Calloway’s Machine
( This story has an audio reading https://azuria-sky.bandcamp.com/track/calloways-machine-audiobook )
“alright, look here..” The tutor picked out a point of light from the chain of data hanging in front of her, and a proof began to unfold. The glyphs of the formulation I’d presented shifted and rearranged. They resolved to a falsum, “⊥”, disproof by contradiction, and I saw how I had been wrong. She’d just happened to have this riposte in her palate, ready and waiting to burn me with it.
“Now remember what you saw today. Your intuition failed you. You must poke and prod at all of the weird cases it allows before you can really know the character of a predicate like this. You need to get a feel for the way this predicate constrains possibility, instead of just using whatever natural concept most closely matches it as a stand-in. It is not a natural concept, it is entirely synthetic.”
“Okay. And it’s damn good that it is, right? If it weren’t, we’d really never get anywhere.”
She smiles... “That mindset is going to cause you trouble as well, I’m afraid. Yes, it’s useful for us to build our language of discourse on top of analytical constructs. Yes, sometimes intuition, natural language, drags us endlessly after impossible ideas, but sometimes it turns out they’re not impossible, sometimes they’re just very difficult to reduce, disambiguate, untangle or implement. And sometimes someone comes along and manages to do it, to synthesize it from mathematics alone and all of the arrogant analytic types who’d told them they’d never be able to get the shit kicked out of them... Hey, have you met Dr Calloway?”
“Sure. Look, he’s talked to me about that a lot, that consciousness crap, right?And it hasn’t done anything for me.”
“Hm, so I guess he hasn’t shown you the machine yet, has he?”
I thought back. “He might have hinted at it.”
“Right then. Well it’s about time he did. This isn’t any of that Chinese Room crap, he’s not going to talk about P-zombies, he wont have to talk much at all. Once you see it, once you’ve actually been in that room of his with it... this thing, this could really open your eyes.” She raised a hand and queried the institution’s coordinator system. She cut our engagement short, and lodged another immediately after it. I had planned to go and fetch some lunch, but I supposed that wasn’t going to happen now. She opened a voice line with Calloway (”what is it?”). She shot him a reference to this new engagement she’d arranged for me, and he replied. “Ah. The frosh. Yes, send him down.”
The voice line closed, and she said, “Don’t make him wait. Floor G-7.”
“There is no G-7″
“You’ll find that there is”
She stops me as I go. “As always, boy. Don’t just be corrected. Don’t just take one point, from what you see today. Look for the meta lesson. Remember all of other things you had to be wrong about to get to where you were. Most importantly, when you see it, ask yourself whether you still believe that the ones who chase after spooks never catch anything.”
As I walk down the hall, towards the elevator, I remember the last conversation I had with Calloway. He had been keeping this from me. I could tell he was onto something new, but he didn’t want to just hand it to me. He’d started talking about “relative anthropic measure”. I’d just written it off as more of the same confusion.
As promised, the elevator’s control projections show a new floor, “G-7″. I pull it up and examine it. Greg must have sent it to me. A reference to the floor and temporary clearance to visit it. I actuate the tag and send the elevator plunging down further than it should go. I begin to lose connectivity. News feeds fall empty. My music stream runs dry. My partner’s GPS tag, a heart that only I could see through walls and over feilds, flickers out, and I am alone.
As the doors open, the elevator’s lights cut into a black hallway. There's no lighting on this floor. The walls are shiny but dark. I find they're faraday cages, meaning that no electrical radiation could get in or out. No wifi. No GSM. No radio whatsoever. I could only find my way along using near-field spacial projections that some node on the inside of the cage must have been casting. Red lines demarcate the floor. Red circles mark what turn out to be doorknobs. As instructed, I find the knob under the projected “1″ and turn. There he is. Dr Greg Calloway. He stands up and ushers me in, laughing warmly.
