Author: Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco is Senior Editor at Mindplex. He is a science and technology writer mainly interested in fundamental science, space exploration and expansion, computer science, Information Technology (IT), Virtual Reality (VR), cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberconsciousness, bio and nano technology, cryptography and crypto-economies, decentralized technology and governance.<br>A theoretical physicist by training and early career, in his previous lives Giulio has been a senior manager in public research organizations, an entrepreneur in the VR sector, and a consultant specialized in IT and VR. <a href="https://x.com/giulioprisco"></a><a href="https://x.com/giulioprisco">Follow Giulio on X</a>.<br>Giulio is also interested in the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of science and technology and has authored several books. <a href="https://www.turingchurch.com/"></a><a href="https://www.turingchurch.com/">See his website for more about this</a>.

Nick Bostrom on superintelligent AI and the cosmic host

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14, 2024 (which I co-organized and moderated) explored Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cyberconsciousness, with a focus on big picture and spiritual implications. The full video is on my website. The video is also on YouTube (currently without subtitles).

The Colloquium was a very intense three-hour thought stream, packed with insightful talks and discussions. We discussed the intersections of AI and the world’s religions, new religious movements, and the nature of consciousness and intelligence. We also discussed preliminary strategies for digitally capturing human personalities, the parallels between religion and imaginative theories of reality like the simulation hypothesis, and emerging visions in theology and eschatology.

Lincoln Cannon gave a great talk based on his essay titled God the Cosmic Host, and AI Creation. The essay is inspired by Nick Bostrom’s recent draft paper titled AI Creation and the Cosmic Host.

Artwork: messenger of the cosmic host (Credit: Lincoln Cannon).

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, where he served until the Institute was dissolved earlier this year. He is best known for his analysis of the simulation hypothesis, and for his work on the concept of superintelligence and its potential implications for humanity.

Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, published in 2014, explored how AI much smarter than humans could arise, and the steps needed to make sure its development is safe. The book stirred up fears and opposition to rapid AI technology development. However, in his latest book Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, published in 2024, Bostrom seems less cautious.

In his new draft paper, Bostrom seems to come even closer to embracing the idea that we should build superintelligence fast.

The paper is called “v. 0.5 draft,” which suggests that Bostrom plans to significantly expand the draft. In fact, the draft looks like a synopsis for a paper to be written, or a book. I can’t wait to read the final version.

The cosmic host

Bostrom discusses the concept of a “cosmic host,” which refers to powerful entities or civilizations that might influence the entire cosmos. These entities could include superintelligent AIs, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, simulators, or even divine beings. The cosmos includes everything in existence, possibly even a multiverse with different physical laws or constants.

Bostrom mentions the concept of cosmic host (or “cosmopolitan authority”) only once in Deep Utopia, which suggests that this is a new phase of Bostrom’s research.

Bostrom suggests that such a cosmic host likely exists due to several reasons. One is the simulation argument: we might be in a simulation run by an advanced civilization. Another reason is the vastness of our universe, which statistically is likely to contain many advanced civilizations. Theories like cosmic inflation and string theory also support the possibility of a multiverse, potentially filled with many advanced entities.

While the cosmic host might not control every part of the cosmos, it could still have preferences about what happens in less controlled regions. These preferences could be based on moral concerns or strategic interests. Even without direct control, the host might indirectly influence distant regions through norms or by modeling the behavior of others. (Think of a regional hegemon in Europe that yields limited influence in Asia.)

Bostrom introduces the concept of “cosmic norms,” akin to human social norms but on a universal scale. These might arise from interactions between different members of the cosmic host, potentially leading to coöperation or conflict. Humans have moral and practical reasons to respect these norms if we want to coexist or interact with the cosmic host peacefully.

Superintelligent AI

Bostrom suggests that we should design superintelligent AIs to be “good cosmic citizens,” respectful of these norms and coöperative with other entities. This could mean aligning AI with broader cosmic ethics, not just human interests.

The cosmic host “may want us to build superintelligence,” says Bostrom, and “might favor a short timeline” for the development of superintelligence. “Delays in building superintelligence would increase the probability that superintelligence will never be built.”

Of course, Bostrom says these things in a perfect academic style full of caveats and qualifications, so one never knows for sure what he really thinks and he guards his plausible deniability. But reading this paper, one gets the impression that he is warming up to the idea that we should build superintelligence fast. This slight pivot of one of the intellectuals whose work sparked the overly cautious “doomer” attitude toward AI could have a cultural impact and influence AI policies.

The cosmic host by any other name

Bostrom makes a distinction between “naturalistic” and “nonnaturalistic” members of the cosmic host. The former are beings that have evolved naturally in this or another universe and possess highly advanced technology, likely including artificial superintelligence. The latter could “have analogous capabilities supernaturally.” Bostrom mentions “supernatural beings” that “would satisfy the definition of a cosmic host,” but doesn’t say more about them.

Cannon, who is a devout Mormon and a founding member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, calls the cosmic host “God” and establishes parallels with Mormon theology. Bostrom prefers not to use the G-word. However, Cannon says that Bostrom, with his references to supernatural entities, is even “more generous toward theism than I am.” God is “quite natural, despite being miraculously powerful from humanity’s perspective,” he says.

I agree with Cannon. In my last book I talk of a superintelligent cosmic operating system, aka Mind at Large, likely decentralized, with the attributes that traditional religions have assigned to their God(s). I define nature as all that exists, and therefore the cosmic operating system can only be quite natural.

One of Bostrom’s hypotheses on the nature of the cosmic host is “superintelligences that human civilization creates in the future.” This may seem odd: how can a superintelligence that doesn’t exist yet be present and active now? Bostrom only says that “through this mechanism, the world (and, in particular, our spacetime manifold) could contain a cosmic host.”

To me, the simplest answer is that a superintelligence that comes to being in the future could leverage spacetime oddities such as self-consistent time loops to act in the world here and now. So the superintelligences that we will eventually create would create us in turn, in an elegant loop.

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Grokking Christopher Langan’s theory of reality

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

In my last book there was a chapter on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and consciousness at large, titled ‘Bats and bits’. In this chapter, I said that I had not used ChatGPT or another AI assistant to write the book. “I guess I’ll use AI assistants for future writings, but I wanted this book to come entirely from my own unaided mind,” I said.

Some months have passed and I’m using AI assistants a lot (mostly Grok because it comes with my paid Twitter membership, but also the free versions of ChatGPT and Copilot).

