In this seven-part essay I’ll present some fresh speculations on ways in which our race might develop in the future. As is my usual practice, I’ve been researching these scientific speculations by means of fictional thought experiments—which means, in plain English, that I’m writing some novels using these ideas. The first two of these novels are called Postsingular and Hylozoic.
This essay also appears in Year Million, an anthology edited by Damien Broderick, out from Atlas & Co. Books this month.
1. Ubiquitous Nanomachines
Let’s start with the notion of nanotechnology, which is the craft of manufacturing things at the molecular scale. One particular goal is programmable nanobots, that is, tailor-made agents who are roughly the size of biological viruses.
The comparison is apt. What’s likely to play out is that, over the coming centuries and millennia, we’ll be capitalizing on the fact that biology is already doing molecular fabrication. The nascent field of synthetic biology is going to be the true nanotech of the future.
One immediate worry is what nanotechnologists have called the “gray goo problem.” That is, what’s to stop a particularly virulent artificial organism from eating everything on Earth? My guess is that this could never happen. The thing is, every existing plant, animal, fungus, and protozoan already aspires to world domination. There’s nothing more ruthless than viruses and bacteria—the grizzled homies who’ve been keeping it real for some three billion years.
The fact that artificial organisms are likely to have simplified metabolisms doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be faster and better. It’s more likely that they’ll be dumber and less adaptable. My sense is that, in the long run, Mother Nature always wins. Cautionary note: Mother Nature’s “win” may not include the species survival of the pesky human race!
But let’s suppose that all goes well and we learn to create docile biological nanobots. There’s one particular breed that I like thinking about; I call them orphids.
The way I imagine it, orphids self-reproduce using ambient dust for raw materials. They’ll cover Earth’s surface, yes, but they’ll be well-behaved enough to stop at a density of one or two orphids per square millimeter, so that you’ll see a few million of them on your skin and perhaps ten sextillion orphids on Earth’s whole surface. From then on, the orphids only reproduce enough to maintain that same density. You might say they have a conscience, a desire to protect the environment. And, as a side benefit, they’ll hunt down and eradicate any evil nanomachines that anyone else tries to unleash.
Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language. One can converse with them quite well. I’ll suppose that an individual orphid is roughly as smart as a talking dog with, let us say, a quadrillion bytes of memory being processed at a quadrillion operations per second.
How do we squeeze so much computation out of a nanomachine? Well, a nanogram does hold about a trillion particles, which gets us close to a quadrillion. And, according to the quantum physicist Seth Lloyd [Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos (Knopf, 2006)], if we regard brute matter as a quantum computation, we do have some ten quadrillion bytes per nanogram. So there’s only, ahem, a few implementation details in designing molecular nanomachines that are smart enough to converse with.
The orphids might be linked via electromagnetic wireless signals that are passed from one to the next; alternately, they might use, let us say, some kind of subdimensional faster-than-light quantum entanglement. In either case, we call the resulting network the orphidnet.
2. Omnividence and Telepathy
We can suppose that the orphids will settle onto our scalps like smart lice. They’ll send magnetic vortices into our occipital lobes, creating a wireless human interface to the orphidnet. Of course we humans can turn our connection on and off, and we’ll have read-write control. As the orphidnet emerges, we’ll get intelligence amplification.
So now everyone is plugged into the orphidnet all the time. Thanks to the orphid lice, everyone has a heads-up display projected over their visual field.
Thanks to global positioning systems, the orphids act as tiny survey markers—or as the vertices of computer-graphical meshes. Using these realtime meshes, you actually “see” the shapes of distant objects. The orphids will be sensitive to vibrations, so you can “hear” as well. We’ll have complete omnividence, as surely as if the earth were blanketed with video cameras.
One immediate win is that we can quickly find missing objects. Another win is that violent crime becomes impossible to get away with. The orphidnet remembers the past, so anything can be replayed. If you do something bad, people can find you and punish you.
Of course someone can still behave like a criminal if they have incontrovertible physical force. Like if, for instance, they’re part of an armed government. I dream that the orphidnet-empowered public will see no further need for centralized and weaponized governments, and man-kind’s long domination by ruling elites will come to an end.
