The Blazing Butterfly

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"But these are flowers that fly and all but sing"

Robert Frost, Blue-Butterfly Day

Tracking Music in Performance, words, and memory

Camp Follower

When I signed on as a chaperone for the Crowden School string orchestra’s Italian Tour, what I most looked forward to was traveling with one of the musicians – my daughter – and exploring Italy’s culture and countryside. As it turned out though, my daughter, busy with her music and her friends, was not in the group of girls I was asked to chaperone, so we couldn't spend much time together. What, then, would absorb my interest? The landscape? Cuisine? The music? I liked music, of course, but didn't consider myself especially musical.

To my surprise, what enthralled me from Rome to Ferrara was following the development of the orchestra. Relieved of the distractions of their busy American lives, immersed in the music, the students played in a school in Rome, in Gubbio’s community theater, in a small church in empyrean Assissi, at Perugia’s Santa Giuliana, a convent turned language school, at Florence’s Conservatory Luigi Cherubini, and in the courtyard of Ferrara’s Estense Castle. In those venues the music moved and entranced with its unexpected metamorphoses, subtle ripening, and powerfully deepening contours. It was illuminating to study how, in concert after concert, the conductors elicited fine performances in ascending order; how they polished pieces by Bach and Tchaikovsky, Lou Harrison and Ralph Vaughan Williams. But my recollections are scarcely of the music, and only selectively of the conductors. What I most vividly recall are the emotions that music associated with the diverse architectures in which it was played. Connected to my images of these spaces, I recall the little communities temporarily formed by the audiences, and the young musicians whose mastery made them seem like adults when they performed.

As the music surprised and delighted me I was surprised by my delight – surprised, because music, though it had always provided enjoyment, had never before commanded so much of my attention, as if it had a story to tell, chapter by chapter. As a traveler in a bustling caravan, I took an interest in all of the incidents that made up the biography of the orchestra. How unfortunate that a player had to sit out the first concert when his bass didn’t arrive in time. How disappointing that the audience in Gubbio didn’t get the avant-garde piece by a student composer. How wonderful that the audience in Ferarra got it! How brilliant the solos performed by the two Davids in Perugia! There, at the Santa Giuliana, the story the music seemed to tell was happily confounded with the most memorable human-interest story of all. There, on June 20 – the festival day on which Perugia celebrates its independence from the Holy Roman Empire – guarded by resplendent soldiers from the language school for the military, the orchestra performed on behalf of the Associazione Elena Marino, a foundation created to honor the memory of a girl who had died before she could fulfill her dream of becoming an opera singer. Elena’s mother – this remarkable woman who had lost her daughter – devoted herself to organizing this tribute to Elena. The concert featured masterpieces of classical music performed alongside Primavera, a poem by Elena that had been set to music by one of the American students. The singing of Primavera was the heart of the concert. But that is simply a story, a wonderful story, about the music I followed on the Italian trail, for in truth, music does not tell a story.

Butterfly...
What dreams does it see
Fanning its wings?
Chiyo-ni

Music gives Wings to the Spirit

Music is transformational. It can lift us outside of, and beyond, our mundane preoccupations, as it lifted the audience that day in Perugia. Music is transitory. Music’s audiences are not congregations, they are provisional communities, joined together on this occasion only, joined not by liturgy, but by shape-shifting sound waves that envelop them, by voices that speak indistinctly to some and clearly to others. Music is holistic. When musicians in an orchestra are firm in their technique, free of the need to focus on getting the right notes, they can hear the ambient music, and take part in the whole that was engendered by the composer’s mind. In this respect, musicians are like readers: they can comprehend the whole when they have mastered code; when they attain fluency they can become imaginatively absorbed in another mind. But though they learn to read music, musicians are not like readers of books, who gain useful information, who identify with characters. Music has no useful information about the world to impart, unless it is coupled with words and becomes a song. Music has no human representations to share, unless, again, it is set to words and becomes a musical or an opera. Music without words is syntax without language that reaches beyond semantics to a larger reality that is yet in synchrony with our sentient core.