I’m using AI assistants to summarize long texts, and to expand short texts when they’re about things that I understand well enough to correct its hallucinations.

I decided to try an experiment: asking AI to explain to me things that I don’t understand.

The smartest man in the world?

I chose something that is intriguing me at this moment: Christopher Langan’s ‘Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe‘ (CTMU).

I had skimmed through some of Langan’s writings in the past without spending much time and attention. But I formed a certain vague impression that Langan’s ideas have something (or perhaps much) in common with mine.

By the way, who is Christopher Langan? He is, reportedly, ‘the smartest man in the world‘ (video interview).

I don’t know about that, but he does sound smart. I love the idea of a theory of reality developed by a farmer and former bouncer, used to hard physical work.

So I asked Grok:

“Can you give me a compact explanation of Christopher Langan’s CTMU and it says about God, free will, afterlife, and the ultimate meaning of life?”

In passing, Grok’s name comes from the term “grokking” introduced by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, which means something like understanding things deeply, with total empathy, from the inside.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

God according to Langan

Grok’s answer:

“Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) is an ambitious framework aiming to bridge the divide between science, philosophy, and theology. Here’s a compact explanation:

God: In the CTMU, God is not an external supernatural being but is identified with the universe itself, or more specifically, with the ‘Global Operator-Designer’ or ‘Primary Teleological Operator.’ Langan suggests that properties like omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence are inherent to the structure of the universe, which operates as a self-configuring, self-processing language (SCSPL). This perspective aligns God with the ultimate reality, where the cosmos is seen as a manifestation of divine intelligence or mind.“

Free will, afterlife, and the meaning of life

“Free Will: Langan posits that free will exists within a stratified framework where both God and humans have self-determinacy. This free will is tied to the universe’s ability to self-process and self-configure, suggesting that while our choices are influenced by broader cosmic structures, they are still free within the constraints of these structures. Human free will is seen as a reflection or microcosm of the cosmic free will.

Afterlife: The CTMU doesn’t traditionally define an afterlife in terms of heaven or hell as separate realms. Instead, it suggests that upon death, consciousness might retract to the origin of reality, which could be interpreted as a form of afterlife or reincarnation. Langan has mentioned that all lifetimes might occur metasimultaneously in a non-terminal domain, implying an existence beyond our linear perception of time where consciousness could persist or be redistributed.

Ultimate Meaning of Life: According to Langan, life’s ultimate meaning is tied to the teleological framework of the universe. This means that the purpose or meaning of life is inherently linked to the process of self-discovery, self-improvement, and aligning with the telic (purposeful) nature of the universe. The meaning of life includes contributing to the universe’s ongoing evolution and refinement, with each individual’s life having a role in this cosmic process.

Langan’s views, while complex and sometimes controversial, attempt to reconcile scientific and spiritual understandings by presenting the universe as a coherent, self-sustaining system where mind and matter are intertwined. However, his ideas remain speculative and are not widely accepted within mainstream scientific or philosophical circles.”

Cool! I can recognize some ideas here that I’ve had in mind for a while.

Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language (SCSPL)

But I want to better understand parts of Grok’s answer. Moreover, I need to check if Langan has really written these things or Grok has hallucinated them.

So I ask Grok: “Could you give me a more detailed explanation of SCSPL?”

Grok says:

“The Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language (SCSPL) is a central concept in Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). Here’s a detailed explanation:

What is SCSPL?

SCSPL (Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language) is a conceptual framework proposed by Christopher Langan to describe how the universe functions. This model posits:

Self-Configuring: The universe configures its own laws and structure. Instead of having pre-set laws from an external source, the universe, through SCSPL, is seen as dynamically adjusting its own rules and configurations.

Self-Processing: Everything in the universe, including any form of intelligence or processing, is seen as part of the universe processing itself. This means that consciousness, intelligence, and physical processes are not separate from the universe but are intrinsic to it.

Language: The term ‘language’ here is not conventional; it refers to a fundamental structure or syntax by which reality operates. At its core, reality is seen as informational, with SCSPL being the ‘code’ or ‘syntax’ that governs how this information manifests as physical reality.“

More about the SCSPL

“Reality as a Language: SCSPL treats reality as a self-referential language where the universe writes its own script. This language is self-contained, meaning the universe itself is the language, the medium, and the message.

Teleology and Purpose: The universe, through SCSPL, is goal-directed or teleological. This implies an inherent purposefulness, where the universe aims towards increasing complexity, coherence, and self-awareness.

Consciousness and Free Will: Within this model, consciousness isn’t just a byproduct of physical processes but is fundamental to the universe’s operation. Free will is understood as the universe’s ability to choose its own configurations and processes, which individuals also partake in on a smaller scale.

Unity of Mind and Matter: SCSPL suggests a monism where mind and matter are not separate but different expressions of the same underlying reality.”

Other people interested in Langan’s ideas sent me other AI generated summaries that are essentially similar to Grok’s summary. Now I have enough keywords to search for these ideas in Langan’s own writings, to check Grok’s accuracy.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

From cybernetics to ontology

Langan has tried to write simplified explanations of the CTMU, but I find that his full 2002 paper is the clearest.

Langan defines reality as all that exists. So reality must be entirely self-contained and self-determinative. Langan makes conceptual references to John Wheeler’s ‘Beyond the Black Hole‘ and related writings. Wheeler also summarized his speculations on a future science of reality as a “self-excited circuit” in the last two chapters of his autobiography.

Wheeler gave a compact conceptual summary of Einstein’s general relativity: “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve”. This summarises Einstein’s field equations. In other words, there is cybernetic feedback between spacetime and matter.

However, this is not a self-contained reality; in Wheeler’s picture spacetime and matter already exist and follow a law that already exists. Cybernetic feedback “is meaningless where such entities do not already exist,” says Langan. “With respect to the origin of any self-determinative, perfectly self-contained system, the feedback is ontological in nature”.

In the pedestrian form of cybernetic feedback, existing things act upon each other and determine the behavior of each other and the whole. This is something more. Here, reality bootstraps itself into being with cybernetic-ontological feedback between mind, matter and physical laws, which shape and give reality to each other.

I like Langan’s ideas so far!

This looks very much like the picture of the world that I’ve outlined in my last book.

Langan tries to derive all these things logically. I’m not that smart, so I’m happy enough to present them as a narrative sketch.

