Originally published November 21, 2003

In Edge 128, Jaron Lanier writes a VERY interesting article entitled “Why Geordian Software Has Convinced Me to Believe in the Reality of Cats and Apples.”

You know why by the title that this guy is no joke.

Lanier, lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, talks about shifting paradigms in computer science…moving from a “wire” or temporal protocol based approach to computing to a more “Phenotropic” or surface interaction based approach. I’m still trying to completely understand his thoughts…but I’m already completely impressed with his line of thinking.

I mean, not only does he offer his thoughts on computer science and his work in the field…but he’s able to make more general observations about our world through his work.

That’s what I’m talking about!!!

Here is a sample:

I pushed that question further and further. Some people might remember the “rain drops” argument. Sometimes it was a hailstorm, actually. The notion was to start with one of Daniel C. Dennett’s thought experiments, where you replace all of your neurons one by one with software components until there are no neurons left to convert. At the end you have a computer program that has your whole brain recorded, and that’s supposed to be the equivalent of you. Then, I proposed, why don’t we just measure the trajectories of all of the rain drops in a rain storm, using some wonderful laser technology, and fill up a data base until we have as much data as it took to represent your brain. Then, conjure a gargantuan electronics shopping mall that has on hand every possible microprocessor up to some large number of gates. You start searching through them until you find all the chips that happen to accept the rain drop data as a legal running program of one sort or another. Then you go through all the chips which match up with the raindrop data as a program and look at the programs they run until you find one that just happens to be equivalent to the program that was derived from your brain. Have I made the raindrops conscious? That was my counter thought experiment. Both thought experiments relied on absurd excesses of scale. The chip store would be too large to fit in the universe and the brain would have taken a cosmologically long time to break down. The point I was trying to get across was that there’s an epistemological problem.Another way I approached the same question was to say, if consciousness were missing from the universe, how would things be different? A range of answers is possible. The first is that nothing would be different, because consciousness wasn’t there in the first place. This would be Dan Dennett’s response (at least at that time), since he would get rid of ontology entirely. The second answer is that the whole universe would disappear because it needed consciousness. That idea was characteristic of followers of some of John Archibald Wheeler’s earlier work, who seemed to believe that consciousness plays a role in keeping things afloat by taking the role of the observer in certain quantum-scale interactions. Another answer would be that the consciousness-free universe would be similar but not identical, because people would get a little duller. That would be the approach of certain cognitive scientists, suggesting that consciousness plays a specific, but limited practical function in the brain.

And then there’s another answer, which initially might sound like Dennett’s: that if consciousness were not present, the trajectories of all particles would remain identical. Every measurement you could make in the universe would come out identically. However, there would be no “gross”, or everyday objects. There would be neither apples nor houses, nor brains to perceive them. Neither would there be words or thoughts, though the electrons and chemical bonds that would otherwise comprise them would remain the just the same as before. There would only be the particles that make up everyday things, in exactly the same positions they would otherwise occupy. In other words, consciousness is an ontology that is overlaid on top of these particles. If there were no consciousness the universe would be perfectly described as being nothing but particles.

Here’s an even clearer example of this point of view: There’s no reason for the present moment to exist except for consciousness. Why bother with it? Why can we talk about a present moment? What does it mean? It’s just a marker of this subjectivity, this overlaid ontology. Even though we can’t specify the present moment very well, because of the spatial distribution of the brain, general relativity, and so on, the fact that we can refer to it even approximately is rather weird. It must mean the universe, or at least some part of it, like a person, is “doing something” in order to distinguish the present moment from other moments, by being conscious or embracing non-determinism in some fundamental way.

Wow.