QUANTUM MONKEYS
A Talk with Seth Lloyd

Edge Video Broadband | Modem

The image of monkeys typing on typewriters is quite old. . . .Some people ascribe it to Thomas Huxley in his debate with Bishop Wilberforce in 1858, after the appearance of The Origin of Species. From eyewitness reports of that debate it is clear that Wilberforce asked Huxley from which side of his family, his mother's or his father's, he was descended from an ape. Huxley said, "I would rather be descended from a humble ape than from a great gentleman who uses considerable intellectual gifts in the service of falsehood. " A woman in the audience fainted when he said that. They didn't have R-rated movies back then.

Steven Pinker, Martin Nowak, J. Craig Venter, Lee Smolin, Alan Guth respond to Seth Lloyd's "Quantum Monkey's".

[more...]

On "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier

Lanier's piece hits a nerve because human life always exists in tension between our individual and group identities, inseparable and incommensurable. For ten years now, it's been apparent that the rise of the digital was providing enormous new powers for the individual. It's now apparent that the world's networks are providing enormous new opportunities for group action.

Understanding how these cohabiting and competing revolutions connect to deep patterns of intellectual and social work is one of the great challenges of our age. The breadth and depth of the responses collected here, ranging from the broad philosophical questions to reckonings of the ground truth of particular technologies, is a testament to the complexity and subtlety of that challenge. (From the Introduction by Clay Shirky)

Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold

Now, another big idea is taking hold, but this time it's more painful for some people to embrace, even to contemplate. It's nothing less than the migration from individual mind to collective intelligence. I call it "here comes everybody", and it represents, for good or for bad, a fundamental change in our notion of who we are. In other words, we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of person.

Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite.
— Douglas Rushkoff

Our new tool for communication and computation may take us away from distinct individualism, and towards something closer to the tender nuance of folk art or the animal energy of millenarianism.
— Quentin Hardy

Networked-based, distributed, social production, both individual and cooperative, offers a new system, alongside markets, firms, governments, and traditional non-profits, within which individuals can engage in information, knowledge, and cultural production. This new modality of production offers new challenges, and new opportunities. It is the polar opposite of Maoism.
— Yochai Benkler

The personal computer produced an incredible increase in the creative autonomy of the individual. The internet has made group forming ridiculously easy. Since social life involves a tension between individual freedom and group participation, the changes wrought by computers and networks are therefore in tension. To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.
— Clay Shirky

Wikipedia isn't great because it's like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.
— Cory Doctorow

The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.
— Kevin Kelly

So, to get the best results, we have people sharpening their ideas against one another rather than simply editing someone's contribution and replacing it with another. We also have a world where the contributors have identities (real or fake, but consistent and persistent) and are accountable for their words. Much like Edge, in fact.
— Esther Dyson

How can both I reject epistemic collectivism and yet say that Wikipedia is a great project, which I do? Well, the problem is that epistemic collectivists like Wikipedia but for the wrong reasons. What's great about it is not that it produces an averaged view, an averaged view that is somehow better than an authoritative statement by people who actually know the subject. That's just not it at all. What's great about Wikipedia is the fact that it is a way to organize enormous amounts of labor for a single intellectual purpose.
— Larry Sanger

This rich context, attached to many Wikipedia articles, is known as a "talk page." The talk page is where the writers for an article hash out their differences, plan future edits, and come to agreement about tricky rhetorical points. This kind of debate doubtless happens in the New York Times and Britannica as well, but behind the scenes. Wikipedia readers can see it all, and understand how choices were made.
— Fernanda Viegas & Matthew Wattenberg

My response is quite simple: this alleged "core belief" is not one which is held by me, nor as far as I know, by any important or prominent Wikipedians. Nor do we have any particular faith in collectives or collectivism as a mode of writing. Authoring at Wikipedia, as everywhere, is done by individuals exercising the judgment of their own minds.
— Jimmy Wales

Lanier does not want to debate the existence or non-existence of metaphysical entities. But his argument that online collectivism produces artificial stupidity offers no reassurance to me. Real artificial intelligence (if and when) will be unfathomable to us. At our level, it may appear as dumb as American Idol, or as pointless as a nervous twitch that corrects and uncorrects Jaron Lanier's Wikipedia entry in an endless loop.
— George Dyson

The debate does demonstrate how much we need to update our media literacy in a digital, distributed era. Our internal BS meters already work, but they've fallen into a low and sad level of use in the Big Media world. Many people tend to believe what they read. Others tend to disbelieve everything. Too few apply appropriate skepticism and do the additional work that true media literacy requires.
— Dan Gillmor

Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons).
— Howard Rheingold

QUANTUM MONKEYS [5.23.06]
A Talk with Seth Lloyd

Edge Video Broadband | Modem

Introduction

Seth Lloyd is an Edgy guy. In fact he likes to work "at the very edge of this information processing revolution". He appeared at the Edge event in honor of Robert Trivers at Harvard and talked from his "experience in building quantum computers, computers where you store bits of information on individual atoms."

Ten years ago Lloyd came up with "the first method for physically constructing a computer in which every quantum — every atom, electron, and photon — inside a system stores and processes information...During this meeting, Craig Venter claimed that we're all so theoretical here that we've never seen actual data. I take that personally, because most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is to try to coax little super-conducting circuits to give up their secrets". Below is his talk along with his discussion with Steven Pinker, Martin Nowak, J. Craig Venter, Lee Smolin, and Alan Guth.

—JB

SETH LLOYD iis Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. His seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications — including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer.

He is the author of the recently published Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos.

