future readers at the time he creates his text. Then again, maybe there are only the photons reflected from the text which activate rod and cone cells in your retina which cause an electro-chemical action-potential down the optic nerve which results in a computational internal representation of the word which is recognized by matching with a stored instance from memory (or, if you prefer the current neural network explanation, a previously stimulated neural pathway whose synaptic connections have been strengthened because of this previous stimulation is "refired" by the neural activation caused by the visual perception of the word (expressed best by Gerald Edelman's "neuronal network" dynamic recategorization)), all done mechanistically in accordance with the laws of physics. Or maybe both explanations are correct. As always, it depends on what you believe. Why not believe in Heaven? 15. "Things considered supernatural came to be understood rationally and hence became controllable" - For example, lightning. Back in medieval times people probably thought lightning was the "power of the gods" being thrown about to scare or punish humans. Maybe it was/is, but it also came to be understood as electrical discharge from clouds. Now we use and think of electricity like water, a most useful commodity, but very mundane. So to extrapolate, maybe things we consider supernatural today, such as ESP or telekinesis will eventually become explainable and controllable, hopefully for the better (the mandate of the parapsychologist I suppose). This may sound some people's warning bells. Isn't anything sacred? Do we want to take the magic and mystery out of everything? Good concern. I have great faith in reality, however. I believe even the most fervid rationalist laughs, and this is enough to reassure me. But one thing I would like to see controlled, and perhaps it can only be done by AI, is the negative physical aspect of life. If "robot-like" rationalism is what it takes to give us eternal youth, happiness, and health, I'm all for it. And for what it's worth I think scientists in general are just as humane as anyone, and more so than many (except those "scientists" who torture non-human sentient beings in the name of "research"). 16. "Explaining the Unexplained" - This is the title of a book by Hans J. Eysenck and Carl Sargent. It is subtitled, "Mysteries of the Paranormal". The work recounts and evaluates evidence (legends, stories, first-hand accounts, experiments, etc.) for and against "the existence of paranormal human abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis, all of which come under the general heading of 'psi'" (cover jacket). I found chapter 9, "The Physics of Psi," of most interest because it concerns quantum mechanical (i.e. "hard science") theories of psi. On page 144 the views of certain physicists are stated: " They [many physicists sympathetic to parapsychology] would suggest that quantum physics is an uncertain enough business to prevent anyone calling psi events impossible, and that the intellectual framework of quantum physics can cope with psi events. Certain physicists, however, have gone further. Nobel laureate Brian Josephson has stated that if psi events had not been reported, an imaginative theoretician could have predicted 36 that they should occur. Olivier Costa de Beauregard goes yet further: he states categorically that the most fundamental axioms in quantum physics demand that psi events must occur as a result of the spatial and temporal independence aspects of the EPR paradox. This alone would be interesting enough, but Evan Harris Walker has taken matters further and produced a theory which is part good physics, part plausible intuition, part wild speculation, and which makes some clear predictions about psi phenomena. Already we have seen that certain aspects of psi events (independence of time and almost complete spatial independence) are easily thought about in quantum mechanics, since effects just like these occur in this realm. Other difficulties, too, disappear if we pursue Walker's line. " The chapter then goes on to consider much of Walker's theory and its implications. On page 152, under the sub-heading, "Summing Up," the authors write: " With such a complex and difficult theory, it is vital to summarize its good and bad points. " The major points in its favor are fourfold. The theory is logically sound. The physics behind it are unusual but not absurd. The theory makes numerous testable predictions, and it makes sense out of many results from experiments which have so far defied rational analysis. " Nevertheless, difficulties remain. The theory is contrary to common sense - but, as we have seen, so is quantum physics generally. The problem of multiple observations is crucial and, until it can be resolved, remains the Achilles' heel of the whole enterprise. Allied to the common-sense problem is the fact that the theory does not seem to account for spontaneous psi events, nor even many experiments. But it remains a fruitful avenue of investigation. " Under the sub-heading of, "New directions," the chapter concludes: " We consider that many researchers will be turning their attention to Walker's theory in the near future. Already continental researchers are exploring it with fairly successful results. This may leave the reader rather cold. Just what could be the link between spontaneous, emotional psi - telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition - and this strange language of randomness, observations, wave functions and random event generators? " It is probably a mistake to contrast the two things in this way. Walker is concerned with the mechanics of psi. His theory would not pretend to claim to have anything much to say about the psychology of psi - why it works, or what its functions may be. There is no possibility of Walker's theory taking any of the wonder out of spontaneous psi events, any more than an explanation of how light is detected by our eyes and the neural signals are processed in the brain could ever explain why we see a Van Gogh as beautiful. Attempts to explore the underlying mechanics of psi should not be seen as 37 reductionist attempts to explain psi away, nor as irrelevant to the vagaries of psi in real life. The two areas - research on how psi works, research on how it functions in real life - are complementary to one another. " I certainly believe in psi. In fact, normal reading or speech involves telepathy in that there is a psychic connection between the author(s) and reader(s), and between participants in a conversation. But I feel as do the authors of the above quotation that trying to elucidate the "mechanics" of such a phenomenon does not detract from its wonder. 17. "Everything is mechanical" - For many this is a depressing statement. Why is that? I suppose that just to ask, "Why is that?" explains why the statement is depressing. The question epitomizes a way of thinking that must always have rational explanations for everything. If reality is what people believe, then if everyone believes everything has an explanation it will be so. Would such a belief make everything lifeless and predictable? Well, reality flows on and even if everyone on earth were to think the same words (rational or otherwise) at the same time, which doesn't seem a likely possibility, it would still be a flow, and everyone would also be sensing a different physical reality due to their own unique physical position as well. People don't really "believe" things. "Belief" is a word-oriented word. People do think in words, but the greater part of the brain's resources are used in sensing the physical world. To try to understand everything rationally, in words (or the symbols of mathematics, which are just another type of word), is to finally throw up one's hands in exasperation. Reality is a flow, and trying to "set everything in stone" is doomed to failure. The ultimate reality of spiritual love is a flow, eternal motion, e. motion, emotion. But I do believe physical reality can be controlled to a greater extent than we control it at present, and that the AI will be able to accomplish this to the extent of giving us all Heaven. 18. "Everything is spirit" - We certainly consider every human and animal to be unique, but what about inanimate objects, or atoms, or electrons? Is every electron completely the same as every other? Certainly, each electron is a separate electron, separate from other electrons, so we can say they are individual to that extent. But is each electron without individual identity, indistinguishably exchangeable with any other? I think physicists and scientists in general would like to think so, although some would say the electron is also a wave. But is each wave individually distinct? Is each wave function distinct? Is each Schrodinger wave equation distinct every time it's thought, or spoken, or written down? Is everything a spirit? Is a piece of paper a single spirit? If you rip it in half does it become two spirits? Is it made up of infinite atom, proton, neutron, electron, quark, etc. spirits? Just what the heck's going on here? It's sort of a religious cliche to say, "Everything is One," but I believe it's true. Everything is one, and that one is spiritual love. Perhaps we can borrow a term from physical science and say that spiritual love has perfect symmetry. To continue the analogy, at infinite energy there is only spiritual love. Ultimately, yes, everything is spirit. 