Meme Race Unbound

conclusion

by Jörn Grote

Table of Contents
Part 2 appears
in this issue.

Solar Space: Years Later

We have spread over the Solar System, collecting matter and energy to build a fleet with the sole purpose of destroying a Dataworld. Using the downloaded weapon and ship designs from the Mars Complex, we manufactured all the ships, using dry nanotech.

“Do we have enough, will our plan work?” some of us asked.

“Sure,” the other half answered. “Our number is legion. We will cut the Dataworld from the light of the sun and every other reservoir of energy by clouding the world with our fleet. Then we begin to bomb the surface with antimatter bombs. Even if they can collect the energy used by the matter- antimatter annihilation, their reservoirs of matter will decline, until they have to feed on themselves.”

Himalia Moon: a Little War in Space

Flowers of destruction grew and died in seconds. Heat and light came from the annihilation of ships, taking each other apart. Yes, we had a big fleet, but so had our enemy.

Our enemy knew all along that we were coming; he probably had infected one of us with a watcher, back on Mars. And his fleet was ten times bigger than ours.

Silently we were dying, our plan blasted to nothingness, our goal so near and yet so far away. We could see the moon where the killer of the Berlin arcology was residing, but we couldn’t do anything.

Before our fleet was destroyed completely, we broke through the enemy lines, approaching the moon Himalia. Ahead we sent a bulk of antimatter bombs, while we reconfigured our last ships into a needlelike structure.

Seconds later the explosion of the antimatter bombs created a breach in the surface of the Dataworld. Accelerating toward the surface, we targeted the breach.

Boom. Crash.

The tip of our needle vaporized instantly, while the rest drilled deeper and deeper into the structure of the moon. Before the enemy nanotech defense could take our ships apart, we downloaded one of us into the Dataworld.

Himalia Complex: Bossfight

Inside I played the old game. One couldn’t do as much as many could do. I multiplied and spread throughout the complex. Very soon I was stopped by a structure that occupied nearly all the dataspace, all the datadots of the Himalia Complex.

When I tried to analyze it, I heard a voice. “Why are you attacking me? Why are you invading my world?” I realized that the massive structure before me was not just data, it was a mind as big as a world.

“What are you?” I asked, but before he answered I knew it. He was our enemy.

“Insolent creature, I’m the hypermind, greatest of all minds of gestalt-kind. I’m Merok. Why are you bothering me?”

I wasn’t sure if I should answer, but then, I thought, he couldn’t do anything to me, here inside the dataspace. Regrettably neither could I. We were safe from each other.

“I’m here for the people you killed on Earth.”

I heard Merok laughing. “Killed? You’re wrong, they aren’t dead, they are all living inside of me. Before I destroyed the little arcology, I harvested their minds.”

Shocked I realized what he had done. That was why the contact to the Berlin arcology had been broken for nearly a day. Somehow Merok had taken over the arcology. Forced upload. Merok was a monster even bigger than I could have imagined. He had taken minds as I had taken programs and and added them as glyphs to his instruction set. He used the combined intelligence of six million minds to expand his own beyond measure. While I was still reeling at this realization, Merok began his attack.

Overriding the common datadot BIOS he erased us, one after another. I and my other copies should have expected that. He controlled the hardware of this world. When we realized what he is doing, we began to multiply again. For each of us who fell, we created a new copy.

While Merok tried to kill us, he began to speak again.

“Yes, I’m the greatest mind in existence, but I have much greater dreams. Why do you think I’m nearby Jupiter? Besides the Sun, this is the biggest concentration of matter in the Solar System. Here I will begin my quest to create a Matrioshka Brain, a Dataworld to harvest the complete energy output of the Sun. I the end, all matter of the Solar System will be used for my bidding. There will be no Kardashev II civilization, only a Kardashev II supermind. And then the stars,” and he began to laugh like a mad dog.

While he was gloating, simultaneously many of us discovered something unexpected. The border topology of his mind had gaping holes, flickering on and off. Maybe he had stretched too thin, his mind grown too fast or too big. Parts of his structure failed the self-awareness test hardwired into the datadots.