The flip-side of omnividence is that nobody has any privacy at all. We’ll have less shame about sex; the subject will be less shrouded in mystery. But sexual peeping will be an issue, and as omnividence shades into telepathy, some will want to merge with lovers’ minds. But surely lovers can find some way to shield themselves from prying. If they can’t actually turn off their orphids, the lovers may have physical shields of an electromagnetic or quantum-mechanical nature; alternately, people may develop mantra-like mental routines to divert unwanted visitors.
As I was just hinting, telepathy lies only a step beyond omnividence. How will it feel? One key difference between omnividence and telepathy is that telepathy is participatory, not voyeuristic. That is, you’re not just watching someone else, you’re picking up their shades of feeling.
One of the key novelties when we have telepathy will be the availability of psychic hyperlinks. Let me explain. Language is an all-purpose construction kit that a speaker uses to model mental states. In interpreting these language constructs, a listener builds a mental state similar to the speaker’s. Visual art is another style of construction kit; here an idea is rendered by colors, shapes, and collaged-in images.
As we refine our techniques of telepathy, we’ll come to a point where people can converse by exchanging hyperlinks into each others’ minds. It’s like sending someone an Internet link to a picture on your website—instead of sending a pixel-by-pixel copy of the image. With telepathy, I can let you directly experience my thoughts —instead of verbally explaining them. Nevertheless, language will persist. Language is so deeply congenial to us that we’d no sooner abandon it than we’d give up sex.
On a practical level, once we have telepathy, what do we do about the sleazeball spammers who’ll want to flood our minds with ads, scams, and political propaganda? We’ll use adaptive, evolving filters. Effective spam filters behave like biological immune systems, accumulating an ever-growing supply of “antibody” routines. In a living organism’s immune system the individual cells share the antibody techniques that they discover. In a social spam filter the individual users share their fixes and alerts.
Another issue with telepathy has to do with, once again, privacy. Very approximately, a blogger of today is a bit like someone who’s broadcasting telepathically, dumping his or her thoughts into the world for all to see. A wise blogger censors his or her blog, so as not to appear like a hot-head, a depressive, or a bigot.
What if telepathy can’t be filtered, and everyone can see everyone’s secret seething? Perhaps, after a period of adjustment, people would get thicker skins. Certainly it’s true that in some subcultures, people yell at each other without necessarily getting excited. Perhaps a new kind of tolerance and empathy might emerge, whereby no one person’s internal turmoil seems like a big deal. For consider: to be publicly judgmental of someone else, you compare your well tended outside to the other person’s messy inside. But once everyone’s insides are universally visible, no one can get away with being sanctimonious.
Telepathy will provide a huge increase in people’s ability to think. You’ll be sharing your memory data with everyone. In the fashion of a web-search engine, information requests will be distributed among the pool of telepaths without the need for conscious intervention. The entire knowledge of the species will be on tap for each individual. Searching the collective mind won’t be as fast as finding something in your own brain, but you’ll have access to far more information.
Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won’t actually change that much—no matter how many millennia go by. That’s a lesson that history teaches us. Yes, we’ve utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins.
No matter what the tech, what people do is based upon simple needs: the desire to mate and reproduce, the need for food and shelter, and the longing for power and luxuries. Regarding luxuries, skewed inverse power-law distributions of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there’s going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel like we’re getting screwed.
Regarding possessions, in the near term an interesting effect will emerge. Since we’re all linked on the net, we can easily borrow things or even get things for free. As well as selling things, people can lend them or give them away. Why? To accumulate social capital and good reputations.
In the orphidnet future, people can always find leftover food. Some might set out their leftovers, like pies for bums. Couch-surfing as a serial guest becomes eminently practical, with the ubiquitous virtual cloud of observers giving a host some sense of security vis-à-vis the guests. And you can find most of the possessions you need within walking distance—perhaps in a neighbor’s basement. A community becomes a shared storehouse.
On the entertainment front, I imagine there being orphidnet reality soap operas. These would be like real-time video blogs, with sponsors’ clickable ads floating around near the characters, who happen to be interesting people doing interesting things.
People will still dine out—indeed this will be a preferred form of entertainment, as physically eating something is one of the few things that requires leaving the home. As you wait at your restaurant table for your food, you might enjoy watching the actions of the chef. Maybe the restaurant employs a gourmet eater, with such a sensitive and educated palate that it’s a pleasure to mind-meld when this eater chows down.