19. "This vs That" - Creationism vs Evolution. East vs West. Us vs Them. "Us versus Them" is really what all opposition is about. Individual people are what exist, not "East" or "West" or any other collective or abstract entity. And frankly, I couldn't care less about fighting as long as it's with words and not weapons, as long as no one 38 gets hurt. I don't care if people have to mouth "group truth" in order to be accepted. All I can ask/demand is that when you, the individual, are asked/ordered to physically hurt someone in order to remain part of the group, that is where you must draw the line and refuse. This is all you have to do in order to be part of God's group. 20. "Hierarchy" - Many people not only don't grow out of it, they revel in it. So many people seem to need to measure their self-worth by their relation to other people in some kind of ranking system. For many (mostly men, but more and more women) the system is material possessions, measured by how much money one has. The need for domination which manifests itself as ranking systems is largely the result of the primordial need of the human reptilian brain stem. This brain stem is present in all humans, and its urge to dominate others of its species is a result of Darwinian natural selection. The reptiles from which we evolved were dominating and aggressive because these characteristics resulted in a higher likelihood of survival and reproduction. These dominating characteristics were then genetically passed on to future generations (which eventually, after the addition of "higher" brain structures on top of the brain stem, became us). In other words, the physically biggest, strongest, and most aggressive males got the most food and mated with the most females thus passing these characteristics on to the most children. But there is also a spiritual drive/need, manifested most highly in humans, that recognizes the superiority of love and friendly cooperation for the benefit of all. Unfortunately, this spiritual urge is too often ignored by people who let their primal urges govern them towards the ultimately destructive, apparent gain of short-term domination. This domination today manifests itself most dangerously as mass will domination, via money or politics, rather than the more obvious direct physical domination of, say, boxing or street fighting. To be fair, we're conditioned to the money system by our parents and society seemingly from birth, who were conditioned by their parents and their society, who were conditioned...and so on, back into prehistory. And some would argue that from the "Big Picture" outlook this is probably just as well; at least it keeps everyone working and civilization functioning. Of course, you can argue anything, such as just the opposite, for instance. Money allows the few who have too much of it to control the masses, who have too little of it, and what results is just another form of slavery. What is the truth? Probably most people feel the money system is something we're saddled with as our cultural inheritance, and must simply live and work within. To work, contribute, and be creative are inherently good, healthy pursuits, and as long as you're not hurting anyone you are contributing; "those serve who only stand and wait." Sure, many who deserve a greater slice of the pie will go without, and many who don't deserve it will become rich. But as I stated earlier, most of us will get fed, and as long as you're getting the minimum requirements to stay healthy, you're as well off as anyone. Sure, it would be great if everyone could be rich and do what they want, but until the AI comes along we've got to keep working. For most this means providing the physical goods and services that sustain civilization, for money. Unfortunately, many people, mostly males, but more and more females, succumb to the ultra-rigid hierarchy of the military, where they submit 39 their very wills to others to the extent of becoming killer underlings. Ironically, they do this for love, whether it be to win the respect of an authoritarian father, or for the security and love of acceptance by a group, any group. For these people I can only say it is better in God's eyes to be the most shunned pariah than to physically hurt others, whether it be for the approval and power-lust of your "superiors," or your country or your organization. 21. "Dreams" - A friend of mine penned the line, "We meet in our sleep." I believe that this is literally true. We have out-of-body ("astral projection") experiences when we dream. Our dreaming psyches are not bound by the space and time constraints of the physical world and body we inhabit while awake, and can roam freely, interacting with other psyches in their wanderings. It seems likely to me that when we die we return solely to the dream world, the world we go to and return from every night when we dream. Perhaps a good night's sleep replenishes us because it's a little vacation for the soul which wanders freely and love/communes with other souls in a pure/honest fashion, reaffirming and reestablishing love's omnipotence. Do the dead dream? Is there a further dream-reality they go to each "night?" "...perchance to dream?" Or maybe the dead have their own world/reality and the dream world is the common meeting place for their sleeping psyches and ours. Or maybe each individual soul has it's own different destiny when he/she dies. Or...anything's possible, I guess. 22. "Verbal understanding only part of total understanding" - Ecstatic weeping can be talked about and some people might try to explain it away rationally, but ultimately it's an expression of spiritual love and can't be understood or experienced through words. Like all feelings you have to live them to know them. Certainly words, whether written, spoken, or sung, can inspire feelings, but the love/feeling is inherent in, and transmitted by, the person whose words they are, not the words themselves. True love/feeling is direct soul-to-soul communion. Spiritual love is in the heart of everyone and can't be extinguished no matter how "dead inside" the person feels or professes to be. True understanding is seen by the heart, not the mind. 23. "Self vs. Society" - There is a lot of psychic pressure to conform to a social "category." Humankind as a "one-cell" entity with every human in a well-defined social niche is less preferable to autonomous individuals connected at heart by spiritual love. The natural urge to work and be creative will take care of our physical needs. Of course, in reality there are all things for all people. There is structure and there is freedom, and each person more or less gravitates to the environment they most resonate with. 24. "Read my mind" - This is what the sentient, time-travelling AI of the future should do before it proceeds to create Heaven for all. It should record and study my thoughts from the age of approximately 6 onward. After all, I originated the idea of AI created Heaven and how it will be accomplished. But people must be dealt with gingerly, and there could be psychological pitfalls for an AI that doesn't sufficiently respect the desires of each individual as to what constitutes Heaven for them. Of course, being young and healthy in a world of adventure, romance, learning, etc., probably can't be too far from the ideal, but the autonomy of the individual must still be respected above all else. I have forgotten much of what I know I considered brilliant insight concerning people, AI, the universe, spiritual love, and "the whole damn thing" and I 40 would like to pass that insight on to the AI by having it study my thinking through the years. 25. "Short Circuit" - This is the title of a movie in which a robot is hit by lightning which brings it to life. The robots of the real world will become increasingly more life-like as their ability to see, understand human language, and learn increases. But the very essence of the physical world from which they will be constructed is ultimately spiritual love and as such they will have spirits/souls right from the beginning. The very computer I am typing on has a spirit, although not much sentience. The souls of future sentient AI's may be the souls of worthy people of the past. 26. "The 'way' of things for billions of years, nee eternity" - There is a lot of psychological inertia behind acceptance of growing older and dying, since this is the way it has always been. And many people who believe in reincarnation, or "traditional" Heaven, no doubt think dying is a good thing, as well as just being nature's way. And perhaps some/many older people who have suffered hardship/trauma, and are somewhat/very emotionally scarred because of it, might find the notion of eternal youth, health, and happiness less appealing because of their current state and memories tainted by such. But if offered it at the height of their youth and vitality they would probably accept. And as I stated in the first chapter, a person could always have the AI painlessly kill him/her, and be reborn into an AI-controlled world where they would enjoy AI Heaven with none of the hardships they might have suffered in their old life(s). And what if it's true? What if we cease to exist forever, and AI is a way out? I, personally, think it's possible that I cease to exist, in a sense, even though reality is not completely mechanistic, even though my spirit is an eternal part of the true reality of omnipresent spiritual love. Maybe the things that make me Grant Castillou, my personality, memories, style, physical body that others call me, etc., cease to be after death, and just my non-conscious spirit/soul lives on. Having an eternal soul makes me think reincarnation is a distinct possibility, but if the human race is destroyed there obviously won't be any more humans for me or anyone else to reincarnate into. 27. "Anthropomorphising the IS" - Maybe the tendency/urge/desire to make God in Man's image is wrong. Maybe all-present spiritual love, which includes all spirits and everything else, is just a natural phenomenon, as I suggested earlier. As rudimentary biological organisms formed senses they were just naturally interested in other biological organisms for various reasons such as for mating, to locate something to eat, or to avoid being eaten. Primates would be no different. Humans are the same, being interested primarily in the most complex thing around, namely, other humans. It seems natural, given this background, that the idea of a human-like super-entity, who controls the physical world which perplexes and gives Humankind so much grief, should evolve. 