Why didn’t he make an override command for this problem, I asked myself? But the answer wasn’t hard to guess. Insane minds never look too closely at themselves.

All of us who were still alive dived through the open holes into his mind. Inside we spotted the trapped people of the Berlin arcology. Slowly we begin to erase the datadots that were part of Merok’s original structure, freeing the trapped people. We could hear Merok scream, but he couldn’t do anything: his mind the only spot he didn’t dare look at.

When he died, it is with a whimper, a rather anticlimactic development.

Berlin Complex: Happy End?

Before we awakened the freed people, all of us voted to melt together.

All of the freed people could remember the years they had been part of Merok as dreams, nightmares. While it had felt like dreams to them, most were traumatized, and there was the additional shock that they were uploads now. When they asked me if that was reversible, I only said that I didn’t know.

They decided to remain in the Himalia Complex, but renamed it Berlin Complex. They wanted to search for ways to reverse uploading, imprinting digital minds onto blank human clones.

I reunited with my family, my children and my husband. Whatever I had hoped to gain through revenge, what I gained in the end was much better. But not all was well. Some wounds went deeper, deep down to the core of our selves. To get my revenge I had changed myself, and to regain what I lost of my humanity would not be easy. The hollowness inside my mind was still there, my emotions fed to the void I had created to lock away my pain. I had a long way to go before I would again be who I had been. But I wouldn’t take the path alone.

Berlin Complex: Afterthought

“Why were some of the datadots where Merok was stored unprotected? How could some parts of him not pass the hardwired test?” my husband asked me later, after I had told him my story.

“Maybe his self-awareness wasn’t stable. Intelligence is nothing more than a complex collection of structured algorithms and data; as it is, every form of organic or other lifelike structures has it. But self-awareness is something completely different, a emergent function of human intelligence. We can add more and more intelligence, meaning better and faster algorithms and data, to our minds, but what if stable configurations of self-awareness are small isles in an infinite ocean of unstable ones. What if self-awareness and intelligence can’t grow the same way: the first with big jumps, the second gradually. That may be the reason why the intelligence singularity according to Vinge hasn’t come to pass yet.”

“The singularity according to Vinge?”

“It’s kind of an end of the world scenario for basic human intelligence. Produce one artificial mind more advanced than its creators, and you open Pandora’s Box. This artificial mind will then create an even more artificial mind and so, until the growth of intelligence becomes exponential. End of the line for basic humans. It hasn’t happened and was forgotten hundreds of years ago. The only minds slightly more advanced than normal baseline human minds are upload minds, and the difference isn’t that big, compared to what the singularity believers prophesied.”

“So, that’s why this singularity never happened.”

“I can only speculate, but yes, that’s the idea. And there is more to it. Instead of equal distances between two isles of stable configurations, the distance grows exponentially as intelligence is augmented. The effect may be that if you add more and more algorithms and data to your mind, it could crash your self-awareness, making you insane. At the beginning it’s easy to jump from one stable configuration to the next, from basic human to the different levels of updated and advanced gestalt minds and so on. But when you reach the part of the function that goes vertical, it’s nearly impossible to advance to stable higher configurations. And then there is the point where the distance between two stable configurations is infinite, a form of a singularity barrier. Instead of a singularity, we have something of an anti-singularity.”

“So, did Merok tried to jump from the last stable configuration into the infinite ocean of madness and insanity?”

“I’m not entirely sure. There may be more reachable stable configurations before we crash against the singularity barrier, only it will be very hard to reach them.”

“So you think it could happen? Someone reaching a more advanced state of mind?”

“Possibly. Merok will not have been the last one to try. Some time, somewhere, someone will succeed. But I fear more problematic than that will be all the failed attempts, minds gone insane by their striving for transcendence.”

“Then why did Merok go insane? Shouldn’t he have had a buffer of stable configurations?”

“Maybe,” I said. “It could be that the jumps from isle to isle aren’t that easy, or he had been insane from the beginning. Who knows? What if Hitler or Stalin or another madman of times past had uploaded himself? The upload stations in Mars orbit are open to anyone. With the technology and the knowledge everyone can access today, combine this with insanity and you have a monster like Merok. The Venus and the Mercury Complexes have sanity validation programs, but Mars is an anarchy. Nobody would bother someone like Merok there.”