Words about Music

In her novel Appassionata, Eva Hoffman imagines the thrill of listening to a gifted pianist perform Chopin and the struggle on the part of the audience to become fully absorbed in the composer’s world.  The thoughts of very different members of the audience are now of the music, now of the pianist, now of their intimate and even mundane concerns. For Ricardo Lopez, the music calls up an autobiographical memory that intermittently displaces the music:

…ah, listen, thinks Ricardo Lopez, chromatic delicate like powder / all senses at once / Alicia / yes, I wanted her in that room, the powder, the gesture of her hand coming up to her face, the musk of her body and then / how could they do it, her wrist, broken, shattered / how could they / cold metal the pain how much pain did she feel / ah, listen, that phrase, the elegance, the grandeur, the grand arc / the bend of her neck, the curve of an arm, Alicia / her wrist, broken, the cruelty, where is the music for that! / the torment of it always //

For Lopez, language embodies the double images that shape the experience of hearing Chopin. The word “powder” conveys Lopez’s sense of the quality of the music only to lead him away from it to a world of personal torment. Moments later, the “arc” of the music recalls the bend of a woman’s arm, the curve of her neck.

Because members of the audience use words to think about the music, to parse Chopin, they are vulnerable to the power of words to lead them away from pure music. Hoffman demonstrates this diversionary power of words in the stream-of-consciousness of Fernand Mercier:

Chopin, incomparable / it’s in me, weaving through me, she’s poured it into me / directly into the veins, the soul / what is it we exchange? the Exchange early morning, must read the figures, damn it bloody figures, must catch up / ah, the modulation, where are we, C-sharp minor, the snag on the soul/the economics of the soul//

The word “exchange” causes Mercier’s thinking about the music to pivot away from thoughts that reflect the experience of hearing Chopin and towards Mercier’s mundane, indeed materialistic, concerns. The music calls him back, but it is clear that he will continue, at a conscious, language-inflected level, to be torn between thinking about the music and thinking about the world. Is thinking about Chopin listening to Chopin? Hoffman does not portray a single member of her audience as listening to the music in a way that bypasses stream-of-consciousness association. In effect, the entire audience experiences music as necessarily mediated, always at risk of becoming a metaphor for something else.

What kind of listener hears pure music, music without any language but the language of music itself? Can full musical absorption, in which the listener is with the performer, and the performer is with the composer, note by note, be sustained throughout an entire piece? When we know music, what do we know? Do we know it in the hearing, in the remembering?

More intelligent people than I have asked such questions, and have not come up with any definitive answers that I know of. But I doubt that anyone more intelligent than Proust has ventured out on this mist-covered terrain. If the answers Proust suggests, in the course of his exploration, are not definitive, at least they may be good. For music plays a signally important role in Proust’s narrative about experience and memory, love and loss, time and art.

Swann in Love with Music

Swann in Love is Proust’s tale of the compulsions of romantic passion acted out intimately and in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where listening to music is both a personal and a finely grained social adventure. The refined Charles Swann falls in love with Odette, a woman of modest intelligence and culture. She’s not even his type, but she has him in her thrall. Before falling in love with Odette though, Swann falls passionately in love with music: in particular, with a little phrase from a sonata by fictional composer Vinteuil. Proust’s account of Swann’s relationship to “the little phrase” represents music as the great modulator of mental states – percepts, feelings, thoughts and memories – both conscious and unconscious.

Proust’s account of Swann hearing the Vinteuil sonata for the first time suggests a philosophy of mind as much as a philosophy of aesthetics. Swann’s integration of the musical phrase into consciousness is built up over three separate moments of listening. Proust describes these moments as follows:

·       “But at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish a clear outline, or give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to recollect…the phrase or harmony…that had opened and expanded his soul…But the notes themselves [had] vanished before these sensations [had] developed sufficiently to escape submersion under” [the sensations awakened by the succeeding notes].

·       Swann’s memory provides him with a “ ‘transcript’…summary…and provisional…he had before him an object no longer pure music, but design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the original music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase that emerged for a few moments from the sound waves. It invited him to enjoy intimate pleasures of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed…”

·       “He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it a third time. And it reappeared without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him a less profound pleasure. But when he was at home he needed it…this passion for a musical phrase seemed to bring the possibility of rebirth into Swann’s life.”