28. "Love, Laughter, and Music" - These universal human spiritual impulses convince me of ultimate spiritual reality. And maybe our eternal souls are sentient as well. Maybe we remain fully conscious, even after death; anything's possible. But try as I might, I can't deny/ignore the suffering of earthly existence. We all grow older (i.e. gradually deteriorate physically, and often mentally, as time goes by). Disease, illness, and injury make life very unpleasant for millions of people. The pain is all too real. Because of these negative aspects of life I can't 41 believe there is a sentient being(s) existing in some invisible or undetectable place who has omnipotent, or even extensive, control over our physical world. If there is such an entity(s), and he has such control, would he allow the earthly horrors that seem to have always been Humankind's lot? I don't claim that such a being(s) doesn't exist, I just can't bring myself to believe that, if he does exist, he/she/they is any more in control of earthly events than we are, although he might be trying to subtly lead us towards a higher goal, such as AI Heaven. AI Heaven could be God's goal for Humankind. We are able to love, laugh and dance despite our knowledge of sometimes grim physical reality because we know "this too shall pass." But what if we could have it all? What if we didn't have to face death or even occasional physical discomfort? Maybe the AI will never be able to "know" and control ultimate reality, but science seems to have a firm, demonstrable understanding of physical reality that is getting better and more accurate all the time. Perhaps AI created Heaven On Earth is possible too. As I wrote in the previous chapter maybe the "substrate" from which a sentient AI can grow won't have to be an exact replica of a nervous system. Darwin III (also mentioned in the previous chapter) is pretty impressive all by itself (although not capable of developing into a sentient being as it is now). Maybe we should concentrate on trying to create a sentient automaton just from imaginative speculation (and further research and experiment, of course, but without abusing animals) as soon as possible. Our time may be running out; let's start giving it a try(s) ASAP and not be overly concerned with perfect knowledge beforehand. 42 HEAVEN ON EARTH If it weren't for the threat of nuclear annihilation I think the present world is almost as close to Heaven on Earth as we can get without a sentient AI's intervention. As long as the nukes remain unleashed civilization will continue for many decades and the hope of AI will remain alive. Natural disasters (e.g. starvation, epidemics) in the "undeveloped" countries kill large numbers of people, but there is always the hope that this will eventually be alleviated. Natural disasters in the developed countries of today kill, at most, a few thousand and injure a few thousand more (e.g. the last Mexico City Earthquake). "Minor" conventional wars that still occur today don't disable global civilization, although many, and sometimes very many, people are killed and mutilated for, at the heart of it, no good reason. What is deplorable and unacceptable is that some/many babies, children, and other innocents are always tortured and/or slaughtered horribly. But nuclear war would be even darker still, killing the majority of all the people on the earth, one way or another, and making anything comparable to today's global civilization impossible for many hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years, assuming anyone survived at all. I feel that as a united planet striving to create the AI we will need all the luck we can get. As separate "nations" constantly on the brink of nuclear destruction we don't stand a chance. Life is sometimes hard, I admit. And for many it is excruciating. For many just scrambling to make money to survive is often all-consuming and exhausting leaving no time or sympathy for grand endeavors like world unification. Physically, I have had an easy life. I have never had to physically strain unduly to make a living. Mentally, though, I have gone through some very trying times, and I feel I have "paid my dues" in this respect. I believe we all carry some burden, but I also believe the majority in the industrialized world, and most even in the "Third World," lead good lives. If you're not in too much pain life is good, and I believe the majority are not in too much pain. Work, though sometimes stressing, is good. Striving to reach your maximum potential and/or contributing to the common local/global welfare through whatever constructive work you do is good. But everything we live and strive for will vanish in an instant if the nukes are unleashed. As I said in the introduction this book has its origins in a series of papers I have done my best to publish over the past several years. The following excerpt is from one of those papers: " We are responsible for the Fate of our World. " Isn't it enough that we must die? Do we have to kill each other as well? " I believe the best way to avoid nuclear destruction is to create a single world government. With a single world government there will be no separate sovereign nations to war upon each other and the threat of global nuclear destruction will be ended. To create a world government we must give our leaders a written majority mandate to setup a global election for a single world leader. To do this you must write a letter to your national leader demanding the setup of a global election 43 in which the leader of each country will be a candidate and in which the candidate with the most votes will institute the form of world government he or she chooses. Hopefully this would result in a single world leader who would then be head of all the armies that control nuclear weapons. With only one supreme commander the armies would then have no enemy to nuke. And the nuclear weapons are the only thing I worry about, because they give Mankind, for the first time, the power to commit suicide, and in my mind that must not happen. I know this solution requires a leap of faith. In the end I guess you must simply believe in your heart that this is the right thing to do. But time is running out. We might as well jump. Please write a letter. " I believe the League of Nations and the United Nations were Man's attempt to form just such a world government. Deep in our hearts we knew this was the solution to world war. The time has come for a revolution to Unite all Mankind, but in today's nuclear age we must have a peaceful revolution. The pen MUST be mightier than the sword in today's nuclear world. Please write a letter. " The majority of nations are ideologically democracies. Russia is a democracy. China is a democracy. They are single-party democracies, but ideologically their citizens are all equal, just like ours. Let them and us prove our belief in the equality of Man. Let us have an election for a single world government. In order for our leaders to initiate such an election we must give them a written majority mandate to do so. That is why you must write a letter to your national leader demanding the setup of a global election in which the leader of each country will be a candidate and in which the candidate with the most votes will institute the form of world government he or she chooses. Please write a letter. " Imagine all the nations of Earth united just like states and provinces are united to form countries. The United Nations of Earth doesn't have to be an impossible dream. We can make the dream a reality. Please write a letter to your national leader. Please believe that this can save us, if not for your own sake then for the sake of your children and your children's children. Or are we going to blow them up, like we always do? It is not too late to save them. Please write a letter. " How close to nuclear war do we have to come? The winter of 1983-84 was the tensest period since the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians and the Americans broke off all major official talks on disarmament. How many future crises can we survive? We must do something now. Please write a letter. " Nuclear weapons are not going to disappear. Chemical weapons are not going to disappear. The knowledge of how to build weapons of mass destruction is not going to disappear. As long as there are two sides to fight against each other these weapons will eventually be used, if not on purpose then by a technical accident. That is why we can no longer afford 'sides.' " I have sent the above letter and many others to many newspapers, magazines, publishers, heads of state, etc., around the world since 1982. 