"Well you sure look spooked"
"Not just one secret floor, four of them, and I don't even...-"
"Frosh, boy. This is a research university. That means some of us have secrets we need to protect from prying eyes. I'm sure you know, these days prying eyes are as vexatious and abundant as flying flies."
"You got laser defenses near that elevator Greg? For microdrones?"
"Bet your ass we do. Like fifteen of them. Come over here, sit down"
Victorian style chairs. Lab-grown leather's cheap now, I know that, but they still manage to make their impression on the room. I look around. There are a few mirrors hanging on the walls. Not much else, aside from a machine on a rack, near the door, a large, roughly cylindrical, iron thing with a big red lamp on it. After closing the door, Greg sits down by the machine and flips a switch, which makes a "pang", and a flash fills the room. Now the lamp's blinking red.
"Can you guess what this light means?"
"Gee I dunno Greg, is it a soul light? Does it mean you've detected the presence of qualia?"
He laughs. "Something like that."
"Well Greg I have to say I'm really taken aback by these results. It's going to take me a while to adjust my worldview but I think together we can-"
He laughs louder. "You see these cameras, here, and here?"
I do. I hadn't noticed them before.
"As long as this light blinks, it means the rendering of the simulation going on in here-" He taps something against the iron cylinder with the light, and I realize he's holding a pistol "-is still perfectly in sync with the recording of the room." And he waves that pistol towards the cameras. “Every hair on your simulated head, every neuron in your simulated brain, ever bead of sweat, running down your simulated forehead, is running in sync with the original, the real room. But the simulation and the room aren't exactly the same. See, in the room- the place where you and I started out when you came in through that door-" He looks down at the pistol, "this was loaded with blanks. But in the simulation, they're live ammunition. If you were to get up too fast, make a run for the door, well then I shoot at you you'll die."
"Only if I’m in the simulation though?"
"Well. Unless you get too close. Blanks can fuck you up, so be careful. But anyway, yeah, the question is, which one are you? Are you in the room or are you in the simulation?"
It starts setting in, and yeah, I start to sweat. "But I remember coming in through that door, I couldn't be-"
"So does the simulant. It remembers everything the natural instance remembers. Those memories do nothing to distinguish the two scenarios, frosh. From the inside, they don't mean anything." He's gone serious, like he does when he's waist deep in math.
"Okay but... Continuity, I think we've agreed, it doesn't work like that. You can't jump from the real world to a simulation just because someone's flicked a switch on an emulator-"
"Think of it as a von nuemann computer, for the sake of the experiment"
"What? You can't emulate human minds on an antiquated computer architecture that reads bits through a straw-"
"It's a thought experiment, frosh!"
"Wait so you're saying you weren’t serious?” I point at the machine “That’s not really simulating-"
"Oh, no, no, I was completely serious about that. The scan was real and complete-" he points at the ceiling, and I see a gaping aperture, like an enormous, bottomless camera lens, crystal front reflecting my stupid face back down at me "-and the cameras are running. And the light means exactly what I told you it means. I must stress, you no longer know precisely where you are any more-" he gestures between me and the machine "-I just want you to think of the computer as something a little different than what it really is. For the sake of the inquiry. I do realize that the whole CPU plus Memory setup is archaic, but so am I, indulge me"
"Okay."
"Now, to get back to your question. Continuity, yes?"
"Right... When I came in here... The instance of me that began in the real world-"
He interjects, "The Natural. We’ll call that The Natural."
"Okay, the natural is still the natural. The continuity can’t just jump from one line to another just because there’s a new person somewhere else who resembles the original."
"That is a reasonable intuition. The line was not broken, and the natural is still the natural and the simulant was always the simulant. We don't know for sure that that's how it works but if that's how your intuition of identity works then I wont argue. Your survival goals will follow along with that. The natural would be under no obligation to care about what happens inside the machine, or whether you get shot. The fact remains, you don't know whether you're the natural, now. You can't. As I said, your memories mean nothing. They’re exactly the same, inside the machine, and out. You have access to no evidence that could point one way or the other."