When he first hears it, the musical phrase enraptures Swann. By the time the music surprises him, however, the moment of hearing it has passed, overtaken by succeeding notes. On the first hearing, the phrase has no graspable syntax, and certainly no semantic value. Swann must recapture the phrase retroactively by creating a mental template: a “facsimile” or “transcript” of the fugitive notes.

Because Swann recreates his first fleeting experience of the notes that moved him with a facsimile, the line of notes recurs as a coherent phrase. The phrase, then, is heard in all its immediacy when it occurs the second time: it comes together syntactically. Now Swann can distinguish it clearly. The music speaks to him, inviting him to enjoy pleasures unknown to him before this moment.

When Swann recognizes the motif a third time, his sensory response and emotional engagement are less intense: the phrase brings him a less profound pleasure, and speaks to him no more clearly than it did on the second hearing. Just at this point of diminished resonance, the little phrase – recollected in tranquility – reveals its meaning to Swann’s conscious awareness. Removed from the scene of the concert, Swann recognizes the semantic significance of the phrase of music in the word “rebirth”. Music calls him to a new life of purpose.

In Proust’s analysis of Swann’s relation to music, music is the discoverable, translatable language that activates percepts, draws forth the deepest unconscious feelings, and inspires the listener to integrate percept and emotion consciously with meaning.

The fugitive notes – which Swann hears so peripherally that they must be configured by facsimile – are part of an infraconscious process, one in which perceptions occur under the radar “at a far simpler level than what philosophers have been accustomed to thinking of as ‘thoughts’.” (Horst, Steven, The Computational Theory of Mind, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003)

Music offers Swann an invitation to enjoy “intimate pleasures of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed.” The experience of listening to the music and making it his own allows Swann to receive it as meaning and value: the little phrase stands for personal rebirth. Music becomes, at this moment, Truth.

Memory and Mind

Proust’s philosophy of mind and memory is of course attested in the episode of la petite madeleine. A little teacake and a cup of tea reawaken the childhood memories of Proust’s autobiographical character Marcel. As Swann is surprised by music, so Marcel is surprised by memory.

In the world that Proust wrote, involuntary memory is catalyzed by sensory experience. Sense memories crest in waves of emotion, leading to sudden recognition, to epiphany. Marcel’s cascading moments of joyful recollection are as revelatory as the moments in which Swann is recalled to life by a phrase of music. New representations of Marcel’s past, activated by involuntary memory, make up the elements of his authentic autobiography. The autobiographical narrative that becomes Proust’s novel In Search of Time Past replaces a stereotyped childhood memory: the bedtime drama, that had blocked Marcel from recalling the full, rich panoply of his childhood experience.

The butterfly is perfuming
Its wings in the scent
Of the orchid.

Basho

The Literary Understanding

In the world imagined by Proust, memories exist in a complex network of interconnected meanings. Fallible, mutable, susceptible to repression, memories, like unconscious desires and aspirations, can be redeemed, at the right moment, through sensory experience. What is the right moment? The moment when the young Marcel is ready to revisit childhood. The moment when the jaded Swann is ready to open his soul to music. 

In Proust’s literary world, memories are weighted according to their emotional significance. A flower is not just a flower. The orchids that Odette wears the first night Swann makes love to her elicit a pun from the lovers: to “do orchids”. For Swann and Odette, the word “orchid” is forever changed. Proust’s world is indeed one of intricacy, of nuance.

 The rich, nuanced quality of human experience reflected in so much of literature suggests that man, for all his fallibility, possesses an inner world that cannot easily be calibrated. Time and again, great literature argues for the reality of the inner world. This inner world is not a soul, God-given, destined for the hereafter. Nor is it an ineffable something that survives the death of the body. Great literature has done a rather good job of understanding the finality of death. Just so, literature understands the unique, irreducible entities that comprise its characters’ inner worlds. Great literature has a great understanding of the human mind.