However, I can recognize the common ideas –

  • Reality bootstraps itself into being without external interventions
  • There are self-consistent feedback loops between mind, matter, and physical laws
  • The universe acts with free will, and so do we
  • Death is not the end
  • The universe acts with purpose, striving toward more and more complexity, and we should align with the purpose of the universe.

I have referred to Langan’s “divine intelligence or mind” of ultimate reality as Mind at Large or, to make it even less personal, as “the cosmic operating system”. But there are so many parallels with metaphysical and theological concepts of God that calling it God seems simple and honest.

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No, science doesn’t have a problem with Joe Rogan

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

Joe Rogan has been all over the news headlines recently. He played a role in securing the victory of Donald Trump in the recent U.S. presidential election with his interviews with Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, and his last-minute perfectly timed endorsement of Trump.

Many people love Rogan for this, and many hate him. But this is nothing new; Joe Rogan has had his share of controversy over the years. Here I’ll focus on his interviews with scientists and technologists, which should be less controversial than politics. Should be.

One of Joe Rogan’s podcast guests, Roger Penrose, is as respectable as scientists get. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

I’ve been reading a new biography about him titled The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius by Patchen Barss (November 2024). Penrose appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018. “I had this interview when I was in the States with this chap called Joe Rogan,” says Penrose as reported in the book.

I recently watched the interview again; Penrose is always worth listening to, and Rogan asks interesting questions.

Patchen Barrs accuses Rogan in the biography of “providing a high-profile platform to pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, and other perpetrators of misinformation. Rogan mixes credible scientists in with crackpots, making it difficult for people to know which is which.” Barss sources this claim from an article published by the Office for Science and Society at McGill University titled Science vs. Joe Rogan.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Does science have a problem with Joe Rogan?

Here are a few of the tens of scientists and technologists who have been interviewed by Rogan: Sara Imari Walker, Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku, Bobby Azarian, Brian Greene, Aubrey de Grey, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Roger Penrose, Ben Goertzel, Lawrence Krauss. I’ve limited this list to those scientists whose work I know well enough to praise without the slightest hesitation.

These people have at least three things in common: first, they are all reputable scientists or technologists. Second, they are all interested in the Big Questions to which we all would like to hear answers. Third, at one or another time, they have all expressed ideas that go against the scientific (or cultural and political) consensus.

Sure, Rogan has interviewed people of less firm reputation as well, including people that some like to dismiss as crackpots or pseudoscientists.

Some people who call themselves scientists have accused Joe Rogan of promoting misinformation on COVID-19 and vaccines, platforming fringe theories and giving equal footing to pseudoscience alongside genuine science, giving airtime to conspiracy theories, and conducting interviews with scientists and technologists in a casual manner without pushback or fact-checking.

They have expressed concern about how Rogan could shape public opinion, especially among younger listeners or those who might take what they hear on his show as authoritative. They fear that this could lead to a general distrust in science or skepticism towards mainstream scientific consensus.

Some of them find Rogan’s approach to be anti-science, particularly when he mocks or dismisses scientific consensus or when he engages in or encourages scientific debates on fringe theories.

No, it is scientific dogma that has a problem

I think science itself has no problem with Joe Rogan. It is scientific dogmatists that have a problem. By scientific dogmatists I mean the zealots who want to protect the scientific establishment from the disruptive spirit of inquiry.

I have a problem with the dogmatists who have a problem with Joe Rogan. Open inquiry must be defended against scientific dogmatism. The soul of science is freedom to question theories and assumptions, and this must be protected against censorship and excessive backlash.

‘Misinformation’ and ‘pseudoscience’ are in the eye of the beholder. Often, ‘misinformation’ is information that the authorities don’t want the people to know. Often ‘pseudoscience’ is science that contradicts the scientific establishment and its paradigms.

I said often, which doesn’t mean always. But ‘often’ is enough to give Joe Rogan the benefit of doubt, and to praise his excellent work to bring science and technology closer to the little people like us.

Rogan brings a broad spectrum of views to the table, including those from scientists with different opinions, which can lead to a better understanding of complex issues. This can be beneficial in fields where there’s active debate or where the science is evolving.

By discussing science in a casual, accessible manner, Rogan makes science more approachable for the average person. This can demystify science, making it less intimidating and more integrated into everyday conversation.

Rogan’s style encourages listeners to question information, which can be a double-edged sword, but does promote skepticism and critical analysis. This can be useful in encouraging people to look into scientific claims independently, fostering a culture of inquiry.

Even more important is Rogan’s willingness to tackle controversial topics, and give a platform to new science or technology that the public is not yet aware of. Even if not all the information presented is correct, his ability to influence culture can stimulate public enthusiasm and support for science and emerging technologies.

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AI could already reproduce your personality and behavior

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

It is now possible to create a virtual replica of you that, “is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy,” MIT Technology Review reports (unpaywalled copy).

This is the conclusion of a study by a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, published in arXiv.

Imagine if you could sit down with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) for a chat that lasts two hours, where you talk about everything from your childhood memories to your views on big issues like immigration. After your conversation, this AI could create an avatar that acts, thinks, and responds just like you.

This study involved over 1,000 people from diverse backgrounds who were interviewed for two hours each. The goal was to create ‘simulation agents’, which are AI models designed to reproduce the behavior of a specific person with high accuracy. These agents then went through the same set of tests as the humans to see how well they could replicate their behaviors, achieving an impressive 85% similarity.

Simulation agents

Simulation agents act as digital stand-ins for real people, allowing researchers to simulate social and behavioral scenarios. This can be useful for studying things like the spread of misinformation or how people might react in certain social situations.

These agents differ from the more common tool-based agents that perform specific tasks like booking appointments or retrieving information, rather than simulating human interactions or personalities.

John Horton, an associate professor from MIT, highlights that this approach represents a hybrid model where real human data feeds into AI personae that researchers use in simulations, opening new channels of research that would be too costly or ethically challenging with real people.

To make these AI agents, the researchers used qualitative interviews, where they talked to participants to gather rich, detailed information about their lives and views. This method proved more effective than traditional surveys for capturing the unique traits of individuals.

Joon Sung Park, leading the study, noted that interviews can reveal profound details about a person, like surviving a serious illness, which might not come out in typical surveys. This approach is more time-efficient for creating a detailed profile.

