Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Non Serviam 319whose task it is to reflect other mirrors, which in turn reflect still others, and so on toinfinity.” Is this poetry, philosophy, or science?The vision of personoids patiently awaiting a proof of the existence of God by amiracle is quite touching and astonishing. This kind of vision is occasionally discussed bycomputer wizards in their hideaways late at night when all the world seems to shimmer inmysterious mathematical harmony. At the Stanford AI Lab late one night, Bill Gosperexpounded his own vision of a “theogony” (to use Lem’s word) strikingly similar toLem’s. Gosper is an expert on the so called “Game of Life,” on which he bases histheogony . “Life” is a kind of two-dimensional “physics,” invented by John HortonConway, which can be easily programmed in a computer and displayed on a screen. Inthis physics, each intersection on a huge and theoretically infinite Go board – a grid, inother words – has a light that can be either on or off. Not only space is discrete(discontinuous) but time is also. Time goes from instant to instant in little “quantumjumps.” The way the minute hand moves on some clocks – sitting still for a minute, thenjumping. Between these discreet instants, the computer calculates the new “state of theuniverse” based on the old one, then displays the new state.The status at a given instant – nothing further back in time is “remembered” bythe laws of Life-physics (this “locality” in time is, incidentally also true of thefundamental laws of physics in our own universe). The physics of the Game of Life isalso local in space (again agreeing with our own physics); that is, passing from a specificinstant to the next, only a cell’s own light and those of its nearest neighbours play anyrole in telling that cell what to do in the new instant. There are eight such neighbours --four adjacent, four diagonal. Each cell, in order to determine what to do in the nextmoment, counts how many of its eight neighbours’ lights are on at the present moment;If the answer is exactly two, then the cell’s light stays as it is. If the answer is exactlythree, then the cell lights up, regardless of its previous status. Otherwise the cell goesdark (When a light turns on, it is technically known as a “birth,” and when one goers offit is called a “death” – fitting terms for the Game of Life.) The consequences of thissimple law, when it is obeyed simultaneously all over the board are quite astonishing.Although the Game of Life is now over a decade old, its depths have not yet been fullyfathomed.The locality in time implies that the only way the remote history of the universecould exert any effect on the course of events in the present would be if “memories” weresomehow encoded in patterns of lights stretching out over the grid (we have earlierreferred to this as a “flattening” of the past into the present). Of course the more detailedthe memo