Chasing a Light Beam – Chapter 11: “Wasted Time”
WASTED TIME
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
-Woody Allen
Ben Bob was back at the freezer, pouring the syrupy cold vodka into his glass once again. He was on top of the problem now; there was no judgment or re-evaluation of things as he went along. His notions had evolved over quite some time, never carelessly. The final result was alive already in the particle configuration of his brain, like a Mozartian concerto, fully completed before written down.
He slumped back into the chair and positioned the ottoman. His glance circled the room as if for orientation, but instead he was diverted. His gaze came to rest on a music video disc beside the high-def plasma screen. It was the Eagles’ “Farewell Number One” tour from Melbourne. It had provided him many happy — and many unhappy — hours. He slipped the disc into the player slot and selected the track he needed to hear. A laser beam interacted with the disc’s microscopic peaks and valleys, extracting digital strings of zeroes and ones. There was science in the background; in the foreground were simply pictures and music.
Looking scruffy, sitting behind a behemoth drum set, Don Henley spoke to him in song:
So you live from day to day, and you dream about tomorrow.
And the hours go by like minutes, and the shadows come to stay;
So you take a little something to make them go away.
I could have done so many things, baby,
If I could only stop my mind from wondrin’ what I left behind,
And from worryin’ ‘bout this wasted time.
Ben Bob took “another shot of courage” from his glass. The music went on:
So you can get on with your search, baby,
And I can get on with mine,
And maybe someday we will find
That it wasn’t really wasted time.
Ben Bob thought a little, and cried a little, and looked around the room a lot. Composed, he picked up the recorder.
I doubt I’ve ever spoken to a really smart person. The odds are against it, for sure, because there haven’t been that many of them. But I’ve read about them, and I’ve read about their ideas. Really smart people come up with great ideas, sometimes so great that they seem absurd. The great ideas the people around me have discovered mostly involve whipped cream and K-Y jelly; nothing absurd at all. It’s a rare person that can find happiness and satisfaction in the unweaving of a magical rainbow into its mundane spectrum, or in the discovery of the scent-source in a pile of rat droppings. The really smart ones, the ones who make a difference, are pig-slop happy to live in a world that appears one way, knowing it’s something else altogether. They’ve got a special tool.
To the guy who has only a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. When you’ve got a human brain that evolved about a hundred thousand years ago and hasn’t changed much since, you experience only the world that brain can interpret. And none of it is reality. It’s a convincing hallucination of individual entities taking distinct paths through time. But that’s not reality. The real world is the sum of amplitude flows between multi-particle configurations, a sum that cancels out all but a narrow path through history: the spectrum that our brains have evolved to detect. I know, because I read about quantum mechanics. Metal detectors don’t detect sand, but that’s mostly what makes up the beach; human brains don’t detect quantum field fluctuations, but that’s the substance of our universe.
The special tool the really smart guys have is mathematics. There’s no way a human brain can describe the universe in words; language is just an approximation for the concepts held within the numbers.
He held the recorder at arm’s length in front of his eyes and stared at it.
Who am I talking to?
It was a question partly stimulated by the vodka, yet one he had been asking for years.
The universe is a sonnet written in math. But Ben Bob didn’t speak math. Oh, he could say the equivalent of, ‘What is your name?’ or ‘Where is the train station?’, but they were only the words of a tourist in a foreign land. The cliché is that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge can be worse, when it comes too late. It was unreasonable, but he was lost; his map did not depict accurately the territory in which he lived.
Chemical combinations capable of replication first occurred on Earth about three and a half billion years ago. Another two and three-quarter billion years passed before life moved up to the level of multi-cellular. Hominids appeared five million years ago; Homo sapiens are only one hundred thousand years old. For ninety percent of the time that modern humans have existed, the skill of growing food was unknown. Yet Ben Bob and computers are the same age. Things are speeding up.
