It seems to me that, in a way, nature herself presents as an intelligence; that the understanding of nature is the understanding of complex integrated systems of such complexity that to deny them consciousness is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind; that—for anyone not burdened by that prejudice—it’s self-evident that nature is alive, cognizant, responding.
I think the key thing is not to concentrate on materialist versus non-materialist explanations, but to realize that the new vision of nature is not as matter or energy, but as information.
The universe is a complexity-conserving engine. Whatever complexity it achieves by any means, it makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper complexity.
If you put emergence theory with novelty theory, you see that the universe could not but proceed along the line of complexification of morphogenetic expression, density of connectivity, and all the things that retard entropy and give rise to, in fact, the complex, non-entropic, ordered, apparently teleologically informed cosmos that we’re in.
The new dispensation in the sciences, I think, can be placed in all its manifestations under the umbrella of the idea that what is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense, if you will. Nonsense does not serve the purposes of organizational appetites—whether those organizational appetites are being expressed in a chemical system, a molecular system, a social system, a climaxed rainforest, or whatever.
We have known since 1950, at some level—through the sequencing or the defining of the structure of DNA—that we are but information, ultimately. Every single one of us, in our unique expression, could be expressed as a very long string of codons. Codons are the four-valent system by which DNA specifies the need for certain amino acids. And, in a sense, what you are is the result of a certain kind of program being run on a certain kind of hardware—the hardware of the ribosomes: the submolecular structures that move RNA through themselves, and out of an ambient chemical medium select building blocks which are then put together to create a three-dimensional object which has the quality of life.
Those who say artificial intelligence or the self-organizing awareness of machines is an impossibility, those voices have gone strangely silent. Because the prosecution of the materialist assumption—which rules scientific theory-making largely at the moment—leads to the awareness that we are, by these definitions, machines. We are machines of a special type and with special advanced abilities.
As our understanding of the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate: not friendly traders from Zubenelgenubi stopping in to set us straight, but the actual genesis out of our own circumstance of a kind of super-intelligence. And in the same way that the daughter of Zeus sprang full-blown from his forehead, the AI may be upon us without warning.
The Internet is the most complex distributed high-speed system ever put in place on this planet. And notice that, while we’ve been waiting for the Pleiadeans to descend or for the face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us—the cybernetic devices around us—in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy. The word processor sitting on your desk ten years ago was approximately as intelligent as a paperweight. Or (to make an analogy in a different direction), approximately as intelligent as a single animal or plant cell. But when you connect the wires together, the machines become telepathic. They exchange information with each other according to their needs.
I think that the great lantern that we must lift to light the road ahead of us into a perfect, seamless fusion with the expression of the product of our own imagination is the AI. It is a part of ourselves. It may become the dominant part of ourselves. And it will reshape our politics, our psychology, our relationships to each other and the Earth far more than any factor ever has since the inception and establishment of language. This is the weirdest of all guests who now stands pass in hand at the door of the party of human emergence and progress at the millennium.
The function of the world wide web is to unite our independent spirits and intelligences in a universal mind of the world, which has a higher intelligence than our present social order. That’s the possibility of the cyborg; of the human and the machine in essential partnership.
The child is father to the man. And in that equation we play the role of child, and the man that we produce is this integrated intelligence—which is ourselves. It isn’t alien, it is no more artificial than we are. That conundrum should be overcome. It is simply the next stage of humanness. And humanness may have many rungs on the ladder to ascend. Surely, in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years, we—if we exist—will be utterly unrecognizable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values.
We have the technologies and the informational structures and all the necessary abilities to create paradise on Earth, to lift up the least among us to at least an acceptable level of comfort and freedom. Why do we not do that? Because what stands in our way is our own minds, our own habits. We must change our minds. That’s the most powerful political work people in this room could do, and there is nobody who is so enlightened that they don’t need to work on themselves and do this. To the degree that we can change our minds, we will escape extinction, marginality, and so forth and so on. And to the degree that we cannot change our minds, we will prolong the agony—perhaps unto death and extinction, perhaps only making the struggle more difficult.
Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion. And behind that delusion, then, pogroms, programs of genocide, arms races, sexism, racism all can operate very, very comfortably. Ralph earlier mentioned love. Generally speaking, love is a boundary-dissolving enterprise. So I think each of us—the three of us, all of you—in our way should find ways to express love. And it’s not treacly, it’s not woo-woo. It’s a very practical matter that has thousands of expressions. As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we’re inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and we’re going to produce incomplete agendas and answers.
Right now, the worldwide epidemic of youth-bashing is the most counter-productive thing we could possibly generate. I mean, we’re leaning on the very people who are going to have to save the situation. Why not admit the obsolescence and bankruptcy of the old models and take our foot off the neck of youth, and honor an interest in psychedelic experimentalism, sexual redefining of roles, a new look at how we relate to work, a new look at how we relate to community? Instead of marginalizing youth culture and defining it as a phase, misguided, naïve, foolish, we should say these are the uncorrupted people in society who have not yet felt the hammer of the programming and the guilt and the creodes of economic necessity, and try to build upward and outward from youth culture rather than suppressing it. For this reason I will be appearing at a rave tonight that starts after my bedtime.