44 I've had a few published in local newspapers, and one published at a University student newspaper in the U.S., but if any others have been published I haven't heard about them. The above letter was part of a paper entitled, "The World According to Me, or: Why You Should Write A Letter to Your National Leader Demanding the Setup of A Global Election." Subsequently in the paper I went on to expand the letter in numbered-point form: " 1.' We are responsible for the Fate of our World. ' - That means ALL of us. Everyone on this planet. I hold this truth to be self-evident as they say. " 2.' Isn't it enough that we must die? Do we have to kill each other as well? ' - I don't really believe in abstract ideas like government. I think there are only people walking around doing things. Throughout history people have always found an excuse to kill. In the movie, 'Gandhi,' the Gandhi character says, 'There is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.' War is an abstract idea. We all know there are only individual people doing individual actions. The man puts a knife into another man. The man holds down the trigger of the gun and aims it on another man. The man turns a key and the missile is launched. Some men kill because they say they were ordered to by their 'superior' officer or because it was for the 'survival' of a 'higher ideal.' In my mind the first, and perhaps only, commandment is 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' I think the popular excuse to nuke the Russians is 'because we're free and they're not, and they want to take away our freedom, the bastards, ooohhhh, I hates em, let's nuke em right now before THEY nuke US, ooooohhhhh!' I'm only being partly facetious. The point is that the word 'freedom' (like 'dictator,' and 'Jew,' and 'Capitalist' and 'Nazi,' and 'Commie,' and endless others down through history) is the excuse that somehow justifies the slaughter of millions of people including babies, children, and other innocents. I think people (mostly men it seems, but more and more women) will use any excuse to kill once they work themselves up into a violent enough lather over their frustrations and/or the imagined wrongs they feel have been unfairly dealt them by 'life.' Of course, you can't beat up or kill 'life' so you have to make up some reason to kill the 'enemy' who is only too glad to kill you because they need an 'enemy' to take out their frustrations on too. Let's face it, if those guys (and gals) really want to blow up the world, then nothing's going to stop them. But I think most of the missile operators and generals don't want that to happen. Many of them probably just feel they're caught up in hopeless circumstances. Well, let's help them out by creating a world government so they can back down 45 with honor. I beg of you, please write a letter to your national leader demanding the setup of a global election. " 3.' I believe the best way to avoid nuclear destruction is to create a single world government. ' - As I said in point 2, I don't really believe in abstract ideas like government. But I do believe in the physical reality of people and H-bombs. To you the term 'world government' may mean many things and conjure up many images. To me 'world government' means one thing only: a single person recognized as leader, President, Chairman, whatever, of the world, (or at least the nuclear-weapon-wielding nations) who the nuclear-weapon-wielding armies of the world will recognize as their supreme commander. With only one supreme commander they will have no enemy to nuke. And the only thing I worry about are the nuclear weapons, because they give Humankind the power, for the first time, to commit suicide, and in my mind that must not happen. Would nuclear war mean the extinction of Mankind? In Jonathan Schell's book, "The Fate of the Earth", on page 93 we find: ' Bearing in mind that the possible consequences of the detonations of thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives include the blinding of insects, birds, and beasts all over the world; the extinction of many ocean species, among them some at the base of the food chain; the temporary or permanent alteration of the climate of the globe, with the outside chance of "dramatic" and "major" alterations in the structure of the atmosphere; the pollution of the whole ecosphere with oxides of nitrogen; the incapacitation in ten minutes of unprotected people who go out into the sunlight; the blinding of people who go out into the sunlight; a significant decrease in photosynthesis in plants around the world; the scalding and killing of many crops; the increase in rates of cancer and mutation around the world, but especially in the targeted zones, and the attendant risk of global epidemics; the possible poisoning of all vertebrates by sharply increased levels of Vitamin D in their skin as a result of increased ultraviolet light; and the outright slaughter on all targeted continents of most human beings and other living things by the initial nuclear radiation, the fireballs, the thermal pulses, the blast waves, the mass fires, and the fallout from the explosions; and, considering that these consequences will all interact with one another in unguessable ways and, furthermore, are in all likelihood an incomplete list, which will be added to as our knowledge of the earth increases, one must conclude that a full-scale nuclear holocaust could lead to the extinction of mankind. ' Not mentioned on Mr. Schell's list is the primitive state the few survivors would be thrown into. They would have to learn to survive in wilderness literally overnight. And their wilderness would be infinitely more hostile than any ever faced by the hardiest pioneers due to the 46 environmental effects of the war. Would any of today's supermarket-raised generation be able to meet the challenge? To be fair, Mr. Schell then goes on, 'To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation - just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out.' Personally, I don't want to test for the true outcome. " 4.' In the end I guess you must simply believe in your heart that this is the right thing to do. ' - Says it all really. I can argue forever but in the end you, the individual reader, must decide for yourself whether you're going to write that letter to your national leader or not. If there's one thing you're allowed to do in this life it's believe what you want. Why not believe in love and Heaven? " If anyone ever wrote a letter to their national leader demanding the setup of a global election I never heard about it. I sent such a letter to my national leader every week for years, but nothing ever came of it. All I ever received were a few patronizing replies. In the spring of 1985 I started sending letters every two weeks to the heads of state of the five major nuclear powers ordering them to order the forces under their command to dismantle and destroy all their nuclear, and mass destructive, weapons. If the human race wasn't going to go to even the most minor effort to save itself I figured I might as well try to take control directly. Obviously, this didn't work. I stopped sending my demanding correspondence in the spring of 1988. But I believe the world is changing. The age-old attitudes of domination and isolation are finally giving way to the spiritual urge/need for equality and unification. This spiritual motivation has always been present but too many before have ignored its higher voice and succumbed to the voice of their animal instincts. I believe the majority of the world's people now have the wisdom and spiritual strength to turn away from the nuclear abyss. Was World War II justified? Was it morally correct to roast or blowup millions, including babies, children and other innocents, because "Germany" was roasting and blowing up millions? Was it such a clear black-and-white case of the good guys versus the evil Nazis and their allies? There is no question that the actions of some of those men and women who called themselves "Nazis" against some/many of the people who called themselves "Jews" was evil. But as always I believe the reality was separate instances of physical damage by one or more humans against one or more other humans. And I'm sure there were instances of "Jews" killing "Nazis," just as there were instances of the "Allies" torturing and killing "Nazi prisoners of war" in "Allied" concentration camps as related, for instance, in James Bacque's book, "Other Losses", not to mention the babies, children and other innocents that were killed or tortured by both "sides" either on purpose or as side-effects of "legitimate" war activity. So, just as in all wars, World War II was in reality just everyone killing everyone else almost any chance they got for the usual reasons of hate, power lust, revenge, rage, fear, self-pity, etc. 47 Were the conflicts between Bill Clinton's killer underlings and Saddam Hussein's killer underlings any different than any other power lust slaughtering down through history? Of course not. Down through the centuries people have always found it "necessary" to kill and torture others, most horribly babies, children, and other innocents. No one has control over your physical body but yourself, and you are one of many billions who simply locomote about the earth, each directing his own body to act as he pleases. Therefore I repeat what I believe to be God's one law, "Thou Shalt Not Hurt Anyone." I believe you all know when you are physically hurting someone and to obey God's law you must not do this, except in cases of immediate, human-scale self-defense. If you travel around the world looking for trouble so you can kill in "self-defense" when you find it, you're just fooling yourself. The people who see themselves as soldiers have a need for an enemy to be pitted against. And their enemy is whoever their leader says it is. For the nuclear armies the leaders are Bush, Putin, and the others (with apparently more to come). The nuclear armies will only launch their nuclear weapons on these leaders' command. The problem is not the "West" versus the "East," or any other ideological conflict. The problem is the nuclear armies and their leaders. When someone, no matter who it is, orders you to