The silence grows thick as I try to get my head around this. It’s not really going anywhere so I decide to just ask the first thing that pops into my head. "Hey Gregger, there’s a version of the machine inside the simulation too. What’s inside that machine?"
"What kind of question is that? D’you think there's going to be another simulation? There's nothing, the version of the machine inside the simulation is fake."
"And past the door?"
"Nothing. Well. Physically there's nothing. There's a network interface. The simulant doesn't have to die at the end of this, you see. But we'll get to that later."
"Wait you’re not going to just erase it before you leave? You're telling me you got a permanent mind-cloning order just for me?"
"Ehh.. it's easier than you'd expect."
For about a minute, he watches me as I try and fail to think. The red lamp on the machine blinks, and the machine periodically beeps along with it.
Eventually, he speaks. “Alright. You’ve got a decision to make. Here’s how it goes. If you go for that door, I shoot at you. If you're the natural, it's a blank and I laugh about it. You probably wont laugh, and I'll want to apologize, make sure there's no bad blood between us over this. You might start to crack a smile after I pull some strings and help you to get your doctorate four years early."
"Four years? But I'll be done in two no matter-"
"Four, at minimum. Don't play optimist with me, you're not testing well and you don't have any original ideas to work into a thesis, no, not really, you don’t. If the natural bets that it is the natural and wins this bet with me, he wins big. I pull strings, you attain, and you attain early."
"Okay. And what about the simulant?"
"Well if the simulant gets up and bets natural, the simulant gets shot and bleeds out on the floor, and back up in the room, I turn off the machine and it’s dead, and that's that. But that’s not the only bet available to the pair of you. You have a choice. If, instead, you concede, admit that there's something to this, back down and admit that comparing the anthropic measure of related experiential chains is a deeply mysterious problem with nontrivial subproblems, all of which is likely to have real-world applications- if you admit to me that you are too uncertain about your own uncertainty to even begin to guess whether you are the natural or the simulant-... then, well, I'll lower my pistol. The natural me, he'll soften up on the natural you. But he'll be disappointed. He'll see the fire's gone out of you. I’ll start treating you like any other student- in part because I’d see you’re finally ready to open your mind and start to learn- but primarily because I’d see that for all your youthful bluster you really don’t have anything interesting to show me. Oh, and, you’ll take four years, at minimum, to finish his doctorate. If you finish it at all."
I wince.
He continues, "But, if you're the simulant, in that scenario. And you back down and I don't shoot you... Like I said, getting a permanent cloning order isn't as hard as you expect. There're limits on what the simulant will be allowed to do in the current climate, for a few decades at least, but they'll be good good decades, frosh. There's a whole other world being built under the earth right now. You’ve got no idea. Living there as a simulant is like living in heaven. Probably better."
"This sounds just like pascal's wager then, I mean, pascal's wager didn't work because it didn't cover all of the possibilities-"
"Right, but this scenario does cover all of the scenarios. There are two, or four, depending what you mean. But, no, I don't know if it can really be compared... The wager requires the payoff of the, uh, “supernatural” outcome to be infinitely higher than the payoff of the familiar outcome. But absconding to this underground heaven I describe to you might not be all that desirable, for you, eh? You have always been prepared to live a natural life. I'm sure you'd enjoy heaven, but would you enjoy it as much as you'll enjoy graduating? You've dreamed of that your entire life, frosh. Your entire sense of self-worth is pinned to that. No matter where you were going, to walk away..."
"I think you’re failing to imagine how fulfilling a well designed heaven would be,” he nods, laughs “but I'll take your point for the sake of inquiry. It would hurt to walk away. It would hurt a lot to take those extra two years-"
"At minimum. It'll be more, I'd bet."
"Well I'd bet against you."
"Stay focused on the bet in front of you though."