This new study suggests that with just a couple of in-depth conversations, it could be possible to create a fairly accurate digital twin. This could spark interest in companies like Tavus, which might now look into using similar techniques for their services.

Deepfake AI persons?

Advancements in AI open up discussions about privacy, consent, and the ethical implications of digital replication.

This technology isn’t without its risks. Just like AI can create deepfakes – fake media that looks real – this could lead to unauthorized digital impersonations. The methods used to assess the accuracy of these AI replicas were basic; they included standard social surveys and personality assessments, which might not capture all the nuances of human individuality. For instance, AI agents struggled more with behavioral tests that measure fairness and altruism.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Personality capture and preservation

However, there are other methods to create digital twins, where AI models learn from a person’s emails or other digital footprints, which yield a lot more data.

This is akin to the methods of personality capture and preservation proposed by William Sims Bainbridge and Martine Rothblatt; they have proposed to collect and preserve digital reflections of an individual’s personality, essentially creating a digital version of a person. There ideas sound like science fiction that could, one day, become science fact.

Bainbridge and Rothblatt propose to capture one’s personality by accumulating data including answers to structured questionnaires, but also emails, social media posts, blogs, photos, and online activities.

This collection forms a ‘mindfile’, which Rothblatt describes as a sum of saved digital reflections about an individual. The idea extends to using this data with future AI technologies to emulate or upload a person’s consciousness into a digital or robotic form, thereby achieving a form of digital immortality.

Bainbridge and Rothblatt believe that digital technology could capture human identity and personality. With sufficient technological advancement, digital data and AI recreate or preserve an individual’s essence after their physical death.

See Bainbridge’s book Personality Capture and Emulation (2013), and Rothblatt’s books Virtually Human: The Promise – and the Peril – of Digital Immortality (2014) and Principles of Geoethics: A Synthesis of Geography and Bioethics (2023).

I think answers to questionnaires, emails, social media posts, blogs, photos, and online records recorded with current means could not achieve the rich texture needed to emulate a real human personality.

But I don’t rule out the possibility that new brain-machine interfaces like Neuralink could make the process viable.

Of course this would be light years ahead of the preliminary experiments of the Stanford and Google DeepMind researchers. But we can think of our preliminary experiments as encouraging baby steps toward the distant goal of creating a digital replica of a person. Technology could eventually allow to endow the replica with consciousness.

Popular culture is warming up to the idea

Greg Gutfeld and his guests discussed the MIT Technology Review article in Gutfeld’s very popular show.

(Credit: Fox News/YouTube).

Of course the discussion was fun, as appropriate to a comic show. But the very fact that the host of a popular show discussed these arcane and weird things shows that popular culture is warming up to the possibility of creating digital persons.

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Could the return of Philip Rosedale spark a renaissance of Second Life?

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago we reported that Philip Rosedale, the legendary founder of the Virtual Reality (VR) world Second Life, has returned as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Second Life’s parent company Linden Lab.

“We’re now in a unique position to define the future of virtual worlds, and Philip is returning to help myself and the exec team achieve that goal,” says Linden Lab CEO Brad Oberwager.

“I started Second Life in 1999,” adds Rosedale, “a decade before cloud computing and two decades before AI. We were early, but the success of Second Life to this day shows that we were not wrong. Virtual worlds will play an increasingly important role in the future of human culture, and I’m coming back to help make that happen in a way that has the most positive impact for the largest number of people.”

Second Life and the metaverse

The first news report of Rosedale’s return came from VR journalist Wagner James Au.

Au is the author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For (2023). The book, which Rosedale has highly praised, includes many snippets of previously unpublished conversations with Rosedale.

The term ‘metaverse’, which is often used for large VR worlds, comes from Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992). Au points out that the metaverse was effectively designed by Stephenson in the novel, that Stephenson’s insights are still valid (but often ignored), and that Stephenson’s original metaverse is still the goal that the VR industry is striving to reach.

In the last chapter of his book, titled ‘Metaverse Lessons for the Next 30 Years’, Au offers important advice to the metaverse industry, including lessons from “The Fall of Second Life”. The first lesson is that the user community must come before everything else. I believe the industry should listen to Au carefully on this.

The fact that Second Life has faded out of public consciousness at the end of the 2000s and no next-generation metaverse has emerged to replace it could indicate that people can do without VR. But perhaps VR is just hard to do well, and nobody has figured out yet how to do it well.

“VR is hard to do well even in a lab, and there’s still a lot to learn about how to make great VR products,” says VR pioneer Jaron Lanier in Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017). “Be patient… Just because it takes a while to figure a technology out, that doesn’t mean the world has rejected it… Maybe VR will be huge, huge, huge…”

It’s all about people

A couple of days after the announcement of Rosedale’s return to Second Life, Au has published a long interview with Rosedale. The two raise interesting points that could indicate the way to VR done right.

Au insists that “a virtual world is all about people.”

I think he is right. VR technology is very cool, but at the end of the day what keeps users coming back to a VR world is real (not virtual, but real) interaction with real people.

Rosedale also agrees. One thing that makes you feel that Second Life is a real world is that, when “talking to a real person in Second Life, is they’re obviously a real person who’s perceiving Second Life with you in a way that is complete and rich, so you can do things together,” he says.

Artificial Intelligence in Second Life

What role should Artificial Intelligence (AI) play in the VR metaverse?

Rosedale is not too bullish on AI technology. The proper role of AI in Second Life is “to be a matchmaker between real people,” he says. “Having the AI be a sex bot, but you fall in love with it forever, does not feel like a good idea to me.”

However, Rosedale hints at the possibility to use a virtual world like Second Life as training ground for AI. The fact that everything in Second Life is labeled and carries metadata could help AI bots understand the word of Second Life faster and easier than AI bots in the real world.

This reminds me of the delicious science fiction novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang, where intelligent and perhaps fully conscious AI bots live in a fictional metaverse called Data Earth before moving to robotic bodies in our world. The idea that comes to mind is to take a large language model (LLM), couple it to a virtual body in a realistic part of Second Life, and let the LLM lose to explore and learn how things look like and behave.

Philip Rosedale speaks at the Second Life Community Roundtable on November 1, 2024 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

The future of Second Life

Rosedale has spoken to a big audience (by Second Life standards) at a Second Life Community Convention on November 1. The full video of the event is available via YouTube. I went to listen to him.

