Science of Discworld

EXTEL OUTSIDE

PROGRESS MEANS SMOKE ... The human race has certainly made a lot of progress over the years, then. How did we do that? Because we're intelli­gent, we've got brains. Minds, even. But other creatures are intelligent, dolphins, especially. And all they seem to do is enjoy themselves in the sea. What have we got that they haven't?

Many discussions of the mind treat it essentially as a question about the architecture of the brain. The viewpoint is that this deter­mines what brains can do, and then the various things that we associate with minds, the difficult problems of free will, con­sciousness and intelligence, come out of neurophysiology. That's one approach. The other common one is to view the problem through the eyes of a social scientist or an anthropologist. From this viewpoint the mind's capabilities are pretty much taken as 'given', and the main questions are how human culture builds on those capabilities to create minds able to think original thoughts, feel emotions, have concepts like love and beauty, and so on. It may seem that between them these two approaches pretty much cover the territory. Link them, and you have a complete answer to the question of mind.

However, neurophysiology and culture aren't independent: they are 'complicit'. By this we mean that they have evolved together, each changing the other repeatedly, and their mutual coevolution built on the unpredictable results of that ongoing interaction. The view of culture building on, and changing, brains is incomplete, because brains also build on, and change, culture. The concept of complicity captures this recursive, mutual influence.

We call the brain's internal capabilities Intelligence'. It is con­venient to give a similar name to all of the external influences, cultural or otherwise, that affect the evolution of the brain, and with it, the mind. We shall call these influences extelligence, a term that HEX has picked up thanks to once-and-future computing. Mind is not just intelligence plus extelligence, its inside and out­side, so to speak. Instead, mind is a feedback loop in which intelligence influences extelligence, extelligence influences intelli­gence, and the combination transcends the capabilities of both.

Intelligence is the ability of the brain to process information. But intelligence is only part of what is needed to make a mind. And even intelligence is unlikely to evolve in isolation.

Culture is basically a collection of interacting minds. Without individual minds you can't have a culture. The converse is perhaps less obvious, but equally true: without a shared culture, the human mind cannot evolve. The reason is that there is nothing in the envi­ronment of the evolving mind that can drive it towards self-complication, becoming more sophisticated, unless that brain has something else fairly sophisticated to interact with. And the main sophisticated thing around to interact with is minds of other people. So the evolution of intelligence and that of extelli­gence are inextricably linked, and complicity between them is inevitable.

In the world around us are things that we, or other human beings, have created, things which play a similar role to intelli­gence but sit outside us. They are things like libraries, books, and the Internet, which from the viewpoint of exteiligence would be better named the 'Extranet'. The Discworld concept of 'L-space' -library-space, is similar: it's all one thing. These influences, sources not just of information but of meaning, are 'cultural capital'. They are things that people put out into the culture, which can then sit there, or even reproduce, or interact in a way that individuals can't control.

The old artificial intelligence question: 'Can we create an intel­ligent machine?' viewed the machine as a once-off object in its own right. The problem, people assumed, was to get the machine's architecture right, and then program intelligent behaviour into it.

But that's probably the wrong approach. Of course, it is certainly conceivable that the collective extelligence of all the human beings interacting with that machine could put a mind into it, and in par­ticular endow it with intelligence. But it seems much more likely that, unless you had a whole community of machines interacting with each other and evolving, providing the requisite extelligence too, then you wouldn't be actually able to structure the Ant Country of the neural connections of the machine in a way that could gen­erate a mind. So the story of the mind is one of complicity and emergence. Indeed, mind is one of the great examples of complic­ity.

The internal story of the development of the mind can be summed up as a series of steps in which the key 'player' is the nerve cell A nerve cell is an extended object that can send signals from one place to another Once you've got nerve cells you can have net­works of nerve cells; and once you've got networks, then a whole pile of stuff comes along free of charge. For example, there is an area of complexity theory called 'emergent computation'. It turns out that when you evolve a network, randomly chosen networks, arbitrary networks, not constructed with specific purposes, they do things. They do something, which may or may not seem mean­ingful; they do whatever it is that that network does. But you can often look at what that network does, and spot emergent features. You discover that even though its architecture was random, it evolved the ability to compute things. It carries out algorithmic processes (or something close to algorithmic processes). The ability to do calculations, computations, algorithms seems to come free of charge once you've invented devices that send signals from one place to another and react to those signals to send new signals. If you allow evolution you don't have to work hard to create the abil­ity to do some kind of processing.

Once you've got that facility, it's a relatively short step to the ability to do specific kinds of processing that happen to be useful -that happen to offer survival value. All you need is the standard Darwinian selection procedure. Anything that's got that ability sur­vives, anything that hasn't, doesn't. The ability to process incoming information in ways that extract an interesting feature of the out­side world, react to it, and thereby make it easier to evade a predator or to spot food, gets reinforced. The brain's internal architecture comes from a phase space of possible structures, and evolution selects from that phase space. Put those two together and you can evolve structures in the brain that have specific functions. The brain's surroundings certainly influence the development of the brain.