SETH LLOYD'S Edge Bio Page

QUANTUM MONKEYS

(SETH LLOYD:) It's no secret that we're in the middle of an information-processing revolution. Electronic and optical methods of storing, processing, and communicating information have advanced exponentially over the last half-century. In the case of computational power this rapid advance known as Moore's Law.  In the 1960s, Gordon Moore, the ex-president of Intel, pointed out that the components of computers were halving in size every year or two, and consequently, the power of computers was doubling at the same rate. Moore's law has continued to hold to the present day. As a result these machines that we make, these human artifacts, are on the verge of becoming more powerful than human beings themselves in terms of raw information processing power. If you count the elementary computational events that occur in the brain or in the computer – bits flipping, synapses firing – the computer is likely to overtake the brain in terms of bits flipped per second in the next couple of decades.  

We shouldn't be too concerned, though.  For computers to become smarter than us is not really a hardware problem; it's more a software issue. Software evolves much more slowly than hardware, and indeed much current software seems to be designed to junk up the beautiful machines that we build. The situation is like the Cambrian explosion, a rapid increase in the power of hardware.  Who is smarter, humans or computers, is a question that will get sorted out some million years hence, maybe; maybe sooner. My guess would be that it will take hundreds or thousands of years until we actually get software that we could reasonably regard as useful and sophisticated. At the same time, we're going to have computing machines that are much more powerful quite soon.

Most of what I do in my everyday life is to work at the very edge of this information processing revolution. Much of what I say to you today comes from my experience in building quantum computers, computers where you store bits of information on individual atoms. About ten years ago I came up with the first method for physically constructing a computer in which every quantum – every atom, electron, and photon -- inside a system stores and processes information. Over the last ten years I've been lucky enough to work with some of the world's great experimental physicists and quantum mechanical engineers to actually build such devices. A lot of what I'm going to tell you today is informed by my experiences in making these quantum computers. During this meeting, Craig Venter claimed that we're all so theoretical here that we've never seen actual data. I take that personally, because most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is to try to coax little super-conducting circuits to give up their secrets.           

The digital information-processing revolution is only the most recent revolution, and it's by no means the greatest one. For instance, he invention of moveable type and the printing has had a much greater impact on human society so far than the electronic revolution.  There have been many information processing revolutions.  One of my favorites is the invention of the so-called Arabic — actually Babylonian — numbers, in particular, zero. This amazing invention, very useful in terms of processing and registering information, came from the ancient Babylonians and then moved to India.  It came to us through the Arabs, which is why we call it the Arabic number system. The invention of zero  allows us to write the number 10 as one zero. This apparently tiny step is in fact an incredible invention that has given rise to all sorts of mathematics, including the bits – the `binary digits' -- of the digital computing revolution.

Another information processing revolution is the invention of written language. It's hard to argue that written language is not an information-processing revolution of the first magnitude. Another of my favorites is the first sexual revolution; that is, the discovery of sex by a living organism. One of the problems with life is that if you don't have sex, then the primary means of evolution is via mutation. Almost 99.9% of mutations are bad. Being from a mechanical engineering department, I would say that when you evolve only by mutation, you have an engineering conflict: your mechanism for evolution happens to have all sorts of negative effects.  In particular, the two prerequisites for life – evolve, but maintain the integrity of the genome – collide. This is what's called a coupled design, and that's bad.  However, if you have sexual selection, then you can combine genes from different genomes and get lots of variation without, in principal, ever having to have a mutation. Of course, you still have mutations, but you get a huge amount of variation for free.

I wrote a paper a few years ago that compared the evolutionary power of human beings to that of bacteris. The point of comparison was the number of bits per second of new genetic combinations that a population of human beings generated, compared with the number generated by a culture of bacteria. A culture of bacteria in a swimming pool of seawater has about a trillion bacteria, reproducing once every thirty minutes.  Compare this with the genetic power of a small town with a few thousand people in New England — say Peyton Place — reproducing every thirty years.  Despite the huge difference in population, Peyton Place can generate as many new genetic combinations as the culture of bacteria a billion times more numerous. This assumes that the bacteria are only generating new combinations via mutation, which of course they don't, but for this purpose we will not discuss bacteria having sex. In daytime TV the sexual recombination and selection happens much faster, of course.

Sexual reproduction is a great revolution.   Then of course, there's the grandmother or granddaddy of all information processing revolutions, life itself. The discovery, however it came about, that information can be stored and processed genetically and that this could be used to encode functions inside an organism that can reproduce is an incredible revolution. It happened four to five billion years ago on Earth, maybe earlier if one believes that life developed elsewhere and then was transported here.  At any rate, since the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, it happened sometime in the last 13.8 billion years.

We forgot to talk  about the human brain (or should I say, my brain forgot to talk about the brain?).  There are many information-processing revolutions, and I'm presumably leaving out many thousands that we don't even know about, but which were equally important as the ones we've discussed.

To pull a Kuhnian maneuver, the main thing that I'd like to point out about these information processing revolutions is that each one arises out of the technology of the previous one.  Electronic information processing, for instance, comes out of the notion of written language, of having zeroes and ones, the idea that you can make machines to copy and transmit information. A printing press is not so useful without written language.  Without spoken language, you wouldn't come up with written language. It's hard to speak if you don't have a brain. And what are brains for but to help you have sex? You can't have sex without life. Music came from the ability to make sound, and the ability to make sound evolved for the purpose of having sex. You either need vocal chords to sing with or sticks to beat on a drum with.  To make sound, you need a physical object. Every information processing revolution requires either living systems, electromechanical systems, or mechanical systems.  For every information processing revolution, there is a technology.

OK, so life is the big one, the mother of all information processing revolutions.  But what revolution occurred that allowed life to exist? I would claim that, in fact, all information processing revolutions have their origin in the intrinsic computational nature of the universe. The first information processing revolution was the Big Bang. Information processing revolutions come into existence because at some level the universe is constructed of information. It is made out of bits.