Will telepaths get drunk and stoned? Sure! And with dire consequences. Imagine the havoc you could wreak by getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just emailing, phoning, or yelling at people face to face. There will be new forms of intoxication as well. A pair of people might lock themselves into an intense telepathic feedback loop, mirroring their minds back and forth until chaotic amplification takes hold.
In the world of art, suppose someone finds a way to record mood snapshots. And then we can produce objects that directly project the raw experiences of transcendence, sense of wonder, euphoria, mindless pleasure, or sensual beauty—without actually having any content.
Telepaths will use language for superficial small talk, but, as I mentioned before, just as often they’ll also use psychic hyperlinks and directly exchanged images and emotions. Novels may take the form of elaborate sets of mental links. Writing might become more like video-blogging. A beautiful state of mind could be saved into a memory network, glyph by glyph. This new literary form might be called the metanovel.
3. Artificial Intelligence and
Intelligence Amplification
In the ubiquitous nanobot model I’ve been discussing—the orphidnet—we have a vast array of small linked minds. It’s reasonable to suppose that, as well as helping humans do things, the orphidnet will support emergent AIs, that is, artificially intelligent agents that enlist the memory and processing power of a few thousand or more of the individual orphids.
Some of these agents will be as intelligent as humans, and some will be even smarter. It’s easy to imagine them being willing to help people by carrying out things like complex and tedious searches for information or by simulating and evaluating multiple alternate action scenarios. The result is that humans would experience IA, or intelligence amplification.
Looking higher, we can suppose that the intelligent orphidnet agents group into higher minds that group into still higher minds and so on, with one or several planetary-level minds at the top.
Here, by the way, is a fresh opportunity for human excess. Telepathically communing with the top mind will offer something like a mystical experience or a drug trip. The top mind will be like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that link into unifying concepts that puzzle-piece themselves into powerful systems that are in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory —aha! Hooking into the top mind will make any individual feel like more than a genius. Downside: once you unlink you probably won’t remember many of the cosmic thoughts that you had—and you’re going to be too drained to do much more than lie around for a few days.
Leaving ecstatic merging aside, let’s say a little more about intelligence amplification. Suppose that people reach an effective IQ of a thousand—by taking advantage of the orphidnet memory enhancement and the processing aid provided by the orphidnet agents. Let’s speak of these kilo-IQ people as kiqqies.
As kiqqies, they can browse through all the world’s libraries and minds—with orphidnet agents helping to make sense of it all. How would it feel to be a kiqqie?
I recently had an email exchange about this with my friend Stephen Wolfram, a prominent scientist who happens to be one of the smartest people I know. When I asked him how it might feel to have an IQ of a thousand, and what that might even mean, he suggested that the difference might be like the difference between simulating something by hand and simulating it on a high-speed computer with excellent software. Quoting from Wolfram’s email:
“There’s a lot more that one can explore, quickly, so one investigates more, sees more connections, and can look more moves ahead. More things would seem to make sense. One gets to compute more before one loses attention on a particular issue, etc. (Somehow that’s what seems to distinguish less intelligent people from more intelligent people right now.)”
In some visions of the far future, amok nanomachines egged on by corporate geeks are disassembling Sol system’s planets to build so-called Dyson shells of “computronium” around the Sun. Computronium is, in SF writer Charles Stross’s words, “matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing.” A Dyson shell is a hollow sphere of matter that intercepts all of the central sun’s radiation—using some of it and then passing the rest outward in a cooled-down form, possibly to be further intercepted by outer layers of Dyson shells. What a horrible thing to do to a solar system!
I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the max possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidien reality.
Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god.
Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that’s a perfect match for the old Earth—call the new one Vearth.
It’s worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature.
This is because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts. [For details on this point, see Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), or see the topic “irreducibility” in Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, (Wolfram Media, 2002). ]
Natural unpredictability means that, if you build a computer sim world that’s smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland environments populated by sim people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels.
But wait, if you do smash the whole planet into computronium, you have potentially as much memory and processing power as the intact planet possessed. It’s the same amount of mass, after all. So then we could make a fully realistic world-simulating Vearth with no compromises, right? Wrong.
Perhaps you can get the hardware in place, but there’s the vexing issue of software. Something important goes missing when you smash Earth into dust: you lose the information and the embodied software that was embedded in the world’s behaviors. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a potentially human-equivalent robot with no AI software, or, more simply, like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.