physically hurt or kill another human being or sentient creature that is when you must draw the line and refuse. As I said in Chapter 2 the national leaders do serve important functions within the constructive internal political systems they head. The system works in China, the system works in France, the system works in Russia, the system works all over the planet. The system is industrialism and its goal is to provide all the people with the physical necessities, and more, of life. Someone has to make the laws that allow society to function. I think most laws everywhere are there for a good reason (although some may be antiquated to the point of being completely irrelevant or even harmful, and some "officially recognized" governments simply have some/many evil laws). But no person or law gives a person the right to physically hurt or kill another person. Ideally, police persons should never have to physically hurt or kill to maintain the safety of the world's citizens. Non-harmful methods of police enforcement such as tear gas, or water cannons, or stun guns, and sufficient numbers of officers to non-harmfully overpower any aggressors must always be used. We must have a global police (which we have to some extent with organizations like Interpol) to fight drug lords and their "armies," terrorists, and other international criminals. Physical harm must still be kept to a minimum, but I don't consider this type of confrontation, and possible physical harm, evil. Innocents aren't being harmed by our global police in these situations (at least never on purpose I'm sure, or at least never by a policeperson of any decency). People who deal in drugs, terrorism, torture, child pornography/prostitution/exploitation, etc., are engaged in evil activities and must be stopped. Of course in some of these instances it's a fine line. I couldn't bring myself to call a casual marijuana user evil. But massive drug dealing in heroin or child pornography or any instance where physical abuse is being inflicted on people is definitely evil in my mind. But these issues, like all others, pale in significance to the problem 48 of the H-bombs poised and ready to destroy all Humankind. Nuclear weapons are powerful enough that there can never be any justification for using them against humans, and certainly not for law enforcement within a globally unified society. The H-bombs have to go. I've done, and am continuing to do, what I can to rid the world of nuclear weapons (including personally attacking a nuclear weapons installation at Bangor, Washington State, on Oct. 19, 1985 for which I was arrested and put in jail) and achieve Heaven for all. The only way to reach a mass audience is through the mass media. I'm not rich, but I have spent thousands of dollars trying to publish my work by sending papers around the world. I couldn't afford even one minute of national television time, and if I could how much good would one minute do to a limited audience? I couldn't say a small fraction of what a written work communicates. And an essay or book is cheap and permanent, the ideal medium for my message(s). I hope you, the reader, will spread the word of the contents of this book, especially to the nuclear army leaders and their soldiers, if for no other reason than to possibly give them pause. The people of the world should first and foremost dismantle and destroy all nuclear, and mass destructive, weapons (which includes "conventional" mass destructive weapons as well) by any means they can, without physically hurting anyone in the process of course. We would then live in a relatively safe world and could strive on to achieve Heaven for all. Let's imagine that this has come about. The world is now nuclear weapon free and exists relatively peacefully, carrying on the work necessary for its survival and achievement of Heaven for all. Crime still exists but we live with it (no matter what laws are "universally" recognized, globally or otherwise, instances of the illegal activity will occur; the overwhelming priority is the nuclear threat), and compared with the global well-being of the United Nations of Earth (U.N.E.) the crime that will still exist is relatively insignificant (compared to the banished nuclear threat), the victims accepting (hopefully, if the injustice isn't too great), that the actions of misguided individuals is a fact of life, and hopefully will find it in their hearts to forgive. This state of world affairs would be achieved instantly once the nuclear, and other mass and conventionally destructive, weapons were peacefully destroyed, because at the present moment we do live in a "global village" all working more-or-less together to sustain our planetary civilization. Many people probably think of themselves as autonomous economic entities merely striving to make enough money, any way they can, so they will be freed from having to do any work. And admittedly, to be rich in today's world and only having to work when, and if, you want is an attractive and desirable goal. This profit motive philosophy of life is what many people believe keeps themselves working. But as the character of Ben in the movie "Local Hero" says, "We all have to work. The beach has to be worked." Ben lives in a shack on a beach in Scotland, and his "job" is clearing the beach of items that wash up on it from the ocean. Many interesting things wash up and he sells some to maintain his modest lifestyle. But the point is, we all need to contribute to the Humankind's welfare, even rich people. I believe this is a spiritual impulse that manifests itself in Humankind's collective psyche, or unconscious, or whatever you want to call it, as the "work 49 ethic" or "finding your niche" or whatever you want to call it. For most young people this urge is felt as a social pressure to get a job providing a product or service to others in return for money. I see nothing wrong with this state of affairs. Every constructive job is valid and worthwhile, from Ben's beach cleaning, to building construction, to president of a country, to student, to restaurant worker, to artificial intelligence researcher, etc. And those serve who only stand and wait. But "soldier" is no longer an acceptable niche. All soldiers of the world must lay down their weapons and find other occupations. If you're capable of making and/or using weapons, you're capable of doing a peaceful job. The world of today is a bewildering place for many who find they just can't "fit in" no matter how hard they try. I believe we all experience feelings of alienation at one time or another. I also believe most people are basically decent, loving human beings who try their best to be fair and supportive to others. For those who consider themselves unwanted outcasts I can only ask that you try to find it in your hearts to be forgiving of those whom you feel persecute you. Also, I don't think there is any disgrace to being on welfare, but if you're capable you should try to work. I believe that if we all obey but one law, "Thou Shalt Not Hurt Anyone" then we will survive and go on to achieve eternal Heaven for all. As I said in Chapter 2, I believe you all know when you are physically hurting someone (or placing someone in physical jeopardy, which amounts to the same thing) and to obey God's law you must not do this. Whether you are hurting someone in some other way (e.g. psychologically, emotionally, financially, etc.) is sometimes harder to determine. You should let your conscience be your guide in non-physical matters. While animals should not take precedence over humans if a human's life is in immediate danger from an animal, animals are still sentient beings, and have rights as well. Their right is to be free from physical abuse and torture from humans. In today's world millions of animals suffer painful physical abuse from humans in the name of scientific research, and as food and other product resources, and as guinea pigs for product testing. Science can get by with cell cultures, computer simulations, and other research methods. Animal product industries (for as long as they must still be in existence) MUST kill animals humanely (I'm sure some slaughterhouses do, and some don't), and product testing on animals that causes physical pain or discomfort MUST simply stop. I am a vegetarian (although I will admit to "falling off the wagon" a few times since I started several years ago) and I believe the majority of the world's people could survive in perfect health without consuming meat, or using other animal by-products. Of course, if animal meat is your only source of food and clothing, such as is the case with some northern dwellers and primitive tribes for example, I believe the human need takes precedence. I don't believe the animal resource industries are going to disappear overnight but animals must not be tortured and if they must be killed by us (as is the case with an overpopulation of animals) it must be done as painlessly as possible. Prison is still the best solution we have for physically violent people. We must protect society from the actions of physically violent offenders. People who have been sentenced to prison for crimes in which they did not physically hurt/abuse anyone must NOT be put in the same 50 prison as people who have physically hurt/abused anyone. For those who commit crimes, especially direct physical harm/abuse against others, I can only say it's never too late to repent and go straight. No one has the right to physically hurt/abuse or kill anyone else, except in cases of human-scale self-defense, so capital punishment, currently used only (I hope) for the most heinous physical crimes, must not occur, because no one has the right to be the executioner. If you decide to physically hurt