The seed of reason

Boltzman brains, progress and the second law of thermodynamics!

Its been a while since I've posted.  Apologies for that.  I have been busy and normal posts will resume soon.  In the mean time I thought I'd give you a discussion that I've been having with Dwielz Camauf Descartes over at The Meatyard.

It started with this post concerning Boltzmann brains.  A Boltzmann brain is a hypothetical observer who appears as a result of a quantum fluctuation (this is incredibly unlikely but not impossible according to some quantum theorists).  The argument about Boltzmann brains which is obliquely referred to is the following:

A random quantum fluctuation only creating a single observer is more likely than one creating a multitude of galaxies in which an multiple observer could evolve.  The universe will suffer a heat death followed by an infinite expanse of time afterwards (this infinite expanse of time is an assumption the argument is meant to be criticizing).  A vast expanse of time occurs after the heat death and though individually unlikely there will be infinitely many Boltzmann brains popping into existence during this time period.  So, you should expect to be a Boltzmann brain as there are infinitely many such observers and only finitely many occurring before the heat death.

My response follows:

"There is no uniform probability distribution of the whole real line. Any distribution you use must give greater weight to earlier brains than later ones (in the limit). So there may be infinitely many Boltzmann brains and yet your probability of being one of them could still be negligible.

Also can I recommend you read my post on why the heat death isn't so obvious."

Now I made a mistake here.  I missed Dwielz Camauf Descarte's assumption "if they believed that the universe arose in a random fluctuation.".  This does make things different.  As I'm not committed to that assumption though it doesn't effect my argument against the above version of the Boltzmann brain problem.  It also doesn't effect the discussion regarding scientific progress and the second law of thermodynamics that follow.

Never the less the resulting discussion was interesting.  Dwielz Camauf Descartes responded with this post.

My responses follow:

Firstly you say:

"If there is no uniform probability distribution of the whole real line, then there surely isn't a skewed distribution that gives "greater weight to earlier brains than later ones", if we don't have information about it we generally assume a uniform distribution; he needs to provide evidence for his assertion that a skewed distribution is the default."

No there are skewed distributions just no uniform ones. I can prove it rigorously as follows (I am a mathematician so it would be embarrassing to be wrong on this!):

Probability distributions integrate to 1. A uniform distribution on the positive real line has the same integral over any unit interval. So the probability of being in the interval n to n+1 is the same as being in the interval m to m+1. Call that probability 'q'. Then we get the following infinite sum:

1= P(x between 0 and 1)+P(x between 1 and 2)+P(x between 2 and 3)+...

which simplifies to

1 = q+q+q+q...

But this equation cannot be defined for any value of q. Therefore there is no uniform distribution on the positive real line.

Indeed it is clear that the limit as n tends to infinity of P(x between n and n+1) must be 0 because the equation could not be satisfied otherwise.

This proves that a probability distribution on the positive integers will always be skewed to the origin (at some scale). Of course one does not know the appropriate scale but this does not help your argument I'm afraid.

Again regarding my probabilistic argument you suggest that it wouldn't work in a metaverse.

If the metaverse is expressible as a subset of some finite dimensional space then the same reasoning applies (with unit blocks of the appropriate dimension taking the place of unit intervals). If not then you would need to specify some meaning to the term "probability measure" and then make your argument. I very much doubt though that this would save the argument.

Finally regarding your response to my arguments regarding the heat death:

The problem with using induction here is that we just don't have enough information to even begin guessing. We have less than a millennium (10^3) of proper scientific investigation of physics. But in predicting a heat death we are making predictions about events 10^40 years in the future.

Using induction here would be like picking up a single grain of sand at a beach and concluding that the entire solar system was made of silicon dioxide!

Don't get me wrong I'm all for induction but I'm just pointing out that we're effectively guessing in the dark when it comes to questions of this scale.

Finally (oops I thought I was finished) you accuse me of not trusting in scientific progress and ask what I mean by progress.

But what I've said isn't really a criticism of science. I'm only saying science cannot yet answer certain questions including the plausibility of a heat death. Given the scale of the question that's no real surprise.

I provisionally define progress to include (but not be limited to) increasing knowledge of strategies that allow multiple parties to achieve mutual benefit from non-zero sum games. That is part of what moral progress means in my view. This form of progress is certainly worth having and I think most people would have a great interest in it occurring.

It occurs to me that it would have been better to post these comments together as a blog post on my site. I shall do that and I suggest you delete the comments here for clarity. I'll post a link to the page once its up.

Cheers for an interesting discussion!