PawPaw, Ben Bob’s maternal grandfather, was born in 1892. In his early life, there was no electricity, no automobile, no recorded music, no antibiotics. His life expectancy at birth was forty-nine years. When he was seventy-seven, he watched a live telecast of astronauts walking on the moon. He died at eighty-nine, having lived ninety percent longer than predicted. How many times had the things he banked on as gospel proved to be false? How could he deal with a world where nothing known was true? Ben felt he knew the answer, unacceptable as it was: PawPaw never asked.
Ben Bob was compelled to ask. He felt that almost all humans are, and always have been, just along for the ride. A tiny number of individuals has been responsible for all important discoveries, progress, and benefits enjoyed by the remainder of mankind. Very small genetic variations can have a significant effect on the “source code” that runs the brain’s “programs”. Chimps and humans have ninety-five percent similar DNA: at most, twelve megabytes of extra “software” transforms chimps into humans. How much smaller must be the difference between a bozo and an Einstein, both of the same species?
Humans have developed a good deal of knowledge, but knowledge does not change the structure of the brain. Every new brain has to acquire the knowledge from scratch. The “hardware” and the “source code” is virtually the same as it was one hundred thousand years ago. New discoveries make way for newer discoveries, but the actual interpreter of the information, the brain, remains untouched. To top it off, we have no access to the experience of true reality. So, Ben had wondered, what’s the purpose?
When Ben had begun to think about that light beam, and its other close associates in the physical world, the only thing he knew about quantum mechanics was that the mega-brained physicist Richard Feynman had said that no one understood it. Why would it be necessary, Ben wondered, that the very first brain to evolve the property of consciousness would also have the ability to understand the reality of the universe in which it had evolved? Would such knowledge add a survival skill? The understanding of a reality that cannot be directly encountered doesn’t seem necessary for survival and reproduction, he reasoned. And the weirdness of true reality? One of the discoverers of the equations behind it, Neils Bohr, had said, Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. Ben didn’t really try to understand it, because he knew that the foreign language of deep math limited his knowledge to words, and that words were simply a poetic expression of the raw knowledge within the equations.
Ben’s reality was one that he could see and touch. True reality, the one involving the summation of amplitude flows in multi-particle configurations, runs in the background, governing everything, but unnoticed. Human brains can address true reality only indirectly, through mathematics. Ben’s brain was confined to the narrow part of reality described as human consciousness. It is perhaps a cruel twist of evolution that the first brains to develop consciousness along with it developed the realization of their inability to understand themselves or their surroundings. It was within that conflictual consciousness that he experienced his existence, however fantasized; he strived with inadequate tools to describe his existence, to understand Ben Bob Boyle.
Ben mentally reverse-engineered himself, down from organ systems to organs to cells to organelles to nuclei to chromosomes to genes to DNA nucleotides to DNA bases. Eventually, had he been capable of continuing the unraveling, he would have reached the composite multi-particle quark configurations or at least their amplitude flows, but that was beyond Ben’s consciousness. Lest he should feel “special” or “on top of the chain”, he knew that the same four DNA bases that made up his own genetic code were identical to those coding all living things: plants, animals, and bacteria. All earthly life is certain to have a single common ancestor, the earliest of the replicators. So, where is the part that is alive? Where is the thought, the imagination, the love, the anger, the soul? With a minor rearrangement of the chemicals, Ben Bob could be a redwood tree, a mosquito, or a gonorrhea diplococcus!
His oldest relative was a bacterium, and Ben was a survival system for its genes. He was being asked to believe that rearranging a few chemical bases created consciousness and the ability to write poetry and sculpt Michelangelo’s David and invent Newton’s calculus. Not only was he being asked to accept it; he was being told that it was a fact, and that non-acceptance was a problem embedded in the observer, not in reality. How and why could he be just an elaborate survival system for replicating chemicals?