"Alright, sure, fine. So, if I bet natural, drop the mic, walk out that door and get coffee, get a blank shot at me, laugh it off, graduate early with your help... Assuming I’m not inside the machine right now, is there a chance I'll end up living in that heaven under the earth one day anyway?"
"We're thinking 20.. 30 years from now, it's all going to open up. But it's always possible that we may die during that time and miss the heavenly elevator."
"Especially with these attacks, and the raids..."
He nods and agrees.
"Well let's just ignore the utility quantities of the payoffs, all of that is really hard and maybe not really solvable or interesting-"
"Everything is interesting, which I’ve told you many times, but that’s a practical stipulation for the time being."
"Right so if the natural would like to get their doctorate early just as much as the simulant would like to survive the afternoon.. then the question becomes... What are the odds that I’ve found myself inside the machine? Which is more likely, natural or simulant, room or machine?"
"Yes, that, dear frosh, that is *precisely* the question. That’s the tangible heart of the problem of comparing anthropic measures over similar scenarios. If you find a general method for answering that question, you’ve solved the mystery of the consciousness, of existence and self-awareness."
"...Well shit, Dr Calloway. If I'd known this was what you were talking about all of this time-"
"No no don't be like that. I didn't even know what I was talking about till about... a month back. And it's not over. You still have to place your bet. Will you go for a coffee, or not."
"Well... I don’t know, cause if I had to guess now I’d say the odds are gonna be 50:50"
"Oh. And could you tell me why they should be?"
Ah... He's just being socratic. He knows I can’t. Well fuck him. I'm going to open my mouth and answer anyway. "There are two vessels. There's the machine, and there's the natural. Simple. I could be either one of those with equal probability, so it's 50:50"
"But why do you assign them equal probabilities, equal anthropic weight? Whatever process determines where an existential-experiential chain starts out, why do you think it conceptualizes the computer in the same way as you do, as a single thing that is equal in its potential for consciousness to a flesh and blood human brain? Here, you know that the media of the cells in the brain are much bigger than the flaps in a memory chip, physically. So maybe there are more experiential chains attached to the the brain than there are to the computer? Doesn’t that sound plausible?"
"Huhhh... Maybe."
"But wait, the representation of the mind in the computer is much less ambiguous and chaotic. Much easier to detect and track- at least according to the principles of computation we know. In that case you’d be more likely to find yourself in the machine. Doesn’t that sound plausible as well?”
"Well I'm not sure the principles of computation really say that but I take your point." "As we continue, for the sake of inquiry, let's call whatever natural process that assigns experiential chains to physical media 'God'"
"That's a real good theoretical deity, Sir."
"Thank you. Yes, it's one of the more divine theoretical deities I've known. Much more of a yahweh than the stewards of compat, or the mathematical Omegas. Anyway, so it's assigning anthropic measures- probabilities of observing- to brains and brain-like patterns. Maybe it finds it much easier to identify brains within vonn neumann computers, maybe it hits the computer again and again but only hits you or I once or twice."
"I don't know. I think the fact that we woke up in flesh and blood human bodies in the first place might sign against that. You know, if the memory of a vonn neumann computer has so much more anthropic measure than the neurons of a brain, why didn't we all wake up 20 years after the singularity instead?"
"I think you may be forgetting... you are no longer certain that you are inside a flesh and blood human brain, nor do you know you ever were, maybe you did just wake up a few years after the singularity, in this here machine. But alright, there’s a point there. We are still so proximal to the flesh, just minutes ago, our natural copies were all we had. That has to be meaningful in itself."
"Mm... if computers had that greater soul measure... um, how long have your secret underground heavens been running?"
"Ahhh, aye. I can't give you an exact figure, but yes, about six years. So you might say that...-"
"The fact that we woke up here as the people we are rather than there as the people who were born within that artificial substrate might indicate that artificial brains have less measure."