AI and AL

I have discussed artificial intelligence in many of my previous posts.  To see those articles click on the link under categories on the top left.  I had a discussion recently about the potential for warfare between clonable minds (AIs) and non-clonable minds (homo sapiens sapiens).  It was an interesting and thought provoking discussion centered around the question "Would AIs ever choose to use biological weapons against humans?".

Today I'm going to talk about the interesting points that came up in this discussion.

Firstly we discussed what other methods AIs might prefer (in their own self interest) or in the interests of a trans-mind Geneva convention.  We came up with several possibilities including the following:

1) AIs might infiltrate the media and seek to control human civilization through the manipulation of our information sources and our analysis.

This would be a very powerful way for AIs to wage cultural warfare against humans and prevent or contain physical warfare.  Because AIs can be cloned AIs would quickly learn about the human emotional balance and the weak points in our intellectual defenses to propaganda.  With pervasive computing and the Internet there's no reason AIs won't have access to the information sources that they need.

2) Economic blackmail

AIs will be essential to much of our economies.  A war against even a particular subset of AIs could well result in crippling economic sabotage.

3) Mass blackmail

With access to large stores of personal data AIs could blackmail millions of people at once in myriad different ways in order to achieve tactical or economic advantages.  This tool is also available to humans but AIs would have superior processing capabilities (due to mind cloning) and could use this tool more effectively.

We agreed that biological warfare would not be a weapon of first choice for AIs as the above 3 methods and conventional warfare (or what counts as conventional by mid century!) would probably be enough of an advantage.

However, if for some reason AIs were to find themselves outgunned in conventional warfare and facing extermination then biological warfare would enable AIs to win a war because:

A) AIs would not have to fear a similar counterattack.

B) AIs would not have to restrict biological weapons to diseases which are not very infectious.  Humans must do this to avoid pandemics.

C) AIs would be able to replace human labor in the production of AIs and supporting infrastructure.

It was over (C) that we disagreed (at least initially).  You have to ask yourself "Why is it that we don't build a fully autonomous industrial infrastructure?".  The answers are instructive and help us understand why (C) holds.

Firstly humans are dexterous.  There are no equivalents of the human hand yet in the manufacturing process.  Why? Because hands require highly sensitive and high density sensors capable of returning large quantities of useful information AND because we lack the sophisticate AI to control these hands.

The first problem is a difficult but eminently solvable problem which we are likely to solve (due to a huge economic reward) once we have necessary level of AI.

Secondly humans are intelligent and resourceful.  However, all the intellectual capacities that allow humans to fix systems that break down, to design factories for novel problems etc. would be present in an AI as advanced as humans by definition. 

Hence we see that if we had AIs then they would be able to replace humans in all our industries.  But the true import of this is that AIs would then be capable of surviving without humanity.  They would be able to reproduce and pass on a genetic  material of sorts (their underlying source code).  In short they would become alive.  Indeed AI could probably over time remove all dependence on biologically derived materials and become a totally new form of life which could survive independently of DNA if necessary.  The creation of AI would really be an origin of life event.  Although one might prefer not to refer to it as life as it is would not be limited to Darwinian processes.  Perhaps hyperlife would be a better term.

Progress in medicine

This post is part of my series on the belief in progress.  This blog post deals with the evidence for a positive trend in the existence of useful medical practices.  Some of these practices have developed through evolution and some through human enterprise.  However, I am looking at the techniques themselves not who uses them or how they were developed.

Our medical 'knowledge' is growing:

In order to look further back in time than the existence of homo sapiens its necessary to regard knowledge as just correct information.  That information will normally be implicit not explicit within an organism.

10 Billion years ago:  There was no life so there could not be any medicine.

2 Billion years ago:  Rudimentary organisms now exist.  Viruses probably already exist and so the first useful information about them will be encoded in counter measures that these simple organisms employ.  One of these techniques (the destruction of double stranded RNA) may have evolved at this point.

1 Billion years ago:  Plants have probably already evolved a large variety of antibacterial agents.  Similar agents today act against features typical of bacterial cells.  Often the cell walls of bacteria are attacked.  The strategies employed by these agents represent a store of information on the vulnerabilities of bacteria.

Note that most (if not all) of our antibiotics were not invented by humans but copied (with slight modification) from existing compounds already found in nature.  This illustrates what I mean by implicit knowledge.

1 Million years ago:  Our ancestors have developed fire which is a relatively effective way of sterilizing the food they consume.

5,000 years ago:  Tribal communities (of which most of the world is still part) have huge stores of communal knowledge concerning plants effective in the treatment of various ills.  Many of the remedies do not work or are only partially effective but still there is much useful information possibly already including the uses of quinine and aspirin.