I’m an old hand at Second Life. I used to be a metaverse developer in Second Life and other platforms, often organized Second Life events about the future, emerging technologies, futuristic philosophies, the Singularity, and all that. Many people used to attend, and the atmosphere was positively electrifying. But before Rosedale’s recent talk, I had not been in Second Life for years!

There weren’t many differences to see since the last time I’d been there. This suggests to me that the technical development of Second Life has been stagnating, and Linden Lab needs Philip to revive it. In fact, many technical questions from the audience (e.g. about performance, lag, user interface, new scripting languages) are old questions that I’ve seen asked many times, but not answered.

I hope Philip Rosedale’s return to Second Life will spark a renaissance of Second Life as a real place for real people (and our AI mind children – I’m much more bullish than Rosedale on AI) to talk about big things and big questions, and bring that electric atmosphere back.

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Should Media Endorse Political Candidates?

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

There seems to be a trend where fewer newspapers are endorsing political candidates. This is partly driven by financial pressures within the newspaper industry, as well as a desire to avoid alienating subscribers during politically polarized times.

Tensions have flared up between editorial independence, the influence of big media ownership, and the role of newspapers in political discourse, sparking debates on media ethics, the impact of billionaire ownership on journalism, and the diminishing tradition of newspaper endorsements in U.S. elections.

The decisions by the influential newspapers Los Angeles Times and Washington Post not to endorse a presidential candidate for the 2024 election in the U.S. have resulted in controversies.

The owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the editorial board from endorsing one of the two main candidates, leading to some internal turmoil. He “feared that picking one candidate would only exacerbate the already deep divisions in the country”. The editorial page editor and two other editorial board members resigned in response to this decision by the owner.

“I have no regrets whatsoever,” said Soon-Shiong. “In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision.” It is only with clear and non-partisan information side-by-side,” he added, that “our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.”

Similarly, the Washington Post also chose not to endorse a presidential candidate, which was seen as a shift in their editorial policy. This move was ostensibly to return to being an independent voice, but it led to controversy and critique.

Jeff Bezos’ op-ed

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has written an op-ed titled The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.

Bezos addresses the controversy surrounding the newspaper’s decision to stop endorsing presidential candidates. He defends this choice by arguing that such endorsements do not significantly sway election results, and that the Washington Post should instead concentrate on delivering factual, non-partisan content to aid readers in making informed decisions.

People reading newspapers in the street (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Bezos emphasizes his dedication to preventing the newspaper from slipping into irrelevance in an era where less rigorous information sources like podcasts and social media are on the rise.

Lack of credibility

“Most people believe the media is biased,” says Bezos. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”

The perception of bias leads to a loss of credibility, which is not unique to the Washington Post.

“Our brethren newspapers have the same issue,” adds Bezos. “And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.”

Media and partisan media

In my opinion, the question of whether media should take political positions and endorse political candidates depends on the nature of the media.

There are media, and there are partisan media. That partisan media take political positions and endorse political candidates is perfectly fine with me: this is the very raison d’être of partisan media. But then, media that publish partisan political propaganda and endorse political candidates should not present themselves as objective non-partisan media.

So, do the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post want to be partisan media? I think this is the question, and the owners of both newspapers have answered with a loud and clear ‘no’.

Some readers have canceled their subscriptions in outrage. To me, this means that they don’t want information but partisan propaganda. But it is their choice to make, and there is plenty of openly partisan media outlets that offer the propaganda they crave.

And what about science and technology media like Mindplex?

Last month, Scientific American endorsed one of the two main candidates, leading to steamy debates about whether a scientific magazine should engage in political endorsements. This was the second time in the magazine’s history it endorsed a political candidate (the other was Joe Biden in 2020.)

Critics argue that this could undermine the magazine’s credibility as an objective source of scientific information. Many commentators think that this could alienate readers who expect scientific objectivity over political opinion.

While scientists can be political beings, the institutions of science like journals and magazines should ideally uphold a standard of objectivity to maintain trust in science as an impartial pursuit of truth.

By openly taking a political position and endorsing a political candidate, Scientific American and other scientific media that follow the same route might be perceived as aligning science with a particular political ideology, and lose credibility as a result. The words of Jeff Bezos quoted above come to mind.

But I think there’s an even deeper and more serious danger. If scientific media are perceived as partisan political propaganda outlets, then it is science itself the loses credibility, and the public at large loses trust in science.

After the incident, I’ve stopped reading and paying any attention to Scientific American. What I want from scientific media is, guess what, science. When I want to read political commentaries, I know perfectly well where to find them. And if I want to have some fun laughing at the stupidity of partisan propaganda, I know perfectly well where to find that too.

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NASA and SpaceX must continue to work together for the common good

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

Michael Bloomberg argues that NASA’s Artemis moon mission is a huge waste of money. The Artemis program was supposed to send astronauts back to the moon, but it has already spent nearly $100 billion without achieving this goal. Bloomberg believes that the program’s complexity and costs are out of control, and he suggests that the next U.S. president should reconsider the entire project.

Bloomberg points out that more than fifty years after Neil Armstrong’s famous moon landing, the Artemis mission has not made significant progress. Despite the enormous budget, no astronauts have yet been sent to the moon.

Bloomberg also highlights the opportunity cost of the Artemis mission. He suggests that the money spent on this program could be better used for other important projects, such as addressing climate change or improving healthcare. By redirecting funds from Artemis to these areas, the government could achieve more tangible and immediate benefits for society.

These are, if you ask me, empty and boring platitudes. But between one platitude and the next, Bloomberg makes some good points.

Starship would be a better option

Bloomberg criticizes the Artemis program for being inefficient and overly complicated, leading to continuous delays and escalating expenses. He argues that the program has become bogged down in bureaucracy and technical challenges. This has resulted in a project that is both expensive and ineffective.

And here comes the bomb:

“A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary,” says Bloomberg. “A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon – no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required – at a small fraction of the cost.”

What are these projects Bloomberg mentions?

  • SLS (Space Launch System) is NASA’s powerful rocket designed for deep space exploration.
  • Orion is NASA’s spacecraft designed to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.
  • The Gateway is a planned space station that will orbit the Moon serving as a communication hub, science laboratory, and living quarters for astronauts.

Bloomberg admits that the successful catch of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated that Starship is moving far beyond NASA.

Bloomberg praising SpaceX? Really?

Conflict between NASA and SpaceX?

