LIFE: REAL AND ARTIFICIAL

From: kalki33!system@lakes.trenton.sc.us

Newsgroups: talk.origins

Subject: LIFE: Real & Artificial

Message-ID: <ZHH1uB2w165w@kalki33>

Date: Sun, 29 Nov 92 12:37:58 EST

Organization: Kalki's Infoline BBS, Aiken, SC, USA

From Back to Godhead magazine, January/February 1991

LIFE: REAL AND ARTIFICIAL

by Sadaputa Dasa

(c) 1991 The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust

Used by permission.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, a group of scientists, mainly from the Los

Alamos National Laboratories, recently held a conference on "Artificial

Life." The theme of the conference, which I attended, was that the

essence of life lies not in biological substance but in patterned

organization.

If this idea is valid, the thinking goes, life forms should be able to

set themselves up through many different types of material stuff. In

particular, life should be able to exist as a pattern of electronic

activity in a computer.

The conference organizers, casually dressed, long-haired men in their

thirties and early forties, say that artificial, computer-based life

forms are developing even now -- and may evolve to dominate the earth.

According to this view, the evolutionary role of man is to give birth to

silicon-based life patterns that will eventually look back on him as a

primitive ancestor. The conference sponsors counseled a broad-minded

attitude toward such evolutionary progress: we should transcend

parochial anthropocentrism and welcome advanced life in whatever form it

may emerge.

But some attending scientists doubted whether a program running on a

computer could properly be thought of as alive. Philosopher Elliot Sober

argued that when engineers make a computer simulation of a bridge, no

one would think of it as a real bridge: the simulation merely shows a

picture in which computations tell us something about bridges. In the

same way, when a computer simulates an organism, we see a picture in

which computations tell us something about life -- we're not seeing life

itself.

Tommaso Toffoli, a computer scientist from Massachusets Institute of

Technology, responded to this argument. Suppose, he said, that simulated

people were driving cars on a simulated bridge. If the bridge were to

collapse, the people would fall to their simulated deaths.

The patterns in a faithful simulation match the patterns found in

reality: the simulated people cross the simulated bridge just as real

people cross a real bridge. And since these patterns, Dr. Toffoli

proposed, are the essence of what is happening, we can think of the

simulation the same way we think of the original.

In principle, then, if a real material scene can exhibit life, so can a

simulation.

In practice, of course, present computers, operating with a single

processor, are weak at matching the patterns of reality.

But Toffoli suggested that the powerful computers of the future will

consist of crystallike arrays of many thousands of microminiature

processors, nearly atomic in size, all computing at once. Toffoli

described such computers as "programmable matter."

Indeed (though Toffoli didn't say so), we might regard matter itself,

with its interacting atomic subunits, as such a computer. According to

this idea, life is already a computer simulation running on the

"programmable matter" of the universe itself.

Now, if life is but a computer simulation, a series of computational

states, then life too must be essentially unreal. Words such as

"flower," "dog," and "human" are simply names, symbols we attach to

patterns of matter. This, in fact, is the Vedic understanding not of

life but of the material body. In the eleventh canto of Srimad

Bhagavatam, Krsna says to Uddhava that the gross and subtle forms of

material bodies have no existence of their own; they are only temporary

patterns manifested by the eternally existing reality, the Absolute

Truth.

Krsna illustrates this idea with an example: "Gold exists before it is

made into gold products, and the gold remains when the products have

been destroyed. The gold alone is the reality while used under various

names. Similarly, I alone exist before the universe is created and after

it is destroyed, and I alone exist while it is maintained....That which

did not exist in the past and will not exist in the future has no

existence of its own while it lasts....Whatever is created and revealed

by something else is ultimately only that other thing." (Bhagavatam

11.28.19,21)

So we can look at the temporary forms of the material universe as

patterns in Krsna's energy to which various names have been assigned. In

essence these patterns in Krsna's material energy (bahiranga-sakti) are

the same as the patterns of electrons that form and disappear in the

circuitry of a computer during a simulation. So we can view the material

universe as the ultimate computer simulation, and Krsna as the ultimate

simulator.