Ah, but what if the nanomachines copy all the patterns and behaviors that are embedded in Earth’s biosphere and geology? What if they copy the forms and processes in every blade of grass, in every bacterium, in every pebble—like Citizen Kane bringing home a European castle that’s been dismantled into portable blocks, or like a foreign tourist taking digital photos of his disassembled California cheeseburger’s component parts?
But, come on, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass.
Just as she is, Nature embodies superhuman intelligence. As I said before, matter isn’t dumb.
Why am I harping on this? It’s my way of leading up to one of the really wonderful events that I think our future holds: the withering away of digital machines, and the coming of truly ubiquitous computation. This is what I call the Great Awakening.
I predict that eventually we’ll be able to telepathically tune in on nature’s computations. We’ll be able to commune with the souls of stones.
The Great Awakening will eliminate the nanomachines and digital computers in favor of naturally computing objects. We can suppose that our newly intelligent world will in fact take it upon itself to crunch up the digital machines, frugally preserving or porting all of the digital data.
Instead of turning nature into chips, we’ll turn chips into nature.
5. The Advent of Panpsychism
In the future, we’ll see all objects as alive and conscious. This is, by the way, a familiar notion in the history of philosophy, and by no means disreputable. Hylozoism (from the Greek hyle, matter, and zoe, life) is the doctrine that all matter is intrinsically alive. And panpsychism is the related notion that every object has a mind. [See David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press 2005).]
Already my car talks to me—so do my phone, my computer, and my refrigerator—so I guess we could live with talking rocks, chairs, logs, sandwiches, and atoms. But unlike today’s chirping appliances, I see the living objects as truly having soul.
My opinion is that consciousness is not so very hard to achieve. How does everything wake up? I think the key insight is this:
Consciousness = universal computation + memory + self-reflection.
Computer scientists say a system is a universal computer if it’s capable of emulating the behavior of every other computing system. The complexity threshold for universal computation is very low. Any desktop computer is a universal computer. A cell phone is a universal computer. A Tinkertoy set or a billiard table can be a universal computer.
In fact, just about any natural phenomenon at all can be regarded as a universal computer: swaying trees, a candle flame, drying mud, flowing water—or even a rock. To the human eye, a rock appears not to be doing much. But viewed as a quantum computation, the rock is as lively and seething as, say, a small sun. At the atomic level, a rock is like a zillion balls connected by force springs. This kind of compound oscillatory system behaves chaotically; and computer science teaches us that any chaotic system can indeed support universal computation.
The self-reflection aspect of a system has to with having a feedback process whereby the system has at least two levels of self-awareness: (i) an image of itself reacting to its environment, and (ii) an image of itself watching its own reactions. [See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt, New York 1999) and Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakes-lee, On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004).]
We can just about see how to program self-reflection into digital computers, so I don’t think it will be long until we can make them be conscious. But digital computers are not where the future is at. We don’t use clockwork gears in our watches anymore, and we don’t make radios out of vacuum tubes. The age of digital computer chips is going to be over and done, if not in a hundred years, then certainly in a thousand. And then we’ll be well past the Great Awakening, and working with the consciousness of ordinary objects.
I’ve already said a bit about why natural systems are universal computers. And the self-reflection issue is really just a matter of programming legerdemain. But two other things will be needed.
First, in order to get consciousness in a brook or a swaying tree or a flame or a stone, we’ll need a universal memory upgrade that can be in some sense plugged into natural objects. Second, in order for us to be able to work with the intelligent objects, we’re going to need a strong form of non-digital telepathy for communicating with them.
In the next section, “Exploiting the Subdimensions,” I’ll explain how, in order to bring about the Great Awakening, firstly we’ll manipulate the topology of space in order to give endless memory to every object, and secondly we’ll create a hi-fidelity telepathic connection among all the objects in the world. But for now let’s take this for granted. Assume that everything has become conscious and that we are in telepathic communication with everything in the world.
To discuss the world after this Great Awakening, I need a generic word for an uplifted awakened natural mind. I’ll call these minds silps. We’ll be generous in our panpsychism, with every size of object supporting a conscious silp, from atoms up to galaxies. Silps can also be found in groupings of objects—here I’m thinking of what animists regard as genii loci, or spirits of place.