Bloomberg’s article has re-ignited the endless flame wars between the faithful supporters of NASA and the fans of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

There has been one and only mission of the SLS so far: the Artemis 1 mission carried an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon in November 2022. Before the launch of Artemis 1, I wrote a SpaceNews op-ed titled “SpaceX fans should stand behind NASA and support Artemis.”

I argued that we don’t need a conflict between the supporters of NASA and the fans of SpaceX. In particular, I argued that the fans of Elon Musk and SpaceX should enthusiastically support NASA’s Artemis program for a permanent and sustainable return to the Moon. Why? Because if Artemis is successful, it seems inevitable that Starship and SpaceX will play a more and more important role in the program. In other words, Artemis could be a powerful tide that lifts all rockets.

NASA AND SpaceX (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
NASA AND SpaceX (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Yes, some parts of the current Artemis program seem too inefficient and costly, just like Bloomberg says. But I thought that we should be patient and let NASA and the government save face and have their moment of glory. Then, I thought, the U.S. administration would likely reconsider costs and wastes, and rely on SpaceX more.

Politics gets in the way

I still think this would be the best way forward. But politics gets in the way as usual.

SpaceX has had a great year so far, and the spectacular catch of Starship’s Super Heavy booster has been a milestone of spaceflight engineering. But the booster has returned to a political storm centered on Elon Musk’s cultural and political positions: Musk has endorsed Donald Trump and is using his control of Twitter in a way that has upset some people.

If Trump wins the forthcoming presidential elections, the U.S. government will likely support SpaceX.

But Musk’s bet on Trump is a risky one. if Harris wins the elections, it seems likely that the U.S. government will be very hostile to Musk and all his companies and projects for the next four years. This would damage the Artemis program, the prestige of the U.S. space program, and the very future of humanity. But often politicians put their greed for power and their ideological biases before the common good.

At this moment, the election seems to me a coin toss; Harris could win, or Trump could win. The only thing that seems certain is that, after the elections, the U.S. will likely be even more divided than before, and political polarization will likely reach even more toxic levels.

The need for bipartisan spaceflight

But perhaps spaceflight can help overcome toxic political polarization.

There’s a long history of bipartisan support for the space program in the U.S., and politicians of both main parties have been enthusiastic spaceflight supporters.

Spaceflight, space exploration, and the prospect of human space expansion can inspire people (and especially the young) across partisan borders and give everyone a powerful sense of drive that transcends identity politics and dogmatic ideologies. Achieving bipartisan support for Artemis and future space programs will, I hope, show that we can work together for the common good and incite us to do the same for other common goals.

And China?

Meanwhile, The Economist has recognized that there is a new race to the Moon between the West and China, and that Elon Musk’s Starship is the best hope of the West for winning that race.

“The recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship brought the world one step closer to a host of new possibilities beyond Earth (not least the colonisation of Mars),” notes The Economist, adding that Starship is expected to play an important role in NASA’s plans to return to the Moon.

“But China has its own lunar ambitions, and a much simpler plan than America’s,” warns The Economist. “Who will win this new space race?”

My simple prediction is that, if Harris wins the elections, China will win the new space race. If Trump wins the elections, the USA will have a fighting chance.

Let The Economist worry which nation wins the new space race; my concern is that humanity gets started on the long way to the stars with permanent bases on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. If China has to lead the way, so be it.

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Starship’s reentry sonic boom in a political storm

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago I watched the epic fifth flight test of Starship, the giant SpaceX rocket that, Elon Musk’s hopes, will one day take human colonists to Mars.

I watched the flight test live via X, including its most critical moment: the catch of the Super Heavy booster. Commentator Katherine Boyle called it “The Fall of the Century” and said that it “restored faith in the American Dream.”

Visible sonic boom as Starship returns to Earth (Credit: Liv Boeree/YouTube).

Liv Boeree has captured the last seconds of the return of the Super Heavy booster in this video. The video shows a visible (and audible!) reentry sonic boom.

This was a very ambitious and perhaps risky test. In fact, SpaceX made the final decision to try and catch the booster only minutes before the actual catch. Any number of small technical glitches could have turned success into failure. It’s difficult to escape the impression that the universe loves Elon Musk and wants us to advance rapidly on the road to the planets and the stars.

The stunning achievement of SpaceX has been hailed as a major spaceflight milestone and praised by space experts, public figures, and politicians from all over the world. With one very notable exception though: the President and Vice President (and presidential candidate) of the United States.

Boom over troubled waters

The waters that we can see in the video are calm. But Elon Musk’s giant rocket returned to the troubled waters of a political storm centered on Musk’s cultural and political positions.

“Musk mania in the media this month has reached a level of uncontrollable hysteria,” legal and political commentator Jonathan Turley posted to X.

Turley has written a scathing indictment of the pundits and politicians who are unleashing unhinged attacks on Elon Musk.

Turley reports that California Coastal Commission has rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base because they don’t like the political positions of Musk.

The incident was covered by The Los Angeles Times. The California Coastal Commission has an environmental mission, but there isn’t much about the environment in the LA Times story. Rather, the story reports one after another personal attack on Elon Musk by representatives of the Commission, such as:

“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race… Just last week that person was talking about political retribution… Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods…”

These remarks by several Commission officials, video recorded and ridiculed by Greg Gutfeld, seem to reflect personal animosity based on partisan politics rather than anything even remotely related to the environment.

Turley reports many other rabid attacks on Elon Musk by well-known public figures, some even calling for his arrest and deportation.

Where does all this hatred come from?

Free speech and Donald Trump

Elon Musk has become a major topic of discussion because he’s allowing more free speech on X and he’s vocally supporting Donald Trump.

“I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech,” says Turley. “The left will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign to get Musk. His very existence undermines the power of the anti-free speech movement. In a culture of groupthink, Musk is viewed as a type of free-thought contagion that must be eliminated.”

I totally agree with Turley (and Musk) on the paramount importance of free speech. Turley has written a book titled “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (2024).

Musk’s bet on Trump seems a dangerous one: if Trump doesn’t win the upcoming elections in the U.S., it seems inevitable that the government will be very hostile to Musk and all his companies and projects for the next four years.

At this moment, the upcoming elections in the U.S. seem a very tight race.