Do animals have minds? They do to some extent, depending on the animal. Even simple animals can have surprisingly sophisticated mental abilities. One of the most surprising is a funny creature called a mantis shrimp.

It's like the shrimps you put inside a sandwich and eat, except that it's about 5 inches (12 cm) long and it's more complex. You can keep a mantis shrimp in a tank, as part of a miniature marine ecol­ogy. If you do, you'll find that mantis shrimps cause havoc. They tend to destroy things, but they also build things. One thing they love building is tunnels, which they then live in. The mantis shrimp is a bit of an architect, and it decorates the front of its tunnel with bits and pieces of things, especially bits and pieces of what it has just killed. Hunting trophies. It doesn't like to have just one tunnel - it's discovered that if you have one tunnel with one entrance, that's more correctly known as a 'trap'. So it likes to have a back entrance too, and more. By the time it's been in the tank for about two months, it's riddled the entire tank with tunnels, and you find it sticking its head out at one end or the other without seeing it pass between.

Years ago, Jack used to have a mantis shrimp called Dougal. Jack and his students discovered that they could set Dougal puzzles. They would feed it shrimps and it would come out and grab the shrimp. Then they would put the shrimp inside a plastic container with a lid and after a little while Dougal would like to take the lid off the container and eat the shrimp. And then they put an elastic band around the container to hold the lid on, and Dougal would learn to take the band off and open the container and eat the shrimp. And after a while if they stuck a shrimp in on its own, you could almost see the mantis shrimp coming out and looking disap­pointed: 'They haven't set me a puzzle, this is no fun, I don't want to play this game!' And it would take a long look at the shrimp and then go back into its tunnel without grabbing it.

Although we can think of no way to prove this, everyone got the strong impression that the shrimp was developing a little bit of a mind. Its brain had the potential to do so, and humans had provided it with the kind of context that would help it develop that potential. Wild mantis shrimps don't go out and play with elastic bands, because those aren't part of their environment, but if you give them that kind of stimulus, you change them. Because we've got minds, we also have the capacity to create a little bit of mind in a lot of other creatures.

Mind is a process, or a network of processes, going on inside the brain. It needs a certain amount of interaction with other minds in order to get anywhere. There isn't an evolutionary feedback loop that would train an incipient mind and make it develop unless it was getting somewhere. So where does such a loop occur? Human beings are part of a reproductive system, there are a lot of us, and we keep breeding new ones. In consequence, a large part of the environment of any human being is other human beings. In many ways this is the most important part of our environment, the part we respond to most deeply. We have all sorts of cultural systems, such as education, that exploit exactly this feature of our environ­ment to develop the kind of mind that fits into the existing culture and helps to propagate it. So the context for an individual mind, as it evolves, is not that mind, it's lots of other minds. There is a com-plicit feedback loop between the entire collection of minds, and that of each individual.

Human beings have taken this process to such an extreme that part of that feedback loop has escaped from our control and is now outside us. In a sense, it has a mind of its own. This is extelligence, and we can't do without it. A lot of what makes us human is not passed on genetically, it is passed on culturally. It is passed on by the tribe, it is passed on through rituals, by teaching, by things that link brain to brain, mind to mind. Your genetics may make it possi­ble for you to do this, it may make you better or worse at it than others, but genes don't actually encode the information that gets passed on. This process is the 'Make-a-Human-Being-Kit'. Each culture has devised a technique for putting into the minds of the next generation what it is that will make them put it into the minds of the generation after that, a recursive system that keeps the cul­ture going. Lies-to-children often feature prominently.

We are running into problems doing this today, because old-style tribal cultures, even national cultures, are becoming intermingled with an international culture. This leads to clashes between what used to be separate cultures, triggering their breakdown. Go into any city in the world and you see adverts for Coca-Cola. Global commerce has put things into various cultures that are different from what they would have developed of their own accord. Coca-Cola does not have a huge influence on the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit, though, so it's acceptable to most cultures. On the whole, you don't find religious fundamentalists complaining about the existence of a Coca-Cola bottling factory in their country (well, you do, but generally because it's just a way of saying 'USA out!') However, if some fast-food chain in Islamic or Jewish countries was trying to sell porkburgers, there'd be plenty of protests.

Extelligence has become so powerful and so influential that nowadays one generation's culture may be radically different from the previous generation's culture. Second-generation immigrants often have an even worse problem, a culture clash. They've grown up in the 'new' country, and they've absorbed how that country works. They speak the language far more fluently than their parents ever can, but they've still got to please their parents. When they're at home, they have to behave in the manner of their original culture. But when they're at school, they have to live in the new culture. This makes them feel distinctly uncomfortable, and that can break the cultural feedback loop. Once the loop is broken, parts of the cul­ture cease to be transmitted to the next generation: they drop out of the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit.

In this sense, extelligence is out of our control. It escaped our control when it became reproductive: extelligence being used to copy (bits of) extelligence.

