Survival of the Diverse
Posted by Jeriaska on August 6th, 2007
Martine Rothblatt and James Gardner answering questions during the Transvision Q&A
Martine Rothblatt started United Therapeutics (NASDAQ: UTHR) in 1996 and has served as Chairman & CEO since its inception. The company develops and/or commercializes unique analogs of natural molecules for cardio-pulmonary disorders, novel monoclonal antibodies for certain cancers, small glycobiologicals for infectious diseases, telemedical services (including for International Space Station astronauts) and nutriceuticals.
Prior to starting United Therapeutics, in 1990 Dr. Rothblatt created Sirius Satellite Radio and served as its first Chairman & CEO. She also initiated and led the effort to get the Federal Communications Commission to create the satellite radio service in which both Sirius and XM operate, based on underutilized frequencies and the novel concept of using GPS-type antennas for digital audio. Her publications include five books and over fifty peer-reviewed articles.
The following transcript