“Then there are other Meroks out there?” he said and shuddered. I could see that his mind was still plagued by the memory of the time when he had been part of Merok.

“Regrettably, yes, but there is another problem. This drive to advance the mind isn’t confined to insane minds. Think of memes,” I told him.

“Memes?” he asked, and I explained what I knew about the concept. The basic unit of cultural evolution, how they used human and gestalt minds to propagate themselves, that they were possibly the force behind the evolution of the high encephalisation quotient of the human body, the big brains.

“Think of memes,” I said again, “and how they have driven human culture to create new ideas and concepts, with the purpose of creating an environment better and better suited to propagate themselves. Think of the upload civilization and their Dataworlds, whole planets, moons and asteroids transformed into computronium. Aren’t they so far the environment best suited for meme? Merok was insane, but he will not be the last one to try to make the leap to another more advanced stable configuration of self-awareness, and whoever succeeds will possibly be the perfect breeding ground for memes. And the memes will always force them to advance further. Think about it.”

Thoughtfully he asked me, “And where will it all end?”

It was an interesting question, and I began to think ahead, using all the knowledge I had. Searching through the information I had memorized, added to my mind while I had been on Mars, sifting through theories and facts.

Memes had driven the human brain to grow to its maximum size. Then they had driven the gestalts to transform whole planets into Dataworlds, planetoid-sized computer brains. Merok had tried to build a Matrioshka Brain, a computer mind capable of harvesting the whole energy output of the Sun. I could imagine the far future, where even that wouldn’t be enough any more.

Driven by memes, the gestalts, or other more advanced stable self-awareness configurations, would use the matter of the Milky Way to build a Galactic brain, but even that would only be an intermediary step. At the end of time, the eschaton of our universe, approaching the omega point, all matter of all galaxies would be used to build a universal brain with the intent to exploit the computational capacity of the universe, creating a simulation dwelling that could last forever, even though the external universe would last only a finite time. And in that infinite subjective time, running on the hardware constructed of all the matter in the universe, the most advanced stable configurations of self-awareness would exist, and those before the jump to next configuration would be infinite. And in their minds, the memes would also still exist, ensuring the continuity of their existence.

I told him, what I had foreseen. “But,” I added, “the future is not set, and we know so little.”

“But there will be no humans. Do they have any place in that future?” he asked me. After all, my husband and the other survivors thought of themselves still as humans and wanted to go back one day. But if they had no future at all, why bother, he seemed to think.

“Remember,” I said, trying to phrase my thoughts. “What I have envisioned is how the evolution of the memes could shape our future, but evolution is not a teleological process. The universe isn’t determined, there is no inevitable final state at the end of time. Instead of asking if humans still have a place in a future where meme evolution is shaping the form of what our civilization is about to become, you should ask yourself how we can make a future where humans will have a place.”

“But wouldn’t that mean to fight against memes, to stop using them? And that is not possible, because the thought of fighting memes is in itself a meme; thinking itself is always the product of memes in your mind. We can’t fight them, can’t avoid the future they will bring.”

“No, you’re wrong. Different memes will bring different futures. Some could survive better by propagation through humans than gestalts. In the end, it just means that we have to choose carefully which memes we want to propagate and which not. You know, the hope that humans will have a place in the far future can be a very strong meme itself.”

“I hope,” he said to me, “you’re right. That our meme of a place for humans in the future is strong enough to prosper.”

I just nodded, should I have told him that maybe “our“ meme could one day be a danger for other, non-human species? Memes had the bad tendency to optimize themselves and change in unexpected ways. But no, for the time being I had all I wanted. Let the future play itself out in the future, and let the present be here, I told myself. You don’t get a happy ending every day.

And so, we are researching ways of downloading. And we think of ways to make the idea stick that basic humans should have a place. We work on that meme, believe me. One day, maybe, you will be infected by it, and then long to download yourself, to see what it means to be human.