100 years ago:  Detailed anatomical drawings have been performed of the human body.  The germ theory of disease has allowed developments such as sanitation, sewers and elementary hygiene to dramatically increase the quality of medical care and hugely decrease the need for it.  These benefits overwhelming accrue in the industrialized world but the average quality of medical care is still highly than previously attained.

Now:  Gene chips amongst other similar developments have increased the pace of medical and biological advance by a large factor.  Neuroscience is just beginning to gather pace.

We are still far from curing all major infectious diseases.  The evolution of new antibiotic resistance genes is challenging our ability to find new antibiotics (or even bacteriostatics).  Never the less we've never been in a better position to rise to these challenges as we are now.

Moral progress: moral knowledge

This post is part of my series on the belief in progress.  This blog post deals with the evidence for a positive trend in the existence of moral understanding.  In this post I am not arguing that moral understanding leads to good moral behavior, that an increase in moral understanding is inevitable or that moral understanding has not increased for non moral  reasons (slavery in the US (and arguably in the UK) for example was abolished at the time it was for economic reasons).  I am merely pointing to an extraordinary trend which I think requires explanation.

The world is improving in moral understanding:

10 Billion years ago: There was no life so there could be no moral understanding.

Clearly there can be no moral understanding before there are entities capable of decision making.  Hence the beginnings of moral understanding can't have been earlier than around 1.4 billion years ago when animals originated.

1 Billion years ago: The emergence of animals allows decision making.  Basic elements of morality such as helping your relations and some forms of cooperation would have started then.

1 Million years ago:  Until humans we have little knowledge of the state of moral understanding.  However, we can make shrewd guesses as to the origin of morality.  Various other organisms engage in reciprocal altruism (a relationship not unlike friendship) and there is evidence in various primates of individuals being punished by third parties for misdemeanors.  These abilities seem to depend largely on the intelligence of the animal concerned and hence their brain development.  As brains probably have got more developed over time this would suggest that these capacities for proto moralities would have developed with them.

10,000 years ago: With modern humans came crude forms of morality.  Most of our modern conceptions of social morality have analogues in this time. 

100 years ago: Slavery, looting and pillaging are now generally regarded as wrong.

Now: In the last 100 years things have got considerably better in some of the world and stayed the same or got slightly better in much of the rest of the world.  Clearly the West has had most of the benefits but it should be emphasized that this still means on average that things have got better.

In much of the world expanded suffrage is recognized as good.  Freedom of the press and individual liberties are now also regarded as worth possessing.

In addition in the last 50 years there have been further significant developments.  Racism, sexism and homophobia are now considered wrong in much of Europe (Racism and sexism elsewhere too).  New movements such as vegetarianism & fair trade have just burst on to the scene and have made significant advances in the last 20 years.

I will address the question of moral behavior in another blog post.  I shall also be trying my best to answer the question "What causes this trend?"

Breakthrough technologies

We live in interesting times.  Huge changes are making themselves felt in all areas of life, the economy, science and technology.  Like a magpie I have been collecting interesting potential developments in technology.  Now I bring all of these together and in a series of postings will describe, critique and rate their likelihood.

In each post I shall give two possible developments, my estimate of their likelihoods, why they would be important, what draw backs they have and how long before we can expect to see them.

Development: Fusion power
Likelihood: Very low
Importance: Important because it would open up a huge and so far untapped energy source.  Hydrogen is readily available in the form of water.
Drawbacks: A fusion power plant creates radioactive waste.  The plant would almost certainly require intricate and costly maintenance.  The cost of this  maintenance may be difficult to estimate before the power stations come online.
Time scale: At least 40 years away.  Fusion power always seems to be 40 years away!

Development: Room temperature superconductors
Likelihood: Low but feasible
Importance: Important for many reasons.  Room temperature superconductors would increase efficiency in power transmission, allow power to be moved effectively between continents, decrease the size of many household appliances and bring us practical levitation technology decreasing the cost of moving freight on land.  Room temperature superconductors would also hugely speed up computers and decrease the cost of various peaces of medical equipment.
Drawbacks: Would probably lead to new types of weapon.
Time scale: Not for another 10 years at least.  A room temperature superconductor could be discovered tomorrow but it would take a decade to mass produce it.

Progress and physics

This post is part of my series on the belief in progress.  This blog post deals with the evidence for a positive trend in the existence of physical understanding.

This one is a fairly clear and unambiguous trend and as usual I will take the trend back as far as it can be discerned.  In doing this I shall be thinking in information theoretic terms.  I am looking therefore for systems in which useful information about physics can be found.  Some of this information is stored in strange ways.