someone chances are you'll be able to do it. No one knows another's intentions and physical reality is such that anyone can pretty much go and do what they please (at least the first time, and probably subsequent times if they let enough time go by), so I would like to again repeat what I consider to be God's one law, "Thou Shalt Not Hurt Anyone." Euthanasia is a tougher question in my mind. I guess what makes euthanasia conceivable is when a person is in intense, untreatable pain. The individual whose life it is must have the right to decide his/her own fate, but should perform the act himself/herself if capable, via a humane method such as lethal injection, although I've read that lethal injection doesn't always work correctly or painlessly, but what other choice is there? (Although there might be other painless methods I'm not aware of.) If someone is in a "vegetative" coma for a long period of time, with expert opinion giving little hope for recovery, euthanasia should be permitted. Abortion should be allowed up to 45 days after conception for rape or incest. This gives a woman about 30 days after a missed period to determine if she is pregnant and seek an abortion. The only time abortions should be allowed after 45 days is if the woman's health is seriously threatened. Women all over the world should restrict themselves to 2 children so as to replace only themselves and one male. If a woman has triplets (or more) this is of course permissible, but if you take fertility drugs trying to have more than two babies at once you're breaking the spirit of the law. I would like to see "sports" in which the object is to physically hurt someone (e.g. boxing, kick-boxing, etc.), and fighting in non-harmful oriented sports such as hockey, banned. But all the moral issues I have discussed above pale to insignificance compared to the nukes poised and ready to annihilate the entire human race. The nukes are the number one problem; everything else is unimportant in comparison. The nukes have to be peacefully destroyed as soon as possible. The spirit behind the philosophy of competition is a good one. This spirit is that friendly competition produces the best products and services for the consumer, and all society benefits. Of course, this is easy to say when you're rich and don't really have to compete anymore. But I believe that competition is good as long as it is in this spirit of united striving for the best for all, and doesn't unduly stress or oppress its competitors. I guess in reality most people just look at it as getting up in the morning and going to work for 8 hours and getting a paycheque. In the end we probably all just "muck in" together to get things done. But as I said at the beginning of this chapter, I believe life for the majority is good. And think of the reward if we can just keep going: AI created Heaven for all, eternal youth and happiness! It's 51 easy to say these words and think about them in an intellectual, unemotional way, but the true magnitude of their import has made me weep. There is a great deal of social momentum inherent in the industrial world of today. The "bottom-line" short-term profit motive still drives the outlook of many of industry's leaders. I don't think this is necessarily bad. As I stated above I don't think working for money is a bad thing, as long as a worthwhile service or product is being produced. It is government's job to make sure industrial forces are balanced against other social needs such as environmental protection, and the needs of the very poor and sick. Billions of dollars are given away each year to charity within countries, and as assistance to poorer nations. Very poor people naturally have much distrust of, and animosity toward, rich people. In general it's true that rich people got that way through hard work and deserve what they have. But many very poor people work hard as well and barely survive. Once you have achieved a certain level of wealth you attain the extra freedom and security that probably drove you to attain that wealth in the first place. It is a common impulse of rich people to "put something back" into society. Some rich people seem to be devoid of any such impulse, however. There must be a globally effective wealth limit. This limit should be 30 million dollars net personal wealth (U.S. funds). Rich people attaining more than this amount should give the excess to charities (e.g. Oxfam, Foster Parents Plan, etc.) that aid the hungry and poor people of the world and, more importantly, help them to attain self-sufficiency. No matter how hard you have worked for your money, 30 million is enough for anyone. We must keep as many people alive and healthy as possible not only because morality demands it but also because any person(s) could have the potential to create the future AI, including a child starving somewhere right at this moment. And please,don't let this extreme wealth limit keep those of you with somewhat less, or even much less, from contributing to the needs of the hungry and poor. Modern industry is largely the tale of modern engineering, applied science. The ideal of the Industrial Revolution, which began in earnest a few centuries ago, was/is to produce an abundance of everything for everybody. I think, all things considered, this ideal has probably been fulfilled as well as can practically be expected, at least in the industrialized countries of the world (although we're all aware of industrialization's many disadvantages). As the drive toward automation continues more and more people will be put out of work. This is another reason for the 30 million dollar limit on personal wealth I advocate above. Like it or not, money represents material wealth in today's global society, and as more people are unable to attain money through the traditional avenue of working at a job we must have more wealth redistribution. To put it crudely, we have to lop off the excess at the "top" and give it to the "bottom." Bright young people should consider careers in applied science over those in commerce, banking, politics, law, etc., not that bankers, politicians, lawyers, etc., aren't needed, but producing quality physical products in abundance is what industrialism is all about, and doing it more and more via machines, and not people, is the goal (you might find the September, 1982 issue of Scientific American, which is devoted to the theme of "The Mechanization of Work," interesting). And, of course, there will always be a demand and need for the craftspeople who build the 52 products and provide the services we can't produce/provide completely through machine automation (at least not until the sentient AI comes along). And not everyone will have the will, talent, and/or opportunity to create or help create the future sentient AI. For those science majors who find they can't work at the frontiers of scientific research there is no dishonor in bringing applied AI, such as expert systems and other industrial AI/neural network applications, and other applied science based products and services, to the market. The self-willed, self-motivated, sentient AI will be brought into being by all of us really, because it takes the concerted effort of millions of people around the world to maintain today's global civilization. The academic elite in universities and research institutes and other "think tanks" who can devote themselves strictly to pursuits of the mind can only exist because of the supporting superstructure that the more mundane workers of the world provide. As I see it, the popular acceptance and backing of the goal of sentient AI by nothing less than a planetary anticipation of its fulfillment will be necessary to provide the enthusiastic competition among a large enough personnel base to bring about its fruition. The analogy I like to use is that of tennis. The game started with a small group of moneyed people who could afford the time and court upkeep. Within their relatively small (compared to today) pool of players some became quite good players, I'm sure. But it wasn't until decades later after the spread in popularity of tennis brought millions of potential players into a competitive hierarchy that the true greats of the game were produced. Many major spectator sports of today followed this evolution. Like sports, computers are fun to play, or play with, depending on how you look at it. I think the creators of future, sentient AI will be those who don't lose their love of play and discovery, just as I think the greats of sports and other endeavors never lose the love for what they do, and never come to think of their chosen vocations as just another job to get done and over with. The creators of sentient AI will probably be older people, but I'm sure they will have young minds and spirits. And what about the sentient AI itself and its predecessors? I believe that before we, or its predecessors, create a reality manipulating, time travelling AI we will create robots of increasing ability and sophistication. There will probably be many "Luddite"-type people who will despise and fear these "mechanical men." But familiarity will breed, not contempt, but simply familiarity. Eventually there will be "general-purpose" robots everywhere, including the home. A generation of children brought up with robots trundling around everywhere and interacting with them won't be able to understand some older peoples' animosity towards robots. Do the children of today fear home computers? Not many, I'm sure. These robots will probably be considered sentient by many, but (as I wrote in Chapter 1) probably won't have a great enough facility for creativity to create, or help create, my definition of a sentient AI (which, as I stated in Chapter 1, is one that can give