Of course, the universe is also made out of elementary particles, unknown dark energy, and lots of other things. I'm not advocating that we junk our normal picture of the universe as being constructed out of quarks, electrons, and protons. But in fact it's been known, ever since the latter part of the 19th century, that every elementary particle, every photon, every electron, registers a certain number of bits of information.  Whenever two elementary particles bounce off of each other, those bits flip.  The universe computes. 

The notion that the universe is, at bottom, processing information sounds like some radical idea.  In fact, it's an old discovery, dating back to Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs, the physicists who developed statistical mechanics from 1860 to 1900. They showed that, in fact, the universe is fundamentally about information. They, of course, called this information entropy, but if you look at their scientific discoveries through the lens of twentieth century technology, what in fact they discovered was that entropy is the number of bits of information registered by atoms.   So in fact, it's scientifically uncontroversial that the universe at bottom is processing information.  My claim is that this intrinsic ability of the universe to register and process information is actually responsible for all the subsequent information processing revolutions.

How do we think of information these days? The contemporary scientific view of information is based on the theories of Claude Shannon. When Shannon came up with his fundamental formula for information he went to the physicist and polymath John von Neumann and said, "What shall I call this?" and von Neuman said, "You'll call it H, because that's what Boltzmann called it," referring to Boltzmann's famous H Theorem. The founders of information theory were very well aware that the formulas they were using had been developed back in the 19th century to describe the motions of atoms. When Shannon talked about the number of bits in a signal that can be sent down a communications channel, he was using the same formulas to describe it that Maxwell and Boltzmann used to describe the amount of information, or the entropy, required to describe the positions and momenta of a set of interacting particles in a gas.

What is a bit of information? Let's get down to the question of what information is. When you buy a computer you ask how many bits its memory can register.  A bit comes from a distinction between two different possibilities. In a computer a bit is a little electric switch, which can be open or closed; or it's a capacitor that can be charged, which is called 1, or uncharged, which is called 0. Anything that has two distinct states registers a bit of information. At the elementary particle level a proton can have two distinct states: spin up or spin down. Each proton registers one bit of information.  In fact, the proton registers a bit whether it wants to or not, or whether this information is interpreted or not. It registers a bit merely by the fact of existing.  A proton possesses two different states and so registers a bit.

We exploit the intrinsic information processing ability of atoms when building quantum computers, because many of our quantum computers consist of arrays of protons interacting with their neighbors, each of which stores a bit. Each proton would be storing a bit of information whether we were asking them to flip those bits or not. Similarly, if you have a bunch of atoms zipping around, they bounce off each other. Take two helium atoms in a child's balloon. The atoms come together, and they bounce off each other, and then they move apart again. Maxwell and Boltzmann realized that there's essentially a string of bits that attach to each of these atoms to describe its position and momentum. When the atoms bounce off each other the string of bits changes because the atoms' momentum changes.   When the atoms collide, their bits flip.

The number of bits registered by each atom is well known and has been quantified ever since Maxwell and Boltzmann.  Each particle — for instance each of the molecules in this room — registers something on the order of 30 or 40 bits of information as it bounces around. This feature of the universe — that it registers and processes information at its most fundamental level — is scientifically  uncontroversial, in the sense that it has been known for 120 years and is the accepted dogma of physics.

The universe computes.  My claim is that this intrinsic information processing ability of the universe is responsible for the remainder of the information processing revolutions we see around us, from life up to electronic computers.  Let me repeat the claim: it's a scientific fact that the universe is a big computer. More technically, the universe is a gigantic information processor that is capable of universal computation.  That is the definition of a computer.

If he were here Marvin Minsky would say, "Ed Fredkin and Konrad Zuse back in the 1960s claimed that the universe was a computer, a giant cellular automaton." Konrad Zuse was the first person to build an electronic digital computer around 1940. He and Ed Fredkin at MIT came up with this idea that the universe might be a gigantic type of computer called a cellular automaton. This is an idea that has since been developed by Stephen Wolfram. The idea that the universe is some kind of digital computer is, in fact, an old claim as well.

Thus, my claim that the universe computes is an old one dating back at least half a century.  This claim could actually be substantiated from a scientific perspective. One could prove, by looking at the basic laws of physics, that the universe is or is not a computer, and if so, what kind of computer it is. We have very good experimental evidence that the laws of physics support computation. I own a computer, and it obeys the laws of physics, whatever those laws are. We know the universe supports computation, at least on a macroscopic scale. My claim is that the universe supports computation at its most tiny scale. We know that the universe processes information at this level, and we know that at the larger level it's capable of doing universal computations and creating things like human beings. The thesis that the universe is, at bottom, a computer, is in fact an old notion.  The work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs established the basic computational framework more than a century ago.  But for some reason, the consequences of the computational nature of the universe have yet to be explored in a systematic way.  What does it mean to us that they universe computes?  This question is worthy of significant scientific investigation.  Most of my work investigates the scientific consequences of the computational
universe.

One of the primary consequences of the computational nature of the universe is that the complexity that we see around us arises in a natural way, without outside intervention.  Indeed, if the universe computes, complex systems like life must necessarily arise.  So describing the universe in terms of how it processes information, rather than describing it solely in terms of the interactions of elementary particles, is not some kind of empty exercise.  Rather, the computational nature of the universe has dramatic consequences.