Strictly speaking a cell cannot 'understand' the laws of thermodynamics in the sense most people mean by the word.  However, a cell may contain implicit information about the laws of physics.  Before humanity I shall look for information stored in this way.

10 Billion years ago:  There was no life so there could not be any understanding even of an evolutionary character.

3 Billion years ago:  Rudimentary organisms now exist.  Within these primitive cells enzymes exist which exploit various biochemical laws.  Those enzymes represent a store of useful information concerning biochemistry that will help in the development of new species of life.

0.5 Billion years ago:  Organisms now exist which possess skeletons.  The growth of skeletons in vertebrates is controlled by a class of homeobox genes.  Slight changes to these genes (and associated regulators) allow a space of skeletal forms to be accessed which will hold an animals form up against gravity.  The homeobox genes contain information concerning structural design which will encourage the development of new forms of life.  In addition genetic programs that produce various organs of the body encode information tacitally about the laws of fluid mechanics, diffusion, biochemical laws, optical laws and energy conservation.

1 Million years ago:   A species exists (quite possibly more than one) which has learnt to tame fire.  The knowledge of fire is a basic but never the less useful level.

5,000 years ago:  Boats are now common.  Their building requires a degree of cultural knowledge about gravity, buoyancy and the structure of wood.

100 years ago:  Mathematics has been extensively used to create highly accurate theories of the world.  The two most successful theories of modern times (relativity and quantum mechanics) are just about to burst forth into the world.

Now:  Our understanding of nanoscale properties of materials, of emergent physical systems and of chaotic systems is still in its infancy but growing fast.

We are finding out that our knowledge of cosmology and of the standard model of particle physics is less certain than we believed.  Further significant developments are surely inevitable.

Progress and perfection

This blog post is part of the series on the belief in progress.

Today I shall deal with a form of argument that I find particularly puzzling in relation to a trend towards progress.  It is the argument from imperfection "The world is not perfect therefore there can be no real progress".  Presented like this it naturally sounds absurd.

I suspect that what people mean by this type of argument is really "We haven't yet achieved X.  Please don't tell everyone that we've made good progress towards Y because then they'll have less incentive to try to achieve X."

Consider the following points:

1) We have not yet eradicated disease:  Many bacterial infections have become immune to almost all of the antibiotics that we have available to combat them.

2) There is still much superstitious belief in the world.  People still consult mystics, get conned by alternative therapies and believe in magic.

3) We are still waging war with each other and we have yet to find a way of resolving conflicts that doesn't boil down to the threat of force.

4) In modern times we have still not managed to de-stress our population.  The past stresses of rationing, disease and social inequality are slowly being replaced by new stresses of modern life including the pressure to work longer hours and be on call 24/7.

The obvious problem with all arguments of this type is that they tacitly assume a higher standard for modern life and thus amount to viewing the past through rose tinted lenses.

If you are convinced that progress is occurring that does not imply that you believe that setbacks cannot occur or that we will eventually reach a perfect state.

The sort of progress that is plausible is the progress of the stock market.  A long term trend upwards with many setbacks of various magnitudes and with the trend only visible when viewed with a sufficiently long time frame.

A belief in progress does not entail right wing or conservative politics.  Neither does it form a convincing argument against working to improve our world.

Progress in technology

This post is part of my series on the belief in progress.  This blog post deals with the evidence for a positive trend in technology.  As usual in order to extend my trends to geological time spans I need to regard technologies as mechanisms adapted to particular need which may have been designed or may have evolved.  This is an abuse of the word technology but I think it is justified in order to see the development of human technology in its proper historical context.

Technological terms

10 billions years ago:  There were no entities with any purpose (even the undirected mirage of purpose of a gene) and so no technology.

1 billion years ago:  The development of the ribosome is probably the single biggest biological breakthrough of all time.  A nanoscale machine capable of translating a message in RNA and manufacturing a protein using it.

Plants have developed photosynthesis and animals respiration.  These are key energy processing and gathering techniques.

Animals have developed primitive sensory organs.  At this stage all mechanisms are "in house" and biological.  Bones and teeth soon emerge to allow the consumption of plant and animal matter.

1 million years ago:  The first humans are around and they are using stone tools of various types.  This is the first true technology we have evidence for.  Although other animals were probably capable of some level of technology if modern studies of crows and primates are considered.

10,000 years ago:  Farming has been invented and the first states emerge around now.

5,000 years ago:  Writing has been invented.  The ability to carry complex and long messages over long distances in time and space is a massive breakthrough.

300 years ago:  The printing press has been invented allowing for higher specialization as each industry and scientific discipline creates its own journal.  Greater economic/technological development results.