There is a seeming problem with panpsychism: how it is that we have synchronization among the collective wills involved in, say, rush hour traffic? Consider the atoms, the machine parts, the automotive subassemblies, the cars themselves, the minds of the traffic streams, not to mention the minds of the human drivers, and the minds of the humans’ body cells. Why do the bodies do what the brains want them to? Why is it that all the little minds agree? Why doesn’t the panpsychic world disintegrate into squabbling disorder? Solution: everyone’s idea of their motives and decisions are Just So stories confabulated ex post facto to create a narrative for what is in fact a complex, deterministic computation, a law-like cosmic harmony where each player imagines he or she is improvising.
Panpsychism is a new way of looking at the world, and I’m still getting familiar with it. What would a tree or campfire or waterfall be into? Perhaps they just want to hang out, doing nothing. Perhaps it’s only we who want to rush around, fidgety monkeys that we are.
But if I overdo the notion of silp mellowness, I end up wondering if it even matters for an object to be conscious. Assuming the silps have telepathy, they do have sensors. But can they change the world? Well, if I think of silps as quantum computations, they do have effectors in that they can influence their own matter, by affecting rates of catalysis, heat flows, quantum collapses, and so on.
Therefore, for instance, a drinking glass might be harder to break than before. The glass might shed off the vibration phonons in optimal ways so as to avoid catastrophic fracture—assuming that the glass minds being broken. And I think of a bean that slyly rolls away to avoid being cooked —sometimes objects do seem to hide.
Does a log mind being burned? It would be a drag if you had to feel guilty about stoking your fire. But silps aren’t so bent on self-preservation. We humans (and animals) have to be like that, so we can live long enough to mate and to raise our young. Otherwise we go extinct. But a log’s or rock’s individual survival doesn’t effect the survival of the race of logs or rocks. Silps aren’t hard-wired to fear death.
Let’s say a bit more about self-reflection among silps. As a human, I have a mental model of myself watching myself having feelings about events—this is the self-reflection component of consciousness mentioned above. There seems to be no reason why this mode of thought wouldn’t be accessible to objects. Indeed, it may be that there’s some “fixed point” aspect of fundamental physics that makes self-reflection an inevitability. Perhaps, compared to a quantum-computing silp, a human’s methods for producing self-awareness are weirdly complex and roundabout.
As I mentioned before, when the Great Awakening comes, the various artificially intelligent agents of the orphidnet will be ported into silps or into minds made up of silps. As in the orphidnet, we’ll have an upward-mounting hierarchy of silp minds. Individual atoms will have small silp minds, and an extended large object will have a fairly hefty silp mind. And at the top we’ll have a newly conscious planetary mind: Gaia.
Because the silps will have inherited all the data of the orphids, the humans will still have their omnividence, their shared memory access, and their intelligence amplification. But, as I mentioned before, when the Great Awakening comes, we’ll have an even stronger form of telepathy, which is based upon a use of the subdimensions.
6. Exploiting the Subdimensions
I need to explain how I’m going to provide every atom in the universe with a memory upgrade—and how I’m going to provide universal telepathy.
I propose drawing on an old-school SF power chord, the notion of the “subdimensions.” What are the subdimensions? The phrase is a science fictional shibboleth from the 1930s, but I think we can retrofit it to stand for the topology of space at scales below the Planck length, that is, below the size scale at which our current notions of physics break down.
One notion, taken from string theory, is that we have a lot of extra dimensions down there, and that most of them are curled around into tiny circles. For a mathematician like myself, it’s annoying to see the physicists help themselves to higher dimensions—and then waste the dimensions by frugally twisting them into tiny coils. It’s like seeing someone win a huge lottery, and then put every single penny of the winnings into a stodgy, badly run investment fund.
I propose that sometime—certainly before the year million, and perhaps much sooner than that—we’ll find a way to change the intrinsic topology of space so as to uncurl one of these stingily rolled-up dimensions. And of course we’ll be careful to pick a dimension that’s not absolutely essential for the string-theoretic Calabi-Yau manifolds that are supporting the existence of matter and spacetime. I see our selected dimensional coil as springing loose to instantly become an infinite line, an endless new direction that projects from every point of space.
Just for the sake of discussion, let’s suppose that it’s the eighth dimension that we uncurl. And now I propose that we use this handy extra dimension as our universal memory upgrade. Atoms can make tick marks on their eighth dimension, as can people, clouds or stones. In other words, you can store info as bumps anywhere you like along the infinite expanse of eighth dimensional space. The infinite accessible spike provides endless memory at every location, and thereby gives people endless perfect memories and gives objects enough memory to make themselves conscious as well.