Let's be more explicit about why something that's computationally capable, like the universe, must necessarily spontaneously generate the kind of complexity that's around us.  There's a famous story, `Inflexible Logic,' by Russell Maloney, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1940 in which a wealthy dilettante hears the phrase that if you had enough monkeys typing then they would type the works of Shakespeare. Because he's got a lot of money he assembles a team of monkeys and a professional trainer, and he has them start typing. At a cocktail party he has an argument with a Yale mathematician, who says that this is really implausible, because any calculation of the odds of this happening will show it will never happen. The gentleman invites the mathematician up to his estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and he takes him to where the monkeys have just started to write out Tom Sawyer and Love's Labour's Lost. They're doing it, without any single mistake. The mathematician is so upset that he kills all the monkeys. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is.

The image of monkeys typing on typewriters is quite old. I spent a fair amount of time this summer going over the Internet and talking with various experts around the world about the origins of this story. Some people ascribe it to Thomas Huxley in his debate with Bishop Wilberforce in 1858, after the appearance of The Origin of Species. From eyewitness reports of that debate it is clear that Wilberforce asked Huxley from which side of his family, his mother's or his father's, he was descended from an ape. Huxley said, "I would rather be descended from a humble ape than from a great gentleman who uses considerable intellectual gifts in the service of falsehood." A woman in the audience fainted when he said that. They didn't have R-rated movies back then.

Although Huxley made a stirring defense of Darwin's theory of natural selection during this debate, and although he did refer to monkeys, apparently he did not talk  about monkeys typing on typewriters, because for one thing typewriters  as we know them had barely been invented in 1859.  The erroneous attribution of the image of typing monkeys to Huxley seems to have arisen because  Arthur Eddington, in 1928, speculated about monkeys typing all the books in the British Library. Subsequently, Sir James Jeans ascribed the typing monkeys to Huxley.

In fact, it seems to have been the French mathematician Emile Borel, who came up with the image  of typing monkeys in 1907. Borel was the person who developed the modern mathematical theory of combinatorics.  Borel imagined a million monkeys each typing ten characters a second at random.  He pointed out that these monkeys could in fact produce all the books in all the richest libraries of the world.  He then went on to dismiss probability of them doing so as infinitesimally small.

It is true that the monkeys would, in fact, type gibberish. If you plug in "monkeys typing" into Google, you'll find a website that will enlist your computer to emulate typing monkeys. The site lists records of how many monkey years it takes to type out the opening bits of various Shakespeare plays and the current record is 17 characters of Love's Labour's Lost over 483 billion billion monkey years. Monkeys typing on typewriters generate random gobbledygook.

Before Borel, Boltzmann advanced a `monkeys typing' explanation for why the universe is complex.  The universe, he said, is just a big thermal fluctuation. Like the flips of a coin, the universe is in fact just random information. His colleagues soon dissuaded him from this position, because it's obviously not so. If it were, then every new bit of information you got that you hadn't received before would be random.  But when our telescopes look out in space, they get new information all the time and it's not random. Far from it: the new information they gather is full of structure. Why is that?

To see why the universe is full of complex structure, imagine that the monkeys are typing into a computer, rather than a typewriter. The computer,  in turn, rather than just running Microsoft Word, interprets what the monkeys type as an instruction in some suitable computer language, like Java.  Now, even though the monkeys are still typing gobbledygook, something remarkable happens.  The computer starts to generate complex structures. 

At first this seems odd: garbage in, garbage out.  But in fact, there are short, random looking computer programs that will produce very complicated structures.  For example, one short, random looking program will make the computer start proving all provable mathematical theorems.  A second short, random looking program will make the computer evaluate the consequences of the laws of physics. There are computer programs to do many things, and you don't need a lot of extra information to produce all sorts of complex phenomena from monkeys typing into a computer.

There's a mathematical theory called algorithmic information, which can be thought of as the theory of what happens when monkeys type into computers.  This theory was developed in the early 1960s by Ray Solomonoff in Cambridge, Mass.,  Gregory Chapin who was then a 15-year-old enfant terrible at IBM in Brazil, and then Andrey Kolmogorov, who was a famous Russian academic mathematician. Algorithmic information theory  tells you the probability of producing complex patterns from randomly programmed computers. The bottom line is that if monkeys start typing into computers, there's a very high probability that they'll produce things like the laws of chemistry, autocatalytic sets, or prebiotic kinds of life. Monkeys typing into computers make up  a reasonable explanation for why we have complexity in our universe.

Monkeys typing into a computer have a reasonable probability of producing almost any computable form of order that exists. You would not be surprised in this monkey universe to see all sorts of interesting things arising. You might not get Hamlet, because something like Hamlet requires huge sophistication and the evolution of societies, etc. But things like the laws of chemistry, or autocatalytic sets, or some kind of prebiotic form of protolife are the kinds of things that you would expect to see happen.

To apply this explanation to the origin of complexity in our universe we need two things: a computer, and monkeys.  We have the computer, which is the universe itself.  As was pointed out a century ago, the universe registers and processes information systematically at its most fundamental level. The machinery is there to be typed on.  So all you need is monkeys.  Where do you get the monkeys?

The monkeys that program our universe are supplied by the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is inherently chancy. You may have heard Einstein's phrase, "God does not play dice." Einstein was wrong. God does play dice. In the case of quantum mechanics, Einstein was, famously, wrong. In fact, it just when God plays dice that these little quantum blips or fluctuations get programmed into our universe. For example, Alan Guth has done work on how such quantum fluctuations form the seeds for the formation of large-scale structure in the universe. Why is our galaxy here rather than somewhere a hundred million light years away? It's here because way back in the very, very, very, very early universe there was a little quantum fluctuation that made a slight over-density of matter somewhere near here. This over density of matter was very tiny, but that was enough to make a seed around with other matter could clump. The structure that we see like the large-scale structure of the universe is in fact made by quantum monkeys typing.