What is the future of the human mind? In discussing the prospects for technological augmentation of the mind, cognitive scientist William Bainbridge estimates that “Each adult may have no more than 50,000 episodic and autobiographical memories.” (Bainbridge, William Sims, Denaturing Humanity) Add to this the adult’s acquisition of words, abstract facts, and non-verbal skill memories for a total of 200,000 memories, each of which could be represented “in a computer…by something like 10 neuronal connections. In a computer, each memory could be stored as a string of perhaps 10 numbers representing the addresses of other strings in the set.”

Accessing 200,000 memories in cold storage: the task of some future Proust? Access would not be through the retrieval device of involuntary memory. No need for the madeleine and the cup of tea. Indeed, if the future lies with brain augmentation, the search for time past that wends its way through the labyrinth of repression, forgetting, and recollection would be rendered obsolete. Bainbridge envisions a day when human limitations in the area of memory may be overcome by augmentation systems providing “time stamps”. Time stamps would create the equivalent of “timelines or calendars in our brains”, enabling us to sequence autobiographical memories.

Cognitive scientists like Bainbridge assume that there is no unconscious mind. Autobiographical memories represented by neuronal connections in a technologically augmented brain would therefore be stored as conscious memories, presumably undifferentiated in regard to their emotional significance at any given time. Do we really want time stamps for our memories? The percept that remains below the radar may indeed be infraconscious. But such a percept may also be obscured from awareness because the subject is not psychologically prepared to experience it.

Human Enhancement and Musical Intelligence

If some future equivalent of Charles Swann possessed a technologically augmented brain with time stamped memories, what would his experience of listening to music be?

In that future there would be no unknown desires to be brought to awareness, no personal meanings to be discovered.  With all memories sequenced, undifferentiated by repression, and easily accessed, how could music awaken Brain-Augmented-Swann’s sense of self at a particular moment in time? Humans as presently constituted are responsive to music in a fundamental way, even when dementia has deprived them of their memories. This may be due to the fact that while particular areas of the cortex subserve musical intelligence and sensibility, the subcortex is also involved in musical response (Sacks, Oliver, Musicophilia, 2007). Sacks confirms that, “the perception of music and the emotions it can stir is not dependent on memory.” (Sacks, p. 385) Music therapy with Alzheimer’s patients succeeds because music speaks – beyond memory – to the patient’s sense of self. The recognition and remembrance of feelings resting beneath the threshold of awareness enriches our experience of music, but isn’t necessary for enjoyment.

"that damn bird..."

Birdsong and Facsimiles

In the spring of 2010, I enjoyed a series of Saturday morning concerts by the Alexander String Quartet. I couldn’t talk anyone into getting up early enough to be in San Francisco by 10:00 a.m., so I went by myself. The series featured performances of Dvorak preceded by Robert Greenberg’s talks on the composer. Greenberg’s amusing, erudite talks included excerpts from recordings and live demos of key phrases by the players – facsimiles to help the audience identify important motifs when they occurred.

While summering in 1893 in Spillville, a Czech village in Iowa – which, to the end of his days, he considered heaven on earth ­– Dvorak composed the American string quartet. There is much debate as to whether the quartet is European in form, with some American folk and Indian influences thrown in, or bona fide new American music. At work in Spillville, Dvorak was extremely irritated by "that damn bird, red, with black wings" whose song kept interrupting his composing. In the end, Dvorak incorporated the song of that bird – the scarlet tanager – into the American string quartet. Prepared as I was by the musicologist’s talk, I identified the line of birdsong as soon as it occurred.

Some people don’t like or need lectures before concerts: I suppose they have what Oliver Sacks calls musical intelligence. In the weirdly brave new world of the future, science may offer musical intelligence as an optional enhancement of our technologically augmented brains. I would take it, but only if it meant that I could keep the experience of music as self-discovery and self-transcendence.