The key step was the invention of printing. Prior to written lan­guage, extelligence was passed on by word of mouth. It still lived in people's minds: it was what the wise men and women of the village, the old people, knew. And all the while extelligence resided in human memories, it couldn't grow, because one person can remem­ber only so much. When you could write things down, extelligence expanded a bit, but there is only so much that you can write down by hand. And it can't spread very far. So mostly you get things like the Egyptian monuments, the history of some particular ruler, his greatest battles, excerpts from the Book of the Dead ...

Another important but apparently mundane function of writing in human society is taxes, accounts, keeping track of property. These sound dull compared with the list of battles, but a growing society needs something better than an old man's memory of 'who owns what' and 'who paid how much'. The list was a great inven­tion.

With printing came the possibility of disseminating information far more widely, and in quantity. Within a few years of printing becoming established in Europe there were fifty million books in existence, which means more books than people. Printing was a very slow procedure in those days, but nonetheless there were lots of printing presses, and you could sell whatever you printed, so there were plenty of pressures that encouraged printing to flourish. And then complicity really set in, because what's on a piece of paper can come back and bite you in the ankle. The rulers started putting constitutional rights and obligations down on paper, to protect their own position: once it's down on paper that the king has certain rights and obligations, then the paper can always be referred to later, and used as an argument.

But what the kings didn't realize, to start with, is that when they put their rights and obligations down on paper, they were implicitly constraining their own actions. The citizens could read what was on the paper too. They could tell if their king was suddenly assuming rights or obligations that were not on the piece of paper. The whole effect of law on human society started to change when you could write the law down, and anyone who could read could see what the kw was. This didn't mean that the kings always obeyed the kw, of course, but it meant that when they disobeyed it, everyone knew what they were doing. That had a big effect on the structure of human society. One minor aspect of it is that we always appear to be nervous of people who write things down...

At that point, extelligence and intelligence began to interact complicitly. Once an interaction becomes complicit, there's no way for an individual to control it. You can push things out into the extelligence, but you can't predict what influence they will have. What's out there is growing in a way that may be mediated by human beings, but, for example, the people printing books were krgely printing them independently of their contents. Early on, anything in print would sell.

All words had power. But written words had a lot more. They still do.

So far we've talked as if extelligence is a single unified external thing. In some sense it is, but what is actually important is the inter­face between extelligence and the individual. This is a very personal feedback loop: we meet selections from extelligence through our parents, the books we read, the teachers who teach us, and so on. This is how the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit works, this is why we have cultural diversity. If we all responded to the same pool of extelligence in exactly the same way, we would all be the same. The whole system would suddenly become a kind of monoculture rather than a multiculture.

Human extelligence is currently going through a period of mas­sive expansion. Much more is becoming possible. Your interface to extelligence used to be very predictable: your parents, teachers, rel­atives, friends, village, tribe. That allowed clusters of particular kinds of subculture to flourish, to some extent independently of the other subcultures, because you never got to hear about the others. Their world view was always filtered before it got to you. In Whit, lain Banks describes a strange Scottish religious sect, and children who grow up in this sect. Even though some members of the sect are interacting with the outside world, the only important influences on them are what's going on within the sect. Even by the end of the story the character who has gone into the outside world and inter­acted with it in all sorts of ways has one idea in mind and one only, to become the leader of the sect and to continue propagating the sect's views. This behaviour is typical of human clusters, until extelligence intervenes.

Today's extelligence doesn't have a single world view, like a sect does. It doesn't really have a world view at all. Extelligence is becoming 'multiplex', a concept introduced by the science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany in the novel Empire Star. Simplex minds have a single-world view and know exactly what everyone ought to do. Complex minds recognize the existence of different world views. Multiplex ones wonder how useful a specific world view actually is in a world of conflicting paradigms, but find a way to operate despite that.

Anyone who wants to can get on the Internet and construct a webpage about UFOs, telling everybody who accesses that page that UFOs exist, they're out there in space, they come down to Earth, they abduct people, they steal their babies ... They do all these things and it's absolutely definite, because it's on the web.

A prominent astronomer was giving a talk about life on other planets and the possibility of aliens. He made out the scientific case that somewhere out in the galaxy intelligent aliens might exist. At that point a member of the audience put his hand up and said 'we know they exist: it's all over the Internet.'

On the other hand, you can access another page on the Internet and get a completely different view. On the Internet, the full diver­sity of views is, or at least can be represented. It is quite democratic; the views of the stupid and credulous carry as much weight as the views of those who can read without moving their lips. If you think that the Holocaust didn't actually happen, and you can shout loud enough, and you can design a good web page, then you can be in there slugging it out with other people who believe that recorded history should have some kind of connection with reality.

We are having to cope with multiplexity. We're grappling with the problem right now: it's why global politics has suddenly become a lot more complicated than it used to be. Answers are in short sup­ply, but one thing seems clear: rigid cultural fundamentalism isn't going to get us anywhere.