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LIFE: REAL AND ARTIFICIAL
by Sadaputa Dasa

(c) 1991 The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust
Used by permission.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, a group of scientists, mainly from the Los
Alamos National Laboratories, recently held a conference on "Artificial
Life." The theme of the conference, which I attended, was that the
essence of life lies not in biological substance but in patterned
organization.

If this idea is valid, the thinking goes, life forms should be able to
set themselves up through many different types of material stuff. In
particular, life should be able to exist as a pattern of electronic
activity in a computer.

The conference organizers, casually dressed, long-haired men in their
thirties and early forties, say that artificial, computer-based life
forms are developing even now -- and may evolve to dominate the earth.

According to this view, the evolutionary role of man is to give birth to
silicon-based life patterns that will eventually look back on him as a
primitive ancestor. The conference sponsors counseled a broad-minded
attitude toward such evolutionary progress: we should transcend
parochial anthropocentrism and welcome advanced life in whatever form it
may emerge.

But some attending scientists doubted whether a program running on a
computer could properly be thought of as alive. Philosopher Elliot Sober
argued that when engineers make a computer simulation of a bridge, no
one would think of it as a real bridge: the simulation merely shows a
picture in which computations tell us something about bridges. In the
same way, when a computer simulates an organism, we see a picture in
which computations tell us something about life -- we're not seeing life
itself.

Tommaso Toffoli, a computer scientist from Massachusets Institute of
Technology, responded to this argument. Suppose, he said, that simulated
people were driving cars on a simulated bridge. If the bridge were to
collapse, the people would fall to their simulated deaths.

The patterns in a faithful simulation match the patterns found in
reality: the simulated people cross the simulated bridge just as real
people cross a real bridge. And since these patterns, Dr. Toffoli
proposed, are the essence of what is happening, we can think of the
simulation the same way we think of the original.

In principle, then, if a real material scene can exhibit life, so can a
simulation.

In practice, of course, present computers, operating with a single
processor, are weak at matching the patterns of reality.

But Toffoli suggested that the powerful computers of the future will
consist of crystallike arrays of many thousands of microminiature
processors, nearly atomic in size, all computing at once. Toffoli
described such computers as "programmable matter."

Indeed (though Toffoli didn't say so), we might regard matter itself,
with its interacting atomic subunits, as such a computer. According to
this idea, life is already a computer simulation running on the
"programmable matter" of the universe itself.

Now, if life is but a computer simulation, a series of computational
states, then life too must be essentially unreal. Words such as
"flower," "dog," and "human" are simply names, symbols we attach to
patterns of matter. This, in fact, is the Vedic understanding not of
life but of the material body. In the eleventh canto of Srimad
Bhagavatam, Krsna says to Uddhava that the gross and subtle forms of
material bodies have no existence of their own; they are only temporary
patterns manifested by the eternally existing reality, the Absolute
Truth.

Krsna illustrates this idea with an example: "Gold exists before it is
made into gold products, and the gold remains when the products have
been destroyed. The gold alone is the reality while used under various
names. Similarly, I alone exist before the universe is created and after
it is destroyed, and I alone exist while it is maintained....That which
did not exist in the past and will not exist in the future has no
existence of its own while it lasts....Whatever is created and revealed
by something else is ultimately only that other thing." (Bhagavatam
11.28.19,21)

So we can look at the temporary forms of the material universe as
patterns in Krsna's energy to which various names have been assigned. In
essence these patterns in Krsna's material energy (bahiranga-sakti) are
the same as the patterns of electrons that form and disappear in the
circuitry of a computer during a simulation. So we can view the material
universe as the ultimate computer simulation, and Krsna as the ultimate
simulator.

But seeing the material body as a succession of flickering patterns
doesn't mean we should view life the same way. Krsna says in
Bhagavad-gita (2.20) that the soul, the individual conscious self,
eternally exists: "For the soul there is never birth or death. He has
not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into
being. He is unborn, ever-existing, and primeval. He is not slain when
the body is slain."

Tommaso Toffoli's simulated people on the simulated bridge lack one main
element: consciousness. A series of computations might simulate the
changes a person's body undergoes, including those in the brain. But why
should patterns of electric current generate the conscious experience of
these changes?

We may easily imagine that the patterns of current making up a machine's
computations may flow without conscious awareness. This suggests that if
consciousness of the results of these computations exists in the
computer, this must be due to some element that our understanding of
computers has not yet taken into account.

Here's how some might reply: It may be hard to understand how patterns
of computer states could generate consciousness, but we already know
that similar patterns generate consciousness in human brains. So why
can't this take place in a computer?

The answer is that we don't know in any scientific sense that patterns
of brain states do generate consciousness. Resolving how such patterns
might do this in brains would be just as hard as figuring out how they
might do it in computers.

Bhagavad-gita provides a simple solution by postulating that
consciousness in the material body is due to the presence of an entity
fundamentally different from matter. Given the difficulties philosophers
and scientists have run into in trying to understand consciousness as
patterns of material elements, they should think about this solution.

If we tentatively adopt this solution, then we may ask: How would the
nonmaterial conscious entity be linked to the material body? We can
understand how this link might work by returning to Toffoli's story of
the simulated bridge.

How could we introduce consciousness into the simulation? One way would
be to make a "real-time" simulation, one in which the simulated events
take place at the same pace as corresponding events in the real world.
(One would simply need a fast enough computer.) Then one could put
consciousness into the simulation by electronically linking the senses
of real, conscious people with the senses of the simulated people. The
intentions of the conscious people would move the bodies of the people
in the simulated world, and the conscious people would have the
experiences the simulated people would have.

Far-fetched? Some people in computer science are already working on it.
VPL Research in California is experimenting with "virtual realities" in
which a person's eyes, ears, and one hand are hooked up electronically
with virtual eyes and ears and a virtual hand in a simulated world. The
person looks through "eyephones," small TV screens placed directly in
front of his eyes, and sees as though in the simulated world.

A "data glove" electronically senses his hand movements, and another
device the movements of his head; the resulting data control the
movements of his simulated hand and head.

Thus the person experiences the simulated world through a simulated
body, moves about in that body, and handles simulated objects in that
world.

If it is possible to link human consciousness with an unreal, virtual
body in a simulated world, why shouldn't it be possible to link
spiritual consciousness with similarly unreal bodies in the "real"
material world?

The Vedic philosophy known as Sankhya describes the workings of such a
communications link. The third canto of Srimad Bhagavatam describes
Krsna's material energy as including an element called "false ego," or
ahankara, which serves as the interface between the nonmaterial soul and
the material energy. This false ego serves like the eyephones and data
gloves that link a human being with a computer running a virtual-reality
program.

Both the material body as understood in Vedic literature and the
simulated body in a computer-generated world are merely temporary
patterns in an underlying substrate. But the conscious self --the real
essence of the living being-- has a substantial reality outside the
realm of transient patterns.

In the computer-generated reality this conscious self is a human being
not part of the computer system, and in the Vedic philosophy this self
is a transcendental entity distinct from matter.

One lesson we can learn from the thoughts and experiments of computer
scientists is that such a relationship between the self and the material
world is possible. And it just might be our actual situation.

END OF ARTICLE

Posted by Kalki Dasa for Back to Godhead.



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