When Swann hears the complete Vinteuil sonata for the second time, he identifies the familiar little phrase with his love for Odette. As Swann’s tormented love affair proceeds, the little phrase becomes stereotyped as “the national anthem of their love.” When the affair is all but finished, Swann hears the full sonata once more. This time the little phrase speaks to him, telling him that his lost happiness is nothing: “When the little phrase spoke to him of the vanity of his suffering, Swann found sweetness in [its] wisdom.” For Swann, the consolation of music is the consolation of philosophy. Ever since his love of music was born, Swann “had seen musical motifs as actual ideas…ideas veiled like shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind.”

I don’t share Proust’s mystical ideas about music, but I fear that music may all but evaporate when confronted with the artificial general intelligence of the future. What would there be for music to do, if not to stir unknown desires, surprise us with joy, beguile us, and offer the consolation of wisdom wrested from life? Perhaps, though, I simply lack imagination. This more perfect brain of future humanity may have many capacities for sensory and emotional experience of which we cannot possibly be aware. And if, intuiting the hyper-efficient circuitry of that brain, the nightingale is too dispirited to sing for us and flees to the forest, the augmented human brain will be more than capable of making a nightingale to its liking: superb, sensual, meticulous, mechanical.

Mechanical Nightingale

by Jonah Schultz

   

  

  

 

Emergent Humanism

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Sim City

A Response to Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

          by Nick Bostrom (2003)

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

LIFE IS JUST A DREAM

We are living in a densely textured computer simulation, a highly calibrated imitation of human reality. The world we believe to be real, and our selves within it, are the fabrications of a higher, synthetic intelligence. (“Life is just a dream you know/ That’s never ending,” Cowboy Beebop Blue).

Socrates. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Euripides were right to say

Who knows if all this life of ours is death

And death is life?

Plato. Gorgias.

Someone has already – according to a probabilities scenario based on the calculations of philosopher Nick Bostrom – implemented the simulation in which we are living. That someone is a posthuman member of a future generation who uses a super-powerful computer to run detailed simulations of his forebears. The posthumans of the simulation argument are oddly nostalgic for the human world. Indeed, the posthuman running our simulation takes man as the measure of his verisimilitude project, going to great(ly extrapolated) lengths to create an “ancestor simulation” of human life on planet Earth.

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POSTHUMAN CIVILIZATION

What is a posthuman? A posthuman is “a radically enhanced human” (Bostrom, Transhumanist Values, 2002, p. 2) In one iteration of Bostrom’s vision of the far future, posthumanity constitutes “a radical change in the human condition” that may be brought about by biological enhancement (genetic engineering, e.g.) or other causes (Bostrom, The Future of Humanity, 2007, p. 20). If realized, posthumanity would engender levels of economic and technological development far surpassing the productivity and ingenuity of humans. Posthumans would enjoy vastly increased life spans, control over pain and suffering, and populations in which a large fraction of citizens have “cognitive capacities more than two standard deviations above the current human maximum.” (Future of Humanity, pp. 20-21). Superintelligence, the signature feature of posthuman civilization, will likely come about through access to AI in computers or computer networks, computer/ human interfaces, or biological improvement of human cognition. (Future of Humanity, p. 22)

Yet having predicted the likelihood of this brave new world and then envisioned it, Bostrom imagines in his simulation argument that members of future generations who run ancestor simulations will put the human at the center of the simulation, orienting the simulations to human perception.

MAN AS THE MEASURE

Man is the measure of all things (“of white and heavy and light and everything of that sort,” Plato. Theaetetus) in the posthuman simulation. Every percept within the simulation is calibrated to match the human sensory apparatus and to delude it. It is as though some hyper-intelligent demiurge had placed man, himself a simulacrum, at the center of a synthetic universe. Bostrom’s hypothesis curiously mingles probabilities analysis with mythical-religious concepts of a higher power, AI iterations becoming minor deities. In positing the simulation’s multilevel reality, Bostrom draws “some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world” in which the posthumans running our simulation are “like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation.” (p. 22)

PERCEPTION

A significant component of Bostrom’s argument for a posthuman simulation consists in detailing how the simulation could be implemented in terms of human perception by the hypothetically advanced computers of the future now representing our present, how in effect posthuman simulators could stage the complete illusion of contemporary human society backed by human history.