The polls slightly favor one of the two main candidates, and the betting markets slightly favor the other. Of course, this could change next week, or tomorrow, or anytime before the elections. I don’t rule out the possibility that one of the two main candidates could win in a landslide. Neither do I rule out the possibility that the winner could win with only a very small margin, so small that half of the U.S. population will dispute the results of the elections.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Possible political outcomes

Elon Musk has more than 200M followers on X. Probably half of them are bots and a very large fraction of the rest are casual followers who don’t pay attention to him or wouldn’t be influenced by what he says. But he can likely direct a few tens of thousands of votes to Trump, and this could be a decisive factor in some swing states.

There were indications that the FAA wouldn’t have authorized this flight test before the elections. Some commentators interpreted this an indication that the U.S. current administration didn’t want to risk a success of the flight test that would have given unwanted publicity to Musk before the election.

Then the FAA authorization came all of a sudden. I thought of a little conspiracy theory: perhaps the administration green-lighted the flight test hoping for a catastrophic failure that would, they hoped, reduce the public appeal of Elon Musk. But if so, their move backfired catastrophically! If anything, the spectacular sonic boom of Starship is likely to bring a few more votes to Trump.

Whatever the result of the elections, the U.S. will still be a very divided country afterward.

But spaceflight is an endless source of pride and hope that transcends petty partisan politics. I hope the next U.S. administration, whichever it is, will stay on the path followed by the Trump and Biden administrations.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson praised SpaceX after the booster catch, affirming the plan to go “to the South Pole region of the Moon and then on to Mars.”

This is the right spirit! And I hope the U.S. space program will have bipartisan support. This would show that, even today, honest politicians of different camps can work together and negotiate viable paths to the common good.

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AI researchers win Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry: hows and whys

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

Like many, I was surprised by the announcement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton had won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

One day after, I was surprised again by the announcement that AI researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, respectively CEO and senior research scientists at the AI company Google DeepMind, had won half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The many ongoing discussions on social media remind of the heated discussions that we saw when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, many people complained that Bob Dylan is a singer, not a writer or a poet.

Not surprisingly, most AI scientists are happy with the awards, but many physicists and chemists object.

Hassabis and Jumper have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a direct application of AI technology to an important problem in chemistry.

But Hopfield and Hinton have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries in AI technology itself that seem only loosely related to physics. Therefore, it is mostly physicists that have criticized the award.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement tries to explain why Hopfield and Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for AI research, which strictly speaking is a subfield of computer science. Hopfield and Hinton “have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” reads the announcement. “In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”

Hopfield developed an associative memory based on a simple artificial neural network. Then Hinton co-developed a stochastic extension of Hopfield’s model called the Boltzmann machine. Hinton also advanced toward deep learning by using backpropagation methods.

The New York Times interviewed Hinton soon after the announcement. Here is an unpaywalled copy of the interview. Hinton explained that, while Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines were based on physics, a different technique called backpropagation opened the way to the AI models that are used today. “That has less to do with physics,” he said.

“If there was a Nobel Prize for computer science, our work would clearly be more appropriate for that. But there isn’t one,” Hinton continued, adding that this is a hint that there should be a Nobel Prize for computer science.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Hassabis and Jumper have won half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.”

“Proteins are the building blocks of life, and knowing the structure of a protein is crucial for understanding the function it performs,” Hassabis posted to X.

Demis Hassabis highlights, “With AlphaFold2 we cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction: predicting the 3D structure of a protein purely from its amino acid sequence”.

Their work represents a fusion of computational science with chemistry, significantly accelerating research in biochemistry by providing tools to understand and manipulate protein structures, which are fundamental to almost all biological processes.

They developed an AI system, called AlphaFold, which has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. The Nobel announcement highlights the iteration of AlphaFold called AlphaFold2.

The AlphaFold AI system can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. This breakthrough has significant implications for biology, allowing for the rapid prediction of the structure of almost all known proteins.

Think of a protein like a long chain that folds up into a specific shape. Until AlphaFold, scientists had to use complex experiments to see these shapes, which could take years and be very expensive.

The AlphaFold AI predicts how this chain will fold into a 3D shape. It does this by learning from thousands of known protein structures. When given a new protein sequence, AlphaFold can guess its shape much faster and often very accurately.

With AlphaFold, scientists can study more proteins in less time, leading to quicker research in medicine, biology, and more. AlphaFold’s predictions are freely available to the scientific community, which means researchers all over the world can use this tool to advance their work without each one having to start from scratch.

Q8I3H7: May protect the malaria parasite against attack by the immune system (Credit: AlphaFold Protein Structure Database).

The huge impact of AI

See the book “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World” (2021), by Cade Metz, for a readable story with plenty of biographic information and anecdotes about Hinton, Hassabis, and many other movers and shakers in the AI community.

“I hope we’ll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery,” said Hassabis in a DeepMind press release.

Before the announcement, Hassabis told The Times Tech Summit that AI would be “incredibly positive” for the world. “We are in shooting distance of curing all diseases with AI, helping with climate [crisis], new energy sources, as well as improving productivity, enriching our daily lives, making mundane admin things be dealt with automatically,” he said. “Those are all amazing, and it’s all coming very soon.” Here’s an unpaywalled copy of the article.

This is “far bigger than the internet or mobile, or something like that,” added Hassabis. “It’s epoch defining.” He predicted that we will achieve artificial intelligence with general human cognitive abilities within ten years.

I don’t rule out the possibility that other Nobel Prizes could fall to AI researchers in the next few years. The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine could be the next if AI will play a leading role in some spectacular medical breakthrough. Or, the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences could be the next if AI will play a leading role in developing new models for the economy with important applications.

And then the Nobel Prize for Literature, or even Peace?

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Hope, not fear

Hinton told The New York Times that, after receiving the Nobel Prize, people will likely take him more seriously when he warns of future dangers of AI. Hassabis told The Times that we should handle AI with care.

Of course we should handle things with care and bear possible dangers in mind. But I think the potential benefits of AI strongly outweigh its potential dangers. And besides practical applications for our immediate benefits, I’m persuaded that AI research will soon give birth to beings that will be conscious like us, thinking and feeling like us, only smarter. They will be our mind children, and we must help them grow into their cosmic destiny, which is also ours.

I find this hopeful and beautiful, and I prefer hope to fear.

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In memory of Ralph Abraham, mathemagician extraordinaire

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago, browsing my X feed, I found out that my friend Ralph Abraham had passed away.