But seeing the material body as a succession of flickering patterns

doesn't mean we should view life the same way. Krsna says in

Bhagavad-gita (2.20) that the soul, the individual conscious self,

eternally exists: "For the soul there is never birth or death. He has

not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into

being. He is unborn, ever-existing, and primeval. He is not slain when

the body is slain."

Tommaso Toffoli's simulated people on the simulated bridge lack one main

element: consciousness. A series of computations might simulate the

changes a person's body undergoes, including those in the brain. But why

should patterns of electric current generate the conscious experience of

these changes?

We may easily imagine that the patterns of current making up a machine's

computations may flow without conscious awareness. This suggests that if

consciousness of the results of these computations exists in the

computer, this must be due to some element that our understanding of

computers has not yet taken into account.

Here's how some might reply: It may be hard to understand how patterns

of computer states could generate consciousness, but we already know

that similar patterns generate consciousness in human brains. So why

can't this take place in a computer?

The answer is that we don't know in any scientific sense that patterns

of brain states do generate consciousness. Resolving how such patterns

might do this in brains would be just as hard as figuring out how they

might do it in computers.

Bhagavad-gita provides a simple solution by postulating that

consciousness in the material body is due to the presence of an entity

fundamentally different from matter. Given the difficulties philosophers

and scientists have run into in trying to understand consciousness as

patterns of material elements, they should think about this solution.

If we tentatively adopt this solution, then we may ask: How would the

nonmaterial conscious entity be linked to the material body? We can

understand how this link might work by returning to Toffoli's story of

the simulated bridge.

How could we introduce consciousness into the simulation? One way would

be to make a "real-time" simulation, one in which the simulated events

take place at the same pace as corresponding events in the real world.

(One would simply need a fast enough computer.) Then one could put

consciousness into the simulation by electronically linking the senses

of real, conscious people with the senses of the simulated people. The

intentions of the conscious people would move the bodies of the people

in the simulated world, and the conscious people would have the

experiences the simulated people would have.

Far-fetched? Some people in computer science are already working on it.

VPL Research in California is experimenting with "virtual realities" in

which a person's eyes, ears, and one hand are hooked up electronically

with virtual eyes and ears and a virtual hand in a simulated world. The

person looks through "eyephones," small TV screens placed directly in

front of his eyes, and sees as though in the simulated world.

A "data glove" electronically senses his hand movements, and another

device the movements of his head; the resulting data control the

movements of his simulated hand and head.

Thus the person experiences the simulated world through a simulated

body, moves about in that body, and handles simulated objects in that

world.

If it is possible to link human consciousness with an unreal, virtual

body in a simulated world, why shouldn't it be possible to link

spiritual consciousness with similarly unreal bodies in the "real"

material world?

The Vedic philosophy known as Sankhya describes the workings of such a

communications link. The third canto of Srimad Bhagavatam describes

Krsna's material energy as including an element called "false ego," or

ahankara, which serves as the interface between the nonmaterial soul and

the material energy. This false ego serves like the eyephones and data

gloves that link a human being with a computer running a virtual-reality

program.

Both the material body as understood in Vedic literature and the

simulated body in a computer-generated world are merely temporary

patterns in an underlying substrate. But the conscious self --the real

essence of the living being-- has a substantial reality outside the

realm of transient patterns.

In the computer-generated reality this conscious self is a human being

not part of the computer system, and in the Vedic philosophy this self

is a transcendental entity distinct from matter.

One lesson we can learn from the thoughts and experiments of computer

scientists is that such a relationship between the self and the material

world is possible. And it just might be our actual situation.

END OF ARTICLE

Posted by Kalki Dasa for Back to Godhead.

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