Design is a key feature of the simulation: “The microscopic structure of the inside of the Earth can be safely omitted…On the surface of Earth, macroscopic objects in inhabited areas may need to be continuously simulated, but microscopic phenomena could likely be filled in ad hoc.” Filled in: as by a graphic artist or animator. As for the simulated humans in the picture: “(But) in order to get a realistic simulation of human experience, much less {than a simulation of the entire universe down to the quantum level} is needed – only whatever is required to ensure that the simulated humans…don’t notice any irregularities.” The simulated humans – that’s us. We’re inside an unreal reality like the one in The Truman Show or Pleasantville, only we too are simulated.

HUMAN KNOWING

Underlying Bostrom’s emphasis on the implementation of computer simulation through the channel of human perception is the premise that human knowing comes primarily through the senses. If the posthumans do a good job at mimesis then, the homunculi inhabiting the posthuman-created universe can be duped into believing that it, and they, are real. But how, indeed, will posthuman simulators go about designing the human construct? If the AI makes use of human DNA, might human knowing beyond sensory perception imbue the human model with dreams, archetypes, memories, with

--> déjà vu, intuition, and ESP, perhaps with a template, preternatural, for Beauty, for Justice, for Truth? And with that template – what existential unease, what cognitive dissonance, in the homunculus with human DNA, computed into life within a hyper-reality.

What capacity for memory, then, might animate the simulated human being? As Bostrom supposes, “There is also the possibility of simulators abridging the mental lives of simulated beings and giving them false memories of the sort of experiences they would typically have had during the omitted interval.” (p.23) We know that, already, scientists can abridge memories in lab rats (Todd Sacktor, World Science Festival program on "The Unbearable Lightness of Memory," 2011) In humans though, how many instances of abridging individual memories might it take to alter the capacity to form episodic memories? Would such tampering have the potential incrementally to diminish the credibility of the human memory function? If the simulated human's capacity for knowing through memory were significantly compromised, would these still be humans who were being simulated? For simulated humans with altered or diminished integrity of memory would have been deprived of a crucial part of their humanity.

Socrates. That, then, was the drift of my question, what terms should be used to describe the arithmetician who sets about counting or the literate person who sets about reading; because it seemed as if, in such a case, the man was setting about learning again from himself what he already knew.

Plato. Theaetetus.

A HUMANIST INQUIRY

Socrates’ inquiry did not encompass topics such as AI and singularity, and it would be mistaken to expect the understanding of the thinkers of classical antiquity to reach as far as the 21^st century in matters specifically related to changes in society brought about by technology. It may be useful, however, to consider the ways in which the speculative reasoning of contemporary futurists reflects paradigms and tropes that go back to Plato and the Presocratics. Is the posthuman simulation an iteration of Solipsism? Does the godlike simulator resemble a Platonic demiurge? Has Bostrom, with his focus on the primacy of perception and man as the measure, imagined a futuristic simulation based on uncertain premises?

IMPORTING ETHICS INTO AI

“Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times.” (Bostrom, p. 9) Enough computing power may be, but how can this futuristic computer access and monitor belief-states unless it has incorporated the human genome that will enable it to understand belief? Supposing then (for supposition is the game here) that the posthuman simulator has incorporated human DNA, might not the human template for ethical behavior become part of its computational values?

Bostrom takes another route to equipping his system with ethics, elaborating his analogy with religious conceptions by positing moral guidance within the posthuman simulator in the form of “a naturalistic theogony.” (p. 22) Here the structure of the simulation as perceived by its inhabitants – imagined as a multilevel architecture with a hierarchy controlling it bottom-up from the “basement-level” of reality – provides the scaffolding for ethical behavior. In Bostrom’s posthuman utopia, “all the demigods… are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.” (p. 22) Ethical behavior would be promulgated by “the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may effect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels.” (p. 22)

WHAT ABOUT THE STATE?

At each level of the simulacrum a member of a theocratic hierarchy implicitly directs moral behavior. Does not this utopian high-rise bypass the State, however? What model of the State should we expect to encounter within the posthuman simulation?