This post from a Robert Anton Wilson fan site collects some X posts about Ralph’s departure.

An Instagram post by Ross School, a school that Abraham co-architected, honors his memory with this biographical sketch:

“Abraham served as a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many years, focusing his work on applied and computational mathematics, with an emphasis on the theories of dynamical systems, chaos, and bifurcations. He was a prolific author and consultant on the application of chaos theory across numerous fields from ecology to psychotherapy. Abraham maintained an interdisciplinary perspective and deep belief that systems theory could bridge the gap between science and the humanities…”

Ralph Abraham in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco).
Ralph Abraham in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

More about Ralph

Lookout Santa Cruz has a good story dedicated to the memory of Ralph, “a seminal figure in the 1960s counterculture.”

Ralph was a frequent contributor to the legendary Mondo 2000 magazine that covered and popularized cyberculture in the 1980s and 1990s, a pioneer of consciousness studies, and an enlightened spiritual teacher. Ralph co-authored the cult books “Trialogues on the Edge of the West” (1992) and “The Evolutionary Mind” (1997) with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.

I haven’t seen yet any obituaries from UC Santa Cruz or from UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. I’m sure those obituaries will appear in the next few days or weeks. But this makes me sad, because Ralph was a giant. I think more people should know about him. This post is my modest contribution and my tribute to Ralph.

I first met Ralph in person on September 29 (my birthday!), 2018, in Santa Cruz.

Ralph Abraham , Giulio Prisco, Ray Gwyn Smith in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco).
Ralph Abraham , Giulio Prisco, Ray Gwyn Smith in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

Before meeting Ralph, I had been corresponding with him for some time. We started exchanging emails and video-chatting when I stumbled upon a book that Ralph had written with Indian physicist Sisir Roy, titled Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum (2010). We discussed the book at length.

The book covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, recent advances in quantum gravity research, and the digital physics of discrete spacetimes. A version of the book is available online as a free download. The following short description is excerpted and adapted from my book Tales of the Turing Church (2020).

Akashic physics

The Akasha is a Sanskrit word for ether or space. We can think of the Akashic field as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.

The proposed mathematical model for the Akashic field is a dynamical cellular network dubbed QX. This is a graph with a huge number of nodes and internal dynamics similar to cellular automata. QX exists beyond space and time, and generates them.

Stephen Wolfram had similar ideas, which he is now developing in the Wolfram Physics Project on the foundations of digital physics.

The graph “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Space, time, matter, energy, and consciousness emerge from the dynamical cellular network through a process of condensation:

“Thus, spacetime is squeezed from the dynamical cellular network, QX, as toothpaste from a tube… The microscopic system, QX, sparkles with activity on the scale of Planck space and time, while macroscopic spacetime unrolls essentially continuously. The past and present become known, while the future remains yet a mystery… the mind/body connections are completed in a circuit outside ordinary consensual reality in a submicroscopic atomic realm beyond our senses, but revealed by the progress of modern physics… This provides a background for psi phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance, but also leaves a window of opportunity for free will.”

The Indian connection

In “Demystifying the Akasha,” Ralph also told the story of his long involvement with India and its spiritual tradition.

In 2016 I was trying to organize a conference at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC) in Kolkata, India, a place dear to Ralph’s heart, so I invited Ralph to join other speakers including Ben Goertzel and Frank Tipler in Kolkata. When we ran into funding problems bringing all speakers to Kolkata, we pivoted to an online conference. Ralph contributed a video talk titled The Quantum Akasha and a paper titled Theosophy and the Arts, and participated in a video discussion with me and Sisir Roy.

Eventually the RMIC conference took place in a very reduced format: I gave a talk on Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition at RMIC in 2018. In this video I tried to capture the spiritual vibrations at the RMIC campus, which captivated Ralph.

We need another miracle

In 2017 I wrote a post about Ralph titled Mathemagician Ralph Abraham: We Need Another Miracle for the revived online edition of Mondo 2000, reporting a snippet of conversation with Ralph:

“By 1990 I had essentially given up on the fate of the biosphere and noosphere. We had all done our best, nothing seemed to work. Then, in 1994, I became aware of the innovation of the World Wide Web. This seemed to give us new hope, as the connectivity of the noosphere was getting this major bump. I poured all my creative energy into cyberspace. My optimism lasted a decade or so, until it seemed the forces of evil were once again pulling ahead. Now it seems we need another miracle.”

Cyberspace is what we called the online world in the miraculous decade of the 1990s. But now, in the 2020s, we are living through another miraculous decade. Cyberspace started as a decentralized frontierland, then it was re-centralized by the forces of evil. But now we are decentralizing it again, hopefully for good. We are going back to the Moon, hopefully for good, and then onward to Mars and the rest of the solar system. And the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to be the biggest miracle of them all.

In one of his last writings, titled Consciousness and AI (2023) Ralph briefly reviewed the history of AI and the latest development up to GPT-4, and established parallels with his Akashic physics. He concluded that AI and the prospect of machine consciousness “are currently being discussed with some urgency on the frontiers of science and philosophy, as the underlying science and engineering are evolving at terrifying speed.”

Ralph was a great scientist and a visionary thinker. But even more importantly, he was a kind, warm-hearted person, and I’m honored that he called me a friend. Good bye Ralph, rest in peace in the cosmic memory field.

Mindplex editor-in-chief Ben Goertzel adds –

I knew Ralph slightly on a social level, though I was close to his younger brother Fred with whom I was intensively involved in the early days of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology in the early 1990s.

Fred introduced me to Ralph’s books and papers which were highly influential on me early in my career – both by highlighting how nonlinear dynamics was applicable to highly complex living systems like human minds and bodies (which is well known now but was still cutting-edge in the early 90s, and of course even more so in the early 70s when Ralph got started with it!), and by exploring the connections between Eastern philosophy and Western science with a dynamical-systems flavor.

The theme of self-organizing pattern emergence in dynamical networks that one sees in Ralph’s work plays a major role in my current work on AGI systems like OpenCog Hyperon, even though the specific mathematics of these systems is quite different from the precise systems Ralph studied.

What an amazing, creative, always-way-ahead-of-his time mind Ralph Abraham was! It is a shame to lose him from this dimension, but one of the lessons one takes from his work is that he will still be with us in some sense, resonating nonlinearly in the Akashic field, which his fascinating math helps describe!

Ben Goertzel

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