"Mmmm, very true."
I can't keep digging here. The truth is, I think he's won. As far as I can tell there's a real question here and the more I look at it the more mysterious it seems. He's pulled that pistol on me, he’s made it a question that I truly have to answer as a matter of sanity and survival, but I can’t find any answers. I don't think he wants me to just put my tail between my legs and admit that to him. He would be disappointed, bored, I know it. And besides, I still want that doctorate. So I drop this line of the inquiry and I decide to dig somewhere else. I do realize, later on, that rationalizing to win the argument here is insanely stupid, because if I really pull it off, drop the mic, get up and choose the get shot at option, well if I get unlucky and it turns out that we are just flickers of electricity inside the machine, it doesn’t matter where Calloway thinks I am, doesn’t matter if I’ve convinced him he’s packing blanks, reality wins out and I still bleed out right there on the virtual floor.
But I havn’t really internalized that thought. I just want to win the argument. So I go and say this "All that said and done... the computer is just one thing. The brain is just one thing. So for any reasonable scheme, why would they have different weights? Why would it be more likely for me to find myself in one over the other."
He looks bemused. "Who says they're just one thing? You know that the brain's architecture is massively redundant. The same pattern is stored multiple times. But you don't know quite how many times, and it depends on which part of you we're talking about. Your memories will be quadrupled, quintupled, but your algorithms might only occur once or twice. But it doesn't end there. The computer, too. How do you know that it's just one thing? Each memory cell is a charged fragment of ferrous metal. The charge, high or low, denotes whether it's one or zero, and it runs all the way along the fragment. It's longer than it is wide. You can say it's one object, but you don't have to. God might not. God might say it's a couple hundred thousand atoms per rod, so maybe as a whole the computer encodes the same pattern a couple hundred thousand times, and as such, maybe you should bet on the simulant outcome with certainty."
"But why would God think like that?"
"I don't know. But why shouldn’t it?. How about this. How do you know it's not one of those space station computers."
I try to figure out what he means... I remember hearing that on older space stations, before they started using optical substrate and strong magnetic shielding, they used to split their computers into three redundant lobes. Every now and then the ship's computers might get hit with solar radiation, and one of the lobes might be corrupted(just one. It was astronomically unlikely that two lobes would be hit at the same time). But if the corrupted lobe disagreed with both of the others the system as a whole would recognize it had gone wrong, set it straight, and everything would continue on as if nothing had happened.
"They were unambiguously redundant, weren't they. Three computers per computer."
"Aye."
"I suppose it could still be argued that they sum up to a single whole, internally it might have had redundant copies, but it was intended to be used as a single device, so why should we consider..."
"Why should GOD care what we consider, frosh?"
"I don't know... I don't know."
It’s like when we play chess, now. There’s a certain amount of time he’ll allow me, after I make a losing move, to look back over the decision I’ve made and look for a way to fix it before the game moves on. I just placed my bet, but he’s not doing anything. He sits, and that’s saying, “are you sure”, and I sit with my head in my hands, all I can say is, “no, no, but what can I do”.
Eventually, I hear sliding metal. He’s pulled the mag out of the pistol and he’s eyeing the bullets inside. His face falls a little further into malaise, boredom. "Turns out you bet on the wrong outcome, frosh." Right then, as he says it, as if in response to him, the lamp stops blinking. I realize it was in response to him. He goes to the machine and flicks a switch and the light goes out of it. He opens the door for me, and we leave. Life goes on. We never really talk about this again. I really lost, and things between us aren’t going to go back to the way they used to be. Sometimes I think about the simulant. As the result of my concession, somewhere under the earth there is a computation that looks a lot like me, and it’s acting out the behaviors associated with joy. I allow myself to wonder whether a machine that can simulate the behaviors of joy must be capable of experiencing joy, subjectively, on the inside. It still feels like a stupid question to ask, but I’m closer to being able to answer it than I was before.