Socrates. We said that the boldest would not go to the length of contending

that whatever a State may believe and declare to be advantageous

for itself is in fact advantageous for so long as it is declared to be so.

Plato. Theaetetus.

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In the process of fleshing out the simulation argument, Bostrom makes two plausible assumptions: 1.) The posthuman simulator, or “director”, can delete memories in the human brain, rewinding and fast-forwarding like a film editor. (p. 9) 2.) Posthumann simulations will be run by “relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so.” (p. 25) Bostrom’s first assumption envisions the posthuman simulator, the “director”, as a highly skilled technician. Bostrom’s second assumption implies a Libertarian conception of government, whose role it is to allow – and to refrain from regulating – the activity of the enterprising individual. This Libertarian strand of the simulation argument prompts certain specific concerns:

· Personhood. For the purposes of running ancestor simulations, might not corporations and other entities be considered posthuman persons entitled to run simulations? (This is not especially far-fetched in light of a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court defining corporations as “persons” entitled to free speech rights as donors to political campaigns.)

· Motivation. Why might wealthy individuals desire to run ancestor simulations? Motivations might range from entertainment and commerce at one end of the spectrum, to the study of anthropology, human biology, ethology, evolution and history at the other. Should the simulation argument include the supposition that any of these simulation projects are regulated, conducted, or prohibited by the State?

· Ethics. What oversight of the posthuman individual/ corporation/ government running the simulation might be instituted? Such oversight would be in addition and external to any oversight provided by the theocratic hierarchy within the simulation.

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One way humanists might further the dialogue on posthuman simulation is by raising, in this context, the type of questions about the role of the State that they are skilled at formulating.

FORWARD IN TIME

For the Socrates of Plato’s Theaetetus, the future meant little more than the immanent, testable future of the individual (“Is it also true…that {man} possesses within himself the test of what is going to be in the future?”) By the 20^th century, futurists had begun to envision humans, or posthumans, hundreds of thousands of years hence.

Today in the early 21^st century, thinking about deep time is still the prerogative of science and science fiction. On the whole, humanists have preferred the past to the future, classicism to futurism, and human history to evolution. Humanist writer and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) contemplated man poised between the double infinities, a before-and-after of human existence in which the prior infinity becomes a nothingness.

For, finally, what is man in nature? He is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing. He is infinitely severed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their principle are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he arises and the infinity into which he is engulfed.

–– Pascal. Pensées.

Humanism, with its historical roots in Christianity as well as classical antiquity, has been discouraged from thinking very far into humanity’s future by the Christian doctrine of the end of time, as well as by religion’s ambivalence toward science.

TRANSHUMANISM: AN EMERGENT HUMANISM

Transhumanism is an emergent form of Humanism. By placing human civilizations within the perspective afforded by deep time, transhumanism calls on us to think critically about humanity's future. The hypothesis formulated in the simulation argument has inspired philosophers, social scientists and scientists to think about humanity's ultimate destiny in terms of possible extinction, or transition to a posthuman state of being. Additionally from the perspective suggested by deep time, transhumanism promotes inquiry into the human condition, and a potentially rigorous testing of human limitations. Humanists working in the humanities would do well to accept the challenge posed by transhumanist inquiry, bringing to the colloquy the tools of postmodern and modern analysis as well as those of traditional exegesis.

UPDATING THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT
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Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? was written in 2003, at a time when it was reasonable to assume that any emergent posthuman AGI would owe its existence to the development of non-biological machine learning systems. Nick Bostrom’s modification of the simulation argument in A Patch on the Simulation Argument (2011) doesn’t alter this assumption in a significant way. The surge in research and development in Neuroscience from 1995 to the present, however, has increased the likelihood that AGI will be built through Systems Neuroscience: a hybrid approach combining machine learning systems with brain research (Hassabis, Demis, Winter Intelligence Conference, Future of Humanity Institute, 2011). What difference does this transformation in AI research make to the simulation argument?

Are You Living in a Systems Neuroscience Simulation?

What might Neuroscience have to contribute to the posthuman simulation argument?