Okay, sweet, and what about universal telepathy? Let’s suppose that all of the eighth dimensional axes meet at the point at infinity, and let’s suppose that our nimble extradimensional minds can readily traverse an infinite expanse, perhaps using a Zenonian acceleration so that the first meter takes a half second, the second meter a quarter second, the third meter an eighth of a second, and so on, so that after one second you’ve darted out to the shared point at infinity. And once you’re there, you can zoom back down to any space location you like. Everyone is connected via an accessible router point at infinity. So now, even though the silps have eaten the orphids as part of the Great Awakening, we’ll all have perfect telepathy.
Of course we won’t stop at mere telepathy! Eventually, we’ll have teleportation, telekinesis, and the ability to turn our thoughts into objects.
Teleporting can be done by making yourself uncertain about which of two possible locations you’re actually in. In other words, I view teleportation as a three-step process. First you perfectly visualize your source and target locations and mentally weave them together. Second you become uncertain about which location you’re actually in. And third you abruptly observe yourself, asking, “Where am I?” Thereby you precipitate a quantum collapse of your wave function, which lands you at your target location.
I’m also supposing that whatever I’m wearing or holding will teleport along with me; let’s say that I can carry anything up to weight of, say, a heavy suitcase.
Once people can teleport, they can live anywhere that they can find a vacant lot to build on. You can ferry in water and you can teleport out with your waste. What about heat and light? Perhaps you can get trees to produce electricity and use that for lamps and heaters.
As a next step, we’d learn to teleport objects without moving ourselves at all. This is what’s known as telekinesis. How would telekinesis work? Suppose that, sitting in my living room, I want to teleport an apple from my fridge to my coffee table. How do I proceed? I visualize the source and target locations as when doing personal teleportation, that is, I visualize the fridge drawer and the tabletop in the living room. But now, rather than doing an uncertainty-followed-by-collapse number on my body, I need to do it on the apple. I become the apple for a moment, I merge with it, I cohere its state function to encourage locational uncertainty, and then I collapse the apple’s wave function into the apple-on-table eigenstate.
What’s the status of the apple’s resident silp while I do this? In a sense the silp is the apple’s wave function, so it must be that I’m bossing around the silp.
Can animals and objects teleport as well? What a mess that would be! We’d better hope that only humans can teleport. How might we justify such a special and privileged status for our race?
I’ll draw on an idea in Robert Sheckley’s 1953 story “Specialist,” from his landmark anthology, Untouched By Human Hands. Sheckley suggests that humans have the power of teleportation because, unlike animals or objects, we experience doubt and fear.
Let’s start with Sheckley’s premises. Certainly it seems as if animals don’t have doubt and fear in the same way that we do. If a predator comes, an animal runs away, end of story. If cornered, a rat bares his teeth and fights. Animals don’t worry about what might happen; they don’t brood over what they did in the past; they don’t mentally agonize—or at least one can suppose that they don’t.
And it’s easy to suppose that the silps that inhabit natural processes don’t have doubt and fear either. Silps don’t much care if they die. A vortex of air forms and disperses, no problem.
Okay, so what about Sheckley’s conclusion? Why do doubt and fear lead to teleportation? Having doubt and fear involves creating really good mental models of alternate realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternate realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. And this means that we can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can’t. In other words, humans happen to carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation—and these lead to teleportation and telekinesis.
As a final goodie, I’d like to discuss the possibility of creating objects out of nothing. I’m going to call such objects “tulpas.”
The origin of the word is that, in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is a material object that an enlightened adept can mentally create. A psychic projection that’s as solid as a brick.
I think it’s entirely possible that in the future any human can create tulpas. How? You’ll psychically reprogram the quantum computations of the atoms around you, causing them to generate de Broglie matter waves converging on a single spot. Rather than being light holograms, these will be matter wave holograms, that is, physical objects created by computation. Your tulpas.
Thus your thoughts can become objects—by coaxing the nearby atoms to generate matter holograms that behave just like normal objects. You can build a house from nothing, turn a stone into bread, transform water into wine, and make flowers bloom from your fingertips.
And then will humans finally be satisfied?
Of course not. We’ll push on past infinity and into the transfinite realms beyond the worlds—mayhap to embroil ourselves with the elder gods and the Great Old Ones.
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