Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker chemistry. He becomes curious about what causes life, and he pursues this question by closely examining how things die and decay — the idea being that if you can understand how life leaves matter, you can understand how to put it back in. Victor spends days and nights in "vaults and charnel-houses," until finally he believes he has learned how to bring dead flesh back to life. He sets to work building the Frankenstein monster and finally reaches his goal: "It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs... The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart." What writer hasn’t experienced something like these feelings upon seeing the work which he or she ends up writing ⎯ as opposed to the original dream! Architectures I find it useful to characterize a computing system’s architecture in terms of the following two distinctions. • How many simultaneous processes are taking place, one or many? • How many different sets of memory are used, one or many? And in the case where there is one shared memory set, we can make a third distinction. • If there is only one memory set, is the data access of the individual process or processes local or global? Some of the architectures that we’ll be discussing are summarized in the table below. All of the cases with many processes and many memory sets seem to share the same network architecture as the Web, so I’ll just write “network” to describe their data access. Example Number of Processes Number of Memory Sets Access To Memory Turing Machine One One Local Personal Computer One One Global Classical Physics Many One Local The Web Many Many Network Quantum Mechanics Many Many Network p. 66
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Organism Many Many Network Human Society Many Many Network The Mind Many One Global Table 1.4: Some computer architectures Von Neumann Self-Reproduction In the late 1940s, von Neumann gave some ground-breaking lectures on the topic of whether or not it would ever be possible for a machine, or “automaton,” to reproduce itself. Usually a machine makes something much simpler than itself — consider a huge milling machine turning out bolts. Could a machine possibly fabricate machines as complicated as itself? Or is there some extra-mechanical magic to self-reproduction? To simplify the problem, von Neumann suggested that we suppose that our robots or automata are made up of a small number of standardized parts: I will introduce as elementary units neurons, a “muscle,” entities which make and cut fixed contacts, and entities which supply energy, all defined with about that degree of superficiality with which [the theory of neural networks] describes an actual neuron. If you describe muscles, connective tissues, “disconnecting tissues,” and means of providing metabolic energy . . . you probably wind up with something like ten or twelve or fifteen elementary parts. 1 Using the idea of machines made up of multiple copies of a small number of standardized elements, von Neumann posed his question about robot self-reproduction as follows. Can one build an aggregate out of such elements in such a manner that if it is put into a reservoir, in which there float all these elements in large numbers, it will then begin to construct other aggregates, each of which will at the end turn out to be another automaton exactly like the original one? 2 Using techniques of mathematical logic, von Neumann was then able to deduce that such self-reproduction should in fact be possible. His proof hinged on the idea that an automaton could have a blueprint for building itself, and that in self-reproduction, two steps would be necessary: (1) to make an exact copy of the blueprint, and (2) to use the blueprint as instructions for making a copy of the automaton. The role of the blueprint is entirely analogous to the way DNA is used in biological self-reproduction, for here the DNA is both copied and used as instructions for building new proteins. The complexity of a reservoir full of floating machine parts hindered von Neumann from making his proof convincing. The next step came from Stanislaw Ulam, who was 1 From “Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata,” 1949, reprinted in John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1966, p. 77. 2 From “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” 1948, reprinted in: John von Neumann, Collected Works, Vol. 5, Macmillan, New York 1963, p. 315. The weird scenario described in this quote is reminiscent of a scene in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Sirens of Titan where an unhappy robot tears himself apart and floats the pieces in a lake. p. 67
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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