While chasing the light beam, Ben Bob found that the “how” answered the “why”. The “how” was Darwinian evolution: the method of expression for the chemical configurations that have the right stuff to become ancestors. The “information” in the configurations that fail to replicate and persist is lost; the successful chemical replicators are computers, passing their digital code along, some of it unchanged for millions of years, but disguised by the elaborate life-support systems that surround it, such as redwoods and humans. The “why” is moot; there is no “why”. There is only survival and replication of genes.
The chase led Ben to the coldly accurate summation of an evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good; nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. And where in all this is God? Dawkins again: We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Ben was a survival machine for a set of chemicals and their digital information, existing at the tip of an enormous iceberg of multi-particle amplitude flows, with all but a narrow pathway of possibilities canceling one another, leaving him with what his consciousness perceived as the world. When one gets the right answer for the wrong reason, does it make a difference? When one has years of happiness in a relationship based on the premise of love, and then finds that premise to have been false all along, does it undo the happiness? When a life is spent on important projects that are found to have no significance in the universe, is it wasted time?
Vodka in hand, some of his words were becoming slurred.
The chemical taskmasters, the li’l gene bastards, may have screwed themselves when the consciousness configuration became a successful ancestor. At that moment the gene survival machine became capable of balking at the instructions. Our team, the sapiens, used the consciousness thingy to bypass some of the orders. Since then, it’s not always the best genes that persist, and the genes themselves are coming under attack.
Gene causing a dementia? Get rid of it. Heart wearin’ out early? Re-route the blood and put in some new valves. Too dumb to come in outta the rain? Fund a program to take care of him and let him reproduce. Einstein-clone worried about overpopulating the Earth? Clip his cords and stop the flow of his DNA. Not willin’ to live one day at a time? Plan for the future.
And that’s what they’re doin’ now, the really smart sapiens. They’re plannin’ for the future. They’re headin’ for the Singularity.
Ben’s light-beam chase revealed the one technological advance promised to be of equal importance to the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth: the technological singularity, the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. An intelligence that would be able to rewrite and improve its own source code, a task no human can accomplish. And then do it again, and again, becoming faster and smarter each time. Human brains work at the snail-pace speed of individual neuronal synapses, the computational power coming from the parallel configuration, allowing the trillions of connections to aid one another. The computers after the singularity will perform those same calculations at the speed of electronics, the pace of the light beam. They will use that speed and power to design better computers and more powerful programs that will be able to address all known problems, including the inevitable ones they themselves create. They will address the core reality of the universe itself. They will design methods to accomplish transhumanism, the interface of humans and intelligent machines. There will be no incurable illnesses, and no need for death. Current information in the morning will be obsolete in the afternoon. Earth will become just another small destination in the multiplicity of amplitude flows, as three and a half billion years of evolution reaches out to the limits of space-time.
The exact nature of life after the singularity cannot be known to humans, because of the limitation of the very brains that are working to make it happen. The abilities of the human brain fail when asked to extrapolate the details of “smarter than human”. The math has not yet been invented; all known algorithms break down as they approach the point of “improve the code that improves the code”.
Ben Bob had the recorder in one hand, and the glass in the other, and so far, he had been lucky enough not to confuse one for the other.
Tryin’ to imagine livin’ after the singularity is like tryin’ to imagine no beginnin’ of time. Ev’ry livin’ human can imagine life without an end, ‘cause that’s what they’ve all had, so far. But almos’ no one can imagine life with no beginnin’, ‘cause no one has ever ‘sperienced it. My ol’ brain jus’ won’t do it. The really smart guys are goin’ to get it figgered out, but it’ll be too late for ol’ Ben Bob. I’m one of those who’s jus’ been along for the ride. I never shoulda started chasin’ that light beam. They tol’ me I cudn’t catch it.
Next on Ben Bob’s agenda was to be an attempt to stand up, and walk to the refrigerator. It would not be an accomplishment on par with the first self-replicating chemical giving rise to life on Earth, but a significant accomplishment nonetheless, given the circumstance.