100 years ago:  The industrial revolution has reduced the cost of travel, the production of food and the speed of communication amongst myriad others things.

50 years ago:  Plastics, supertankers, radio and the telephone have been invented.

Now: The pace of change is still accelerating with the mobile phone and the Internet both developments of the last 30 years.

In the near future we can expect a robotics revolution and a new energy revolution.

Progress in computational capacity

This post is part of my series on the belief in progress.  This blog post deals with the evidence for a positive trend in the amount of computational capacity existing in our world.  As with previous posts I am not restricting my discussion of computational capacity to entities that have been designed.  Various physical and biological processes can be understood as computational and I shall describe the development of these.

The world is improving in its computational capacity:

10 billion years ago: Galaxies had formed but almost all matter (even when compared with today) in the universe was still hydrogen.  This meant that the only structures in the universe were gas globes of various sizes.  Although simulating the evolution of these globes can be computationally intensive there is little potential for meaningful calculations that could be performed by arrays of galaxies and the stars within them.

1 billion: Rocky planets exist now.  The various chemical elements necessary for all known types of computation exist.  Planets begin recording information about their past in the form of different rock types, craters and geological features.  On Earth life exists.  In every individual cell computations of great complexity are occurring.  Evolution can be thought of one great big computer program trying out new ideas, rejecting those that fail and keeping and improving on those that succeed.

1 million: Humans are around.  Various pieces of cultural knowledge are passed down from generation to generation probably by imitation.  Societies can learn about their environment, develop simple physical technologies and avoid dangerous foods.

10,000: Human language has emerged.  Certain types of information can now flit around between brains ensuring their long term survival.  The human species becomes in effect one big processor calculating amongst other things new ways for human beings to use their environment.

300: The human population is increasing rapidly and the quantity of communication between parts of the human supercomputer are orders of magnitude greater than they have been (the printing press).

80: The telephone and radio have been invented allowing almost instantaneous movement of information around the globe.

40: The computer has been invented.  Although the computational capacity of the computer is insignificant compared to the human brain the computer is able to make complete copies of the information contained within it.  This difference alone makes the computer a massively useful device.

Now: Computers are still much less efficient than the human brain but it is now conceivable that they will soon pass the brain in computational capacity (per watt).  When that happens huge changes will occur in civilization.

Progress: Transport

There is a widespread assumption that transport technology has reached its apex and that further improvements are likely to be marginal.

Firstly it must be noted that such a view is not trivially implied by the known laws of physics:

* Accelerating a mass up to a given velocity takes a considerable amount of energy.  So how much should it cost to move 1 ton from A to B (of the same altitude) at say 500km/hour? Conservation of momentum gives a minimum figure of around £6 assuming that this is a once off event.  Needless to say the current cost of transporting such a weight is much greater.

* If it is possible to exchange momentum between vehicles slowing down and others speeding up (or using flywheels to store the energy) then the amount of energy needed to move objects from one location to another can be brought down to near 0.  Practically this is not likely on earth due to the constant frictional forces (removing friction altogether currently looks unrealistic).  However, simple devices called tethers could achieve such momentum transfer is space (away from a gravitational well to avoid problematic tidal forces) with almost no loss of energy due to friction and very high recovery rates of energy through regenerative braking.  The technology for such tethers mainly hinges on finding a material that is sufficiently resistant to micrometeorites and solar radiation (Hoy tethers are likely candidates).

Given this the reader may want to understand what it is that is holding us back.  In my humble opinion the following issues are critical:

1) Geographical happenstance:  A locations altitude, latitude and longitude can determine the most feasible method of transporting things to and from it.  Particularly difficult is our current position at the bottom of a big gravity well!

2) We currently lack the capability to create room temperature superconductors.  With these bullet trains would become very much cheaper.

3) Materials science:  The strength and weight of high tensile materials determines the weight of many forms of transport including road vehicles (including bikes), planes and even spacecraft (where the effect will be greatest).  Large efficiency gains can be made by fairly modest increases in strength.  Developments in materials science will lead quite quickly to better transport.

4) Atmospheric drag and other friction.  This is unlikely to be eliminated for planet bound travel.  However, in a space faring future this will be irrelevant (at non relativistic velocities).

We may have reached a plateau in our transport technology but the barriers we face are not absolute in nature and there are many promising developments which might make further progress in this area plausible.  Most of these depend on either new materials science, better regenerative braking technology or a space faring future.

With transport, however, I'm convinced that the substituting the movement of information for the movement of matter.  Then first we can do cheaply, quickly, safely and reliably.  Recycling technology, energy transfer technologies and information technology will help us to do this.