We have all the ingredients, then, for a reasonable explanation of why the universe is complex.  You don't require very complicated dynamics for the universe to compute. The computational dynamics of the universe can be very simple. Almost anything will work. The universe computes.  Then, the universe is filled with little quantum monkeys in the form of quantum fluctuations, that program it. Quantum  fluctuations get processed by the intrinsic computational power of the universes and eventually give rise to the order that we see around us.

Steven Pinker, Martin Nowak, J. Craig Venter, Lee Smolin, Alan Guth

SETH LLOYD: When I give talks, I am often asked for my definition of complexity.

I wrote my Ph.D. thesis partly on different ways of defining complexity. Although I have my favorites I wouldn't advocate one over the other. Basically the monkeys typing argument  for the generation of complexity simply says that you don't have to have a preferred definition of complexity. Any structure or set of structures that you would regard as being complex will be produced by this mechanism.

If you insist that I define complexity, though, I can do so. Charlie Bennett proposed a good definition of complexity called logical depth, which says that a complex structure is one that requires a lot of computation to be produced from a simple program. If you take that idea, then the stuff that the universe has generated is exactly that logically deep stuff. The programs are simple, the computations have been going on for a long time. In fact, I can tell you exactly how many ops the universe has performed on how many bits: by applying the physics of computation you find that the universe has performed ten to the one hundred and twenty elementary operations (e.g., bit flips) on ten to the ninety bits.  That's a lot of ops on a lot of bits. What we get as a result is logically deep stuff.

STEVEN PINKER: The claim that the universe is a computer would not have much empirical content if we could not conceive what it would mean for the universe not to be a computer. Is it worth distinguishing between things that we recognize as processing information as opposed to merely containing information?  Containing information just means that you have more than one possibility.

LLOYD: So you're happy with that notion of things, continuing information?

STEVEN PINKER: It seems to me that a computer is more than something that contains information, because everything contains information. As an information processor a computer would seem to be special in two ways. One is that the information it processes  stands for something. It has a semantics as well as syntax. Among information-processing systems we’re familiar with.  written language refers to sound, sound refers to concepts, brains process information about the environment, DNA codes information about amino acids and their sequences, and so on.

Also, having information that has put into correspondence with something else, the information-processing system then attains some goal. That is, there are physical changes in the information-processor that by design (or its equivalent in evolved information-processors) is isomorphic with some relationship among the things that are represented, in some way that lead to some desirable outcome. In the case of computations it's solving equations; in the case of language it's communicating thoughts; in the case of the genetic code it's assembling functioning organisms, and so on. In all of those cases when you have a well-defined semantics and a goal-directed physical process it makes sense to talk about information processing, or in the human-made case, a computer.

But that wouldn't seem to apply to the universe. The states of all the elementary particles don't seem to stand for something else. Nor does the sequence of physical events map onto some orderly set of relationships. This would suggest that the universe is not a computer, although it contains information. Does that contradict what you're saying?

LLOYD: You've raised an important distinction. Many of the systems we regard as processing information, particularly sophisticated ones, have a notion of correspondence of a message with something else.

You seem to have a notion that computations are goal-directed. You're quite right that those kinds of features, having semantics and the notion that information corresponds to something else, are  more sophisticated. I regard those as emergent features that we can only ascribe to objects like living things, or perhaps to life itself. Those emergent features are very important.

However, it is possible for a system to register information without that information having some kind of semantic meaning. If a particle's spin can contain a bit, I would argue that you can also talk about information-processing without content.

Let me make an historical point: The great advance that Shannon made in discovering information theory was discovering that quantity of information could be stripped from its semantic content. If you ask how much information can be sent on a fiberoptic cable, you can answer that question without knowing what that information is about.  It could be MTV, it could be Romeo and Juliet — the number of bits per second traveling down the cable is the same. It is exactly by getting rid of the notion that semantic content is necessary to describe quantities of information that information theory and the mathematical theory of communication could arise.

STEVEN PINKER: Although Shannon did talk about information in terms of a correlation between what happens at the output end and what happened at the input end. They would have to correlate. It couldn't just be random bits at the input and random bits at the output.

LLOYD: Right, because if the bits were completely random then you would not have information. But what these bits referred to is unimportant for the quantity of information sent down the channel. Correlation is something that can be defined mathematically in the absence of any notion of what the bit means.

Still answering Steven's question, let me argue that in the same way  that quantity of information is defined irrespective of semantic content, information processing is defined irrespective of semantic content or the notion that some higher order or purpose is taking place. In an ordinary computer, a computer is just performing simple operations on a bit, flipping it depending on the state of another bit; that would happen regardless of whether there's some overall purpose to that bit flip, whether greater or lesser, or of any semantic content of those bits. If I take a nuclear spin of a proton in one of our quantum computers, and I flip it from spin up to spin down, now I have just flipped a bit and there may be no purpose whatsoever for it.

The question of whether information is being processed, or transformed, has a physical meaning completely apart from any mission or goal that this information is being processed for. In the same way that Shannon was able to say that you can disassociate the quantity of information from semantics, we can also strip information-processing, the notion that the bits are being flipped, from the notion that this is part of some goal-oriented process.

That's the sense in which I'm using the notion of information being processed, the physical process of information being transformed. It actually doesn't have to be part of some goal-oriented process.

STEVEN PINKER: I can see that you can define information processing in that way, so that everything is information-processing, in which case I wonder what kind of statement it is that the universe is an information processor.

The question is whether it is true by virtue of being circular. What I'm doing is offering a definition of information-processing such that it's not true that everything by definition is an information-processor. That allows me to make a statement of content. Is the universe an information-processor or not? I would think that the answer would be no, it isn't. At least, there's an interesting distinction to be made between DNA, computers, and printing presses on the one hand and the entire universe on the other. If you come up with a definition of information-processing and you can't make that distinction, then it would raises the question of whether it means anything to say that the universe is a computer or information-processor.