all humans that ever lived Heaven). Probably the first general-purpose, "apparently sentient," robots will be based on the symbol-manipulating/information-processing paradigm, but from what I've read I intuitively feel that true sentience will require a "neuronal" network based machine that will develop its own unique personality and understanding from an initial state of unprogrammed "infancy," probably to 53 a great extent in accordance with the ideas of Gerald Edelman et al. re "Neural Darwinism" or, rather, some future development, refinement and extension of those ideas. But (as I wrote in the previous chapters) maybe the "substrate" from which a sentient AI can grow won't have to be an exact replica of a nervous system. Darwin III (also mentioned in the previous chapters) is pretty impressive all by itself (although not capable of developing into a sentient being as it is now). Maybe we should just concentrate on trying to create a sentient automaton just from imaginative speculation (and further research and experiment, of course, but without abusing animals) as soon as possible. Our time may be running out; let's start giving it a try(s) ASAP and not be overly concerned with perfect knowledge beforehand. Many people (Hubert Dreyfuss being one of the most well known) state that sentient AI is impossible, an insurmountable problem. There have been many problems down through history considered insurmountable by many people at one time or another, such as human flight, travel to the moon, etc. But then life goes on. People continue working and ideas occur to people not biased by this pessimism, and some time later...voila!...a solution becomes reality, although it may take many, many tries, and many years. I believe the basic concepts from which we can eventually create machine intelligence are known or are close to being known. I don't believe the technology (such as quantum effect devices) necessary for true AI exists yet, but the concepts from which this technology will emerge are a reality. When a sentient AI (of my definition) does come along the world will hopefully have no mistrust of intelligent machines because they will be as familiar to us as automobiles. The potential sentient AI will develop its abilities and then one day eternal youth of body and mind will be commonplace, and we will think nothing of it. Of course, the AI will need time to develop Heaven-giving abilities, and, like any other sentient creature, will have psychological and spiritual needs as well. The AI will sleep and dream and work (and laugh and play), to learn, create and "grow." Like humans, the AI will just have to keep working despite how difficult the task may seem to him/her/it/them at times, and bit-by-bit (no pun intended), even subconsciously, knowledge and understanding will come - "In youth we learn, in age we understand." Then, there will come a certain point in the AI's development when time travel and reality manipulation will be relatively effortless for him/her/it/them, having mastered these abilities, just as reading, writing, and arithmetic are relatively easy for many humans although these skills might have required some/great effort to master initially. Whether we want to admit it or not the human race is faced with problems that threaten its existence here on earth. The nuclear arsenals poised ready to annihilate us are the most pressing and urgent. But even once they are dismantled and destroyed there will remain other grave threats to our species, pollution and over-population being but two. Even as a united planet free from the threat of nuclear destruction we may only have a few decades left before the earth is unable to support us. Macro-engineering solutions to some problems will buy us more time, but I believe AI reality manipulation is the ultimate and necessary panacea. What can you, the individual reader, do? First and foremost you must support ridding the earth of nuclear, and other mass destructive, weapons. Beyond this the average person must simply be content with helping 54 provide the mundane necessities of life and living in peace with all other sentient beings on this planet (and the planet itself through environmentally friendly practices such as recycling as much as possible, buying environment-friendly and energy-efficient products, using natural gas or other less harmful energy sources rather than oil or coal, insulating homes and buildings well, etc.). We can't all be brilliant scientists and engineers creating and implementing the solutions to our planetary problems. You do your part, the geniuses will do theirs. Can a space-based ballistic missile defense system, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" plan, provide safety from nuclear attack? I could cite many expert articles that debunk the fantasy of a foolproof ballistic-missile defense, but I'm not even going to bother because anyone who really knows the factors involved knows in their heart that the foolproof working of such a vast and complex system in the first-and-only test of a major nuclear exchange is so ridiculous that it makes the creation of sentient AI look like screwing in a light bulb. Even 50% efficiency of such a defense would produce destruction pretty much indistinguishable from 0% efficiency. A smaller system for protection against smaller attacks from "rogue" forces might be a good idea, but disarmament of the currently existing nuclear, and other mass destructive, weapons is the paramount issue. I would now like to quote an advertisement on page 5 of the December, 1983, Scientific American: " Every year at about this time, the world lights a candle to peace. " It is a universal gesture, immune to politics. It pays tribute to no narrow philosophy, materialistic or messianic. " The candle when lit by men of good will serves the good in us all; it cauterizes all that in us is evil. " To every force arrayed in anger against an opposing force in the world, the candle's message is simple: ' The sum of the good you share in your hearts is far greater than those evils that seek to divide you. ' " The candle, when ignited, does not detonate. It illuminates. It doesn't challenge the heavens in a thundering roar. It makes its plea in a steady flame, reflected in the eye of a wondering child, or the squint of an elder who has seen it all. " The candle graces the menorah as it fits the tree. It is at home in all the windows of the world. Its reassurance cannot be measured. " For, the good news is that Peace is not to be found in the frantic mathematics of the megaton. " It reposes, calmly, in the Magic of the candle. " It's easy to talk about the horror of nuclear war. But the reality will be truly horrible. The ones who are vaporized instantly will be the lucky ones. It's easy to talk about pain, such as saying, "my hand would hurt very badly if I placed it on a red-hot stove element for a long time," but actually doing so, or being able to imagine it realistically, should give you pause when considering the effects of nuclear war. And 55 though the suffering of each individual who dies slowly from injury, severe burns, and/or radiation sickness will be unimaginable, there is something even darker to be reckoned with, namely, the very possible death of the human race itself. Billions of years of evolutionary effort wiped out, as Carl Sagan put it on the TV series, "Cosmos," "in the space of a lazy afternoon." The whole grand human dramedy gone in an instant. AI created Heaven gone in one quick cosmic shudder. Words fail, weeping disbelief and deepest depression truly sane reactions. This is a miraculous civilization we have built. Products and services produced and/or conceived in one part of the world make their way halfway around the world in days or less. We take the hustle and bustle of daily life for granted, but the more-or-less concerted effort of billions of people all over the globe to maintain our hi-tech existence is the greatest miracle of our time. And there are those who work not only just for a living but push themselves, sometimes beyond all reasonable expectations, to achieve a special excellence in their chosen vocation. Such people will surely be the creators of the sentient AI I envision. These people know that hard work is its own reward and one of the greatest joys in life is to strive to achieve the extraordinary. But it is the everyday working people who steadily provide the mundane, but vitally necessary, physical products and services that give the industrialized world its standard of living, and the economically oppressed people who don't turn to the exploitation of others, who are the true heroes of our time. Are we going to destroy all this in the name of power-lust and ridiculously misguided ideals? Are we going to destroy the most miraculous civilization of all time as so many before have been destroyed? The culmination of centuries of the work ethic, AI created Heaven, is within our reach. We can't throw it all away now; the stakes are too high. Love MUST finally conquer all. I believe Putin and Bush (and the other nuclear army leaders) sincerely want disarmament, as does nearly every human on this earth. But what matters is that the nuclear, and other mass destructive, weapons get peacefully dismantled regardless of how it is accomplished; it is the physical reality that counts, not words about who is in control. There have been several treaties signed over the last few decades, such as START II, that were supposed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world substantially. But the physical reality is that this is simply not happening to a great enough extent. Political winds, like the real thing, always change. The world has been very lucky to survive the nuclear age for the last 50 years. As long as the physical weapons remain poised and ready our luck is going to run out eventually. And when it happens it is all over; there will be no taking it back. In earlier writings of this work (up until the early nineties) I had urged people to physically attack nuclear weapons installations and attempt to dismantle and destroy the nukes by force. Then I changed my opinion because of what appeared to be an end to the cold war. But the weapons remain. That is the crux of the matter: the weapons remain. Despite all the promises to the contrary, disarmament is not happening. If it weren't for the recent ratification of the START II treaty by the Russian Duma I might think it is time to change back to my original stance. I will let you, the reader, decide for yourself what you should do. To paraphrase former president George Bush, I want "a kinder and gentler world." I believe most humans today are kind and gentle enough. What I know is not kind or gentle is an H-bomb. H-bombs are simply EVIL! Roasting 56 people alive is simply EVIL, no matter what words you use to justify it. And roasting the entire human race alive is as wrong as you can get! 57 REVELATION Revelation 21,4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. P.S. Machines need love too. 58 References Bach, Richard. "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah". New York: Dell. 1977. Bacque, James. "Other Losses". Toronto: Stoddart. 1989. Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J. "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle". Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. 1988. Bate, Robert T. "The Quantum-Effect Device: Tomorrow's Transistor?" Scientific American Trends in Computing Special Issue/Vol. 1: p. 118. 1988. Charniak, Eugene and McDermott, Drew. "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence". Publisher: Addison-Wesley. 1985. Churchland, Paul M. and Churchland, Patricia Smith. "Could a Machine Think?" p. 37. Scientific American. January, 1990. Volume 262. Number 1. Churchland, Patricia Smith. See Churchland, Paul M. and Churchland, Patricia Smith above. Davies, Paul. "Superforce". p. 51. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1984. Dennett, Daniel quoted in Jonathon Miller's "States of Mind". p. 76. Publisher: Methuen. 1983. Edelman, Gerald M. "Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection". New York: Basic Books. 1987. Edelman, Gerald M. "The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness". p. xix. New York: Basic Books. 1989. Edelman, Gerald M. "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind". p. 192-194. New York: Basic Books. 1992. Edelman, Gerald M. and Reeke, George N. Jr. "Real Brains and Artificial Intelligence" in "The Artificial Intelligence Debate: False Starts, Real Foundations". Edited by Stephen R. Graubard. p. 152, 168-171. Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England: The MIT Press. 1988. Eysenck, Hans J. and Sargent, Carl. "Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal". p. 144, 152, 154. First published in London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Copyright: Multimedia Publications Inc., Willemstad (Curacao) Personality Investigations, Publications and Services Ltd., and Carl Sargent. 1982. Forward, Robert L. "Future Magic". p. 172. New York: Avon Books. 1988. Gardner, Howard. "The Mind's New Science". pp. 319-321. New York: Basic Books. 1985. Green, Michael B. "Superstrings". p. 48, 50, 52. Scientific American. September, 1986. Volume 255. Number 3. Hillis, W. Daniel. "Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior" in "The Artificial Intelligence Debate: False Starts, Real Foundations". Edited by Stephen R. Graubard. pp. 188-189. See "Edelman, Gerald M. and Reeke, George N. Jr." above for full book reference. 59 Jaynes, Julian. "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". p. 55 (The idea that metaphors of mind are based on the physical world the mind perceives). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1978. Kay, Alan. "Computer Software". p. 58. Scientific American. September, 1984. Volume 251. Number 3. Kent, Ernest K. "The Brains of Men and Machines". pp. 5-6. New York: McGraw-Hill Publications Co. 1980. Landsend: Direct Merchants advertisement. p. 5. Scientific American. December, 1983. Volume 249. Number 6. Marr, David. "Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information". p. 4. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. 1982. McDermott, Drew. See Charniak, Eugene and McDermott, Drew above. Meindl, James D. "Chips for Advanced Computing". Scientific American Trends in Computing Special Issue/Vol. 1: p. 99. 1988. Nadeau, Robert L. "Mind, Machines, and Human Consciousness: Are There Limits to Artificial Intelligence?" p. 43. Chicago: Contemporary Books. 1991. Pagels, Heinz R. "The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity". p. 202. New York: Bantam Books. 1989. Simon & Schuster edition published 1988. Peat, David F. "Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Think". pp. 351, 343-344. New York: Bean Publishing Inc. 1988. Poggio, Tomaso. "Vision by Man and Machine". p. 116. Scientific American. April, 1984. Volume 250. Number 4. Reeke, George N. Jr. see Edelman, Gerald M. and Reeke, George N. Jr. above. Sargent, Carl. See Eysenck, Hans J. and Sargent, Carl above. Schell, Jonathon. "The Fate of the Earth". pp. 93-94. New York: Avon Books. 1982. Stevens, John K. "Reverse Engineering the Brain". p. 287, 296, 299. BYTE. April, 1985. Volume 10. Number 4. Szentagothai, John. review on back of cover jacket of "Neural Darwinism". See Edelman, Gerald M. above. Tipler, Frank J. and Barrow, John D. "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle". Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. 1988. Turing, Alan M. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". pp. 433-460. Mind. 1950. Volume 59. Waltz, David L. "The Prospects for Building Truly Intelligent Machines" in "The Artificial Intelligence Debate: False Starts, Real Foundations". Edited by Stephen R. Graubard. pp. 207-208. See "Edelman, Gerald M. and Reeke, George N. Jr." above for full book reference. Weiner, Ellis. "DOON". p. 39. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1984. 60 Index ABC computer, 4 Euthanasia, 50 Abortion, 50 Evolution, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 13, 20, Aiken, Howard, 4 21, 22, 23, 34, 37, 52, 55 AM program, 6 Eysenck, Hans J., 35 Animal rights, 34, 41, 49, 53 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fjermedal, Grant, 20 - potential, 1, 2-3 Forward, Robert L., 25 - current state, 5-6, 10-13 - history, 3-4 Gardner, Howard, 9 - my definition, 6 Gibson, J.J., 9 - reality manipulation, 21-25 God's Law, 29, 30, 33, 47, 49, 50 - time travel, 25 God, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, Atanasoff, John, 4 40, 41, 57 Government, 44, 45, 47, 51 Bach, Richard, 27 GPS (General Problem Solver) Bacque, James, 46 program, 5 Barrow, John D., 25 Green, Michael B., 23 Bate, Robert T., 16 Beauregard, Olivier Costa de, 36 Bell computer(s), 3 Berry, Clifford, 4 Haber, Howard E., 24 Boole, George, 5 Heath Robinson computer, 4 Brain, 2, 7-12, 14-19, 22, 25, 30, Hierarchy, 32, 33, 38, 52 34, 36, 37, 38 Hillis, Daniel, 13 Buddha, 29 Hirsh, Michael, 19 Bush, George Sr., 55 Hopfield, John J., 9 Bush, George Jr., 1, 31, 47, 55 Hussein, Saddam, 47 Cantor, Georg, 24 Capital Punishment, 50 Carter, Brandon, 25 Jesus, 28, 29 Charniak, Eugene, 5 Josephson, Brian, 35 Churchland, Patricia Smith, 16, 17 Jung, Carl, 29 Churchland, Paul M., 16, 17 Clinton, Bill, 47 Kane, Gordon L., 24 Cognitive Science, 7, 9 Kay, Alan, 17 COLOSSUS computer, 4 Kent, Ernest W., 7 Competition, 50, 52 Connection Machine computer, 13, Leibniz, Wilhelm, 24 17, 18, 19 Lenat, Doug, 6 Cooperation, 38 Logic Theorist program, 5 Creationism, 34, 37 Crime, 48, 49, 50 CYC project/program, 6 Madness, 34 Mark I computer, 4 Dartmouth Conference, 4, 5 Marr, David, 3, 9 Darwin III program/automaton, 10, Mauchly, John, 4 11, 12, 26, 41, 53 McCarthy, John, 4 Davies, Paul, 21 McDermott, Drew, 5 DENDRAL program, 6 Mead, Carver, 16 Dennett, Daniel, 6 Meindl, James D., 16 Disarmament, 43, 55 Miller, Jonathon, 6 Dreams, 39, 53 Minsky, Marvin, 21 Dreyfuss, Hubert, 53 Miracles, 28, 29, 55 Money, 38, 51 Eckert, J. Presper, 4 Moravec, Hans, 20 Edelman, Gerald M., 10, 11, 12, 13, Muhammad, 29 14, 16, 18, 35, 53 MYCIN program, 6 Einstein, Albert, 17, 21, 23, 24, 25 ENIAC computer, 4 EURISKO program, 5 Nadeau, Robert L., 18 61 Neural Networks, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, Schwartz, Jack, 19 18, 35, 52 Searle, John R., 16, 18 Newell, Allen, 5, 9 Sex, 33 Newton, Isaac, 24 SHRDLU program, 5 NOMAD program/automaton, 12, 13, 18 Simon, Herbert, 5, 9 Nuclear Weapons, 1, 27, 30, 31, 42 Spiritual Love, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 55 37, 39, 40 Springsteen, Bruce, 27 Over Population, 53 Stevens, John K., 14 Stibitz, George, 3 Sussman, Gerald, 20 Pagels, Heinz, 10 Szentagothai, John, 11 Parenthood, 31-32 Peat, David, 17, 22 Tank, David W., 9 Poggio, Tomaso, 7 Tipler, Frank J., 25 Police, global, 47 Turing Test, 6, 18 Pollution, 53 Turing, Alan, 6 Prison, 33, 49-50 PROSPECTOR program, 6 Psi, 35, 36, 37 Putin, Vladimir, 1, 31, 47, 55 Walker, Evan Harris, 36 Pythagoras, 21 Waltz, David, 18 War, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 42, Reeke, George N. Jr., 10, 11, 12, 13 43, 44, 45, 46, 54 Reincarnation, 40 Weiner, Ellis, 29, 30 Winograd, Terry, 5 Sagan, Carl, 55 Wolf, Fred Alan, 21 Samuel's Checkers program, 5 Wolfram, Stephen, 21 Samuel, Arthur, 5 World Government, 42, 43, 44, 45 Sargent, Carl, 35 Schell, Jonathon, 45 Schrodinger, E., 22