According to cognitive neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, there are already adequate machine learning programs for building two of the human brain’s core capacities for knowledge, symbolization and perception, into AGI. What is missing in the scientific schema for building AGI are algorithms for the third core capacity for human knowledge: concept acquisition and representation. The conceptual ability of the human brain, Hassabis suggests, can best be built into AGI using discoveries in Neuroscience regarding concept formation. Neuroscience has opened a door to understanding, and implementing, human knowledge contained within a complex system linking symbol formation to abstract ideas, concepts to perception, knowledge to memory, and the conscious mind to the unconscious through the translatable language of dreams.

If a posthuman simulator exists, it would have a massively enhanced, but at its core human, brain. The posthuman simulator, as demiurge, would then be subject not only to ethical constraints built into the architecture of its ultra-intelligent machine learning system, it would be imbued with the capacity for moral judgment derived from the conceptual reasoning capacity of the human mind. Like the computer scientists of the 21^st century, the posthuman simulator would be aware that the simulated human not only possesses complex apparatus for perceiving the world around him, but a mind capable of reason and judgment. Any simulation of reality would therefore have to take into account human knowing through memory, dreams, and abstract reasoning as well as through observation and perception. It would not be enough for the posthuman simulator to create a realistic imitation world, for the simulated humans within it would understand that world with their human minds. The presence of concept formation in the human model would mean that high-level abstractions like Beauty, Justice, and Truth could be linked through digitized neural pathways to the physical substrate of the simulated brain. Possessing Truth as a core value, the human would be driven to protect his core, and to validate his surroundings, much as a machine learning AI system would be driven to preserve its core utility functions and to clarify its goals (Omohundro, Stephen, The Nature of Self Improving Artificial Intelligence, 2007).

Moreover, as Hassabis’ research on short-term episodic memory suggests, any “abridging” of discrepant or anomalous memories would be vastly complicated by the way human perception exists in a continual feedback loop with concept formation, memory, and the reconfiguration of memory through dreams. Cognitive science research demonstrates how emotionally heightened episodes are culled from among more mundane memories and replayed as dreams. The neurological pathway from event to memory to dreaming to knowledge produces a survival advantage, and a possible long-term change in understanding. As imagined in dramatic poetry, dreams made of memories may eventuate in self-knowledge, perhaps in transpersonal wisdom:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the mind of Zeus.

Agamemnon. Aeschylus. (l. 176-181)

The “pain which cannot forget” is encapsulated in an emotionally heightened memory. In Aeschylus’ poetic understanding, sleep and dreams convert pathos – experience or suffering – into emotional intelligence, or wisdom, over time (“drop by drop upon the heart”). This is an unconscious, non-intentional process (“against our will”). In Aeschylus, the wisdom that ensues comes from a mind more powerful and capacious than the mind of man. To the ancient Greeks, the mind of Zeus was a meta-mind, Zeus having formed unions with Metis (intelligence), Themis (the laws of the physical universe), Eurynome (the laws of society), and Mnemosyne (memory) before establishing his reign on Olympus, as related in Hesiod's Theogony (Bulloch, Anthony, Classical Mythology, 2012).

For the purpose of illustrating the simulation argument, which owes its credibility to the rigor of probabilities, its author, Nick Bostrom, considers questions relating to philosophy of mind peripheral to his essential argument. As philosophy of mind bears directly upon the question: What is a human? and therefore: What is a posthuman? however, its concerns should not be marginalized. Is there at present a human nature, and is wisdom part of it? Can the mind of a wise man be uploaded (the wisdom of the Buddha? the sense of humor of the Dalai Lama?) or do some qualities of human mind elude even the intricate mapping of Neuroscience?

The simulation argument is a provocative hypothesis that prompts us to think in new, more scientifically based and rigorous ways about humanity’s future. As the idea of the posthuman simulation continues to be tested by critique and discussion, and re-imagined by those who are inspired or disturbed by the scenario it presents, it will hopefully be the case that more and more people become less and less afraid of technological change in the 21^st century and beyond. For “the future comes apace; what shall defend the interim?” Technological change can take us to many places, but never back.