LLOYD: I think we're in agreement that the statement that the universe is an information-processor is true by virtue of itself. You could call it circular, but I'll just call it true. What I'm trying to explore here are the implications of this fact. You could use your definition of information processing, which is a human-based picture, associated with ideas of language or preconceptions about life. I would just say that this information processing is the result of bits flipping, and then out of this arose life, human beings, etc. The interesting questions concern why we get these emergent features, like information that has semantic content and means something important. I certainly don't say that all bits are created equal. All bits are equal physically — they each register one bit — but some bits are a heck of a lot more important than others. I don't want you flipping the bits in my DNA.

MARTIN NOWAK: I am interested in the physical properties of the universe which might lead us to expect the possibility of life? Is this based on computation? Are you saying that certain structures in the universe can compute something while others cannot? Does this chair here compute?

LLOYD: Certain structures are better at computing than others, but the universe as a whole has this capability. Different pieces of the universe process information in different ways. The whole point about a universal computer is that it can process information in any possible way. Some of these ways of processing information are a heck of a lot more interesting than others. If human beings present very interesting questions of semantics and content and purposeful information processing, I think that's good. That's what's interesting about human beings.

I  take a very physical definition of information. If the universe if computing, we have to see what the consequences of that are. The consequence is we get a very diverse universe, in which some parts of computation we regard as interesting, and some not. This chair computes itself, and you wouldn't want it to stop doing that, because if you sat on it, and the chair stopped computing its ability to hold you up – bang. You'd be on the floor. So that's pretty good computation too.

CRAIG VENTER: Your argument is basically that this computer is driving us toward order and I would argue life as a natural consequence of that. So where does decay and entropy enter into this?

LLOYD: That's really a key question. Most of the processes that you see around, particularly in life, have used the increase of entropy as a powerful mechanism that drives pieces of the system to ordered states. There's a whole physical theory of how you can get order in some part of the system at the expense of creating disorder elsewhere. According to the second law of thermodynamics the total amount of information in the system never decreases. You can't make order here without pumping that disorder out elsewhere. This may be a way of trying to discover what happened before life existed. Rather than looking for systems of genetic information we should be looking for systems that were capable of controlling the way that you create order in one place and pump disorder to another place. What kinds of systems do that? That is actually a key part of how you create order. The process of creating order has to respect the laws of physics,  and that process exploits the second law of thermodynamics to create order in one place while creating disorder elsewhere.

MARTIN NOWAK: The statement that something is a universal Turing machine requires a mathematical proof. Imagine a box of ideal gas. Is that a universal Turing machine?

LLOYD: No, typically not. Not on its own. To demonstrate that something is a universal Turing machine is not a content-free statement. You can actually ask Yes or No questions. Is the universe a classical cellular automaton as was suggested by Zuse and Fredkin? The answer is almost certainly not, because classical cellular automata can't reproduce quantum mechanical effects in any efficient way. The statement that the universe is a universal computer is not a content-free statement. When you investigate what that statement means in detail, and how the universe actually computes, you can rule out certain kinds of computation as the basis for what it's doing. You actually require a proof that the laws of physics as they stand are computationally universal in a reasonable way.

For a bunch of particles in a gas, Ed Fredkin and Norm Margolus pointed out that particles colliding off each other could perform universal computation. The problem with this model of computation is that it's chaotic. The collision of molecules is a chaotic, the information that the molecules contain degrades very rapidly, and the molecules in this room are not factoring some large number, or reporting back to Microsoft on what we're doing.

LEE SMOLIN: I'm trying to understand the same thing that you're trying to understand: how it is that complexity might come out of the laws of physics. If you agree that there are two very distinct notions of processing information that you and one Steve gave — one defines semantic content and goal-oriented behavior and one just defines evolution of the system in which we identify "bits of information" — the question we're all interested in is how the first kind gives rise to the second, or the reverse.

LLOYD: Given my contempt for theories of everything I would certainly not try to suggest that the computational theory of the universe I have advocated here solves all our problems. I disagree with the notion of insisting on semantic content because it's very hard to make the kind of definitions of information-processing that rely on semantic content precise. Philosophers of language have been trying to make such definitions precise for many, many years, and down that road lies madness. To say what it means for something to have a semantic content is hard. What you mean by goal-oriented behavior is a part of semantic content. That's why I really would like to avoid a definition of that sort, because I don't regard it as being a definition that can be made scientifically precise.

But why does this low-level information-processing that pervades everywhere in the world spontaneously give rise to this kind of high-level information processing where you have language, semantics, and goal-oriented behavior? That's, indeed, what we'd like to find out. This argument that you spontaneously produce complicated structures by no means solves that question, because there's a very detailed history of the way in which this complex behavior erupted in the first place. The nature of this history is
a very interesting question, and I certainly wouldn't say that it's been solved at all.

LEE SMOLIN: Here are two possible quantum theories of gravity: Quantum theory of gravity one has a basis of states that were given by some labeled graphs, combinatorial graphs. Quantum theory of gravity two has a basis of states given by labeled graphs embedded in a three-dimensional manifold. Since you believe in quantum mechanics this means that states have to be normalized. It means you have to sum over certain numbers and get 1. In the first case, the graph isomorphism probably could be solved, and we could write an algorithm that a computer could run to check whether a quantum state is normalizable or not. In the second case it's conjectured that the embedding of graphs in three manifolds is not a problem that's solvable by a finite algorithm. You would have to be committed to the second kind of theory being wrong and the first kind of theory being right, because if the second kind of theory were right then even testing whether a quantum state was normalizable is something that a digital computer could never do. Therefore, if the universe were a digital computer, it could not learn that kind of quantum mechanics.

LLOYD: No, I actually disagree with that. The process of testing whether a theory is correct on a digital computer is very different from the process of a digital computer being something and doing something. This, by the way, is a distinct type of unpredictability from that involved in quantum mechanics. If you have something that is a computer performing a universal digital computation, then Gödel's theorem and the Halting Problem guarantee that the only way to see what it's going to do is to let it evolve and to see what happens. Even without any kind of additional lack of determinism in terms of quantum mechanics or chaos, the fact that the universe is computing makes its future behavior — and in particular its future behavior about things like complex systems, which is what we really care about — intrinsically unpredictable. The only way to see what's going to happen is to wait and see.

ALAN GUTH: When I hear about the universe as a computer and all that, I don't really know what that means that's different from saying that the universe can be described mathematically. I would think that anything that can be described mathematically is the same sort of thing as a computer.

LLOYD: There's a technical difference between something that is described mathematically and something that is capable of universal computation. You can build machines, or indeed laws of physics, that are not capable of universal computation and they could not support things like language, etc. We don't have that kind of universe. There's something called the Chomsky hierarchy, which is a hierarchy of information-processing devices, and as you move up the hierarchy you get ever more sophisticated. At the top of the hierarchy are universal Turing machines. Our universe seems to be, in terms of its information-processing ability, at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy. But it's quite easy to build toy models that don't have this capability.

ALAN GUTH: But it's easy to build models that do have the capability.

LLOYD: Once you have some kind of non-linear interaction between things then you typically get it.

ALAN GUTH: Okay, but then the universal Turing machine idea is
telling us very little about the universe.

LLOYD: The fact that people seem to regard this whole statement that the universe is processing information as self-evident, and that it is almost self-evident that it's a universal Turing machine, is good. All I'm arguing is that we should actually look seriously at the implications of this self-evident fact.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out

Despite comparing Wikipedia with the likes of American Idol, this is a more reasoned and hopeful argument than it appears at first glance. Lanier is not condemning collective, bottom-up activity as much as trying to find ways to check its development. In short, it's an argument for the mindful intervention of individuals in the growth and acceleration of this hive-mind thing called collective intelligence.

Indeed, having faith in the beneficence of the collective is as unpredictable as having blind faith in God or a dictator. A poorly developed group mind might well decide any one of us is a threat to the mother organism deserving of immediate expulsion.

Still, I have a hard time fearing that the participants of Wikipedia or even the call-in voters of American Idol will be in a position to remake the social order anytime, soon. And I'm concerned that any argument against collaborative activity look fairly at the real reasons why some efforts turn out the way they do. Our fledgling collective intelligences are not emerging in a vacuum, but on media platforms with very specific biases.

First off, we can't go on pretending that even our favorite disintermediation efforts are revolutions in any real sense of the word. Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite. Just because the latter might include a 14-year-old with an Internet connection in no way changes the fact that he's educated, techno-savvy, and enjoying enough free time to research and post to an encyclopedia for no pay. Although he is not on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he's certainly in as good a position as anyone to get there.

While I agree with Lanier and the recent spate of articles questioning the confidence so many Internet users now place in user-created databases, these are not grounds to condemn bottom-up networking as a dangerous and headless activity — one to be equated with the doomed mass actions of former communist regimes.

Kevin's overburdened "hive mind" metaphor notwithstanding, a networked collaboration is not an absolutely level playing field inhabited by drones. It is an ecology of interdependencies. Take a look at any of these online functioning collective intelligences — from eBay to Slashdot — and you'll soon get a sense of who has gained status and influence. And in most cases, these reputations have been won through a process much closer to meritocracy, and through a fairer set of filters, than the ones through which we earn our graduate degrees.

While it may be true that a large number of current websites and group projects contain more content aggregation (links) than original works (stuff), that may as well be a critique of the entirety of Western culture since post-modernism. I'm as tired as anyone of art and thought that exists entirely in the realm of context and reference — but you can't blame Wikipedia for architecture based on winks to earlier eras or a music culture obsessed with sampling old recordings instead of playing new compositions.

Honestly, the loudest outcry over our Internet culture's inclination towards re-framing and the "meta" tend to come from those with the most to lose in a society where "credit" is no longer a paramount concern. Most of us who work in or around science and technology understand that our greatest achievements are not personal accomplishments but lucky articulations of collective realizations. Something in the air. (Though attributed to just two men, discovery of the DNA double-helix was the result of many groups working in parallel, and no less a collective effort than the Manhattan Project. ) Claiming authorship is really just a matter of ego and royalties. Even so, the collective is nowhere near being able to compose a symphony or write a novel — media whose very purpose is to explode the boundaries between the individual creator and his audience.

If you really want to get to the heart of why groups of people using a certain medium tend to behave in a certain way, you'd have to start with an exploration of biases of the medium itself. Kids with computers sample and recombine music because computers are particularly good at that — while not so very good as performance instruments. Likewise, the Web — which itself was created to foster the linking of science papers to their footnotes — is a platform biased towards drawing connections between things, not creating them. We don't blame the toaster for its inability to churn butter.

That's why it would particularly sad to dismiss the possibilities for an emergent collective intelligence based solely on the early results of one interface (the Web) on one network (the Internet) of one device (the computer). The "hive mind" metaphor was just one early, optimistic futurist's way of explaining a kind of behavior he hadn't experienced before: that of a virtual community.

Now sure, there may have been a bit too many psychedelics making their way through Silicon Valley at the same time as Mac Classics and copies of James Gleick's Chaos. At the early breathless phase of any cultural renaissance, there are bound to be some teleologically suspect prognostications from those who are pioneering the fringe. And that includes you and me, both.

Still, what you saw so clearly from the beginning is that the beauty of the Internet is its ability to connect people to one another. It's not the content, it's the contact.

The Internet itself holds no philosopher's stone — there's no God to emerge from the medium. I'm with you, there. But there is something that can emerge from people engaging with one another in ways they hadn't dreamed possible, before. While the Internet itself may never produce the genuinely cooperative society so many of us yearn for, it does give us the opportunity to model the kinds of behaviors that may work back here in the real world.

In any case, the true value of the collective is not its ability to go "meta" or to generate averages but rather, quite the opposite, to connect strangers. Already, new sub-classifications of diseases have been identified when enough people with seemingly unique symptoms find one another online. Craigslist's founder is a hero online not because he has gone "meta" but because of the very real and practical connections he has fostered between people looking for jobs, homes, or families to adopt their pets. And it wasn't Craig's intellectual framing that won him this reputation, but the time and energy he put into maintaining the social cohesion of his online space.

Meanwhile, offline collectivist efforts at dis-intermediating formerly top-down systems are also creating new possibilities for everything from economics to education. Local currencies give unemployed Japanese people the opportunity to spend time caring for elders near their homes so that someone else can care for their own family members in distant regions. The New York Public School system owes any hope of a future to the direct intervention of community members, whose commune-era utopian "free school" models might make us hardened cynics cringe— but energize teachers and students alike.

I'm troubled by American Idol and the increasingly pandering New York Times as much as anyone, but I don't blame collaboration or techno-utopianism for their ills. In these cases, we're not watching the rise of some new dangerous form of digital populism, but the replacement of key components of a cultural ecology — music and journalism — by the priorities of consumer capitalism.

In fact, the alienating effects of mass marketing are in large part what motivate today's urge toward collective activity. If anything, the rise of online collective activity is itself a check — a low-pass filter on the anti-communal effects of political corruption, market forces, and strident individualism.

One person's check is another person's balance.

The "individual" Lanier would have govern the collective is itself a social construction born in the Renaissance, celebrated via democracy in the Enlightenment and since devolved into the competition, consumption, and consumerism we endure today.

While the tags adorning Flickr photographs may never constitute an independently functioning intelligence, they do allow people to participate in something bigger than themselves, and foster a greater understanding of the benefits of collective action. They are a desocialized society's first baby steps toward acting together with more intelligence than people can alone.

And watching for signs of such intelligent life is anything but boring.

QUENTIN HARDY
Silicon Valley bureau chief of Forbes Magazine; Lecturer, U.C. Berkeley's School of Information

Jaron Lanier contends with several ideas at once. What I take out is:

• That Wikipedia is the best possible example of the collective mind. It may be the worst.

As he indicates, and others have shown before, successful collectives are something like tribes, with like-minded people assuming a common culture which they see as both valuable and fragile. It has rules, boundaries and guardians. Wikipedia is unbounded and (for the most part) ungoverned. It is a great experiment, the kind of thing that is necessary when learning to use a new tool, but that does not make it the best model.

This collective, it is worth noting, made of those individuals he cherishes. The "crowd" does not keep acclaiming Mr. Lanier's skills behind the camera; one or more people do. Even in a healthy financial market, everybody's favorite collective mind, there is plenty of mispricing.

• That it would be an absolute good if all error were eliminated. Most errors, in society and nature, are unfortunate. The process is necessary. The ill-formed and stillborn bird is the other side of species creation. We have to have error if Columbus is ever to sail off for India, so finding America, or if Leibniz is to misunderstand the I Ching, thereby exploring binary math.

• That existing definitions of the self and the crowd are permanent. Our new tool for communication and computation may take us away from distinct individualism, and towards something closer to the tender nuance of folk art or the animal energy of millenarianism. Either way, however, both "individual" and "folk" should stand as metaphors. Possibly a third thing is happening, as yet poorly understood.

At times like that, it is easy to bemoan losses and overestimate gains. Yet while the electronically enhanced collective mind is novel, but the discovery of new ways to be is not a new phenomenon in the history of human consciousness. Rather it is typical of revolutionary advances in transport or communications (and responsible for most market manias and political upheavals, as well as much progress. )

• That collectives will purportedly resolve one of the key problem of an era of media onslaught: What is successful filtering? With so much information at hand, what should we consume? Popurls doesn't offer much info in advances in diabetes management, but I read three newspapers a day and I missed it too.

It's certainly unclear that collectives will eliminate the culture of celebrity, one of the more woeful primary filters of our time. But bashing American Idol (another unbounded collective) for not advancing the cause of pop music is just strange. Pop (like most things) never threw out endless great stuff. Clay Aiken is not supposed to be John Lennon, he is the current version of Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lets.

• That existing hierarchies are the best places to test the efficacy of the new communications tools. This is like asking the Catholic Church, circa 1475, about the uses of the printing press. Mr. Lanier is probably consulting for wealthy companies and governments, which would rather co-opt the collective phenomenon than see it authentically transform the world they know. That may be why the results there are often uninspiring.

All that said, massive kudos for suggesting some rules around collectives (i.e., "at best when not defining its own questions") that he moves toward in the last third of this essay. Getting this right will take years. That is a real service that can't happen without some belief that there is deep value in the collective.

Which is to say that Mr. Lanier does believe in the crowd, or he would not go to the trouble. What I suspect gets up his nose is the recurring failure of "the crowd," no matter what the century or the tools in question, to be clear-eyed about where it is in History: Usually someplace in the middle, but acting like we are at the beginning or end of something major, something world historic. Something that will finally afford us, as individuals and a species, a kind of certainty in Time. Something that will bring absolute judgment after all the generations. Something that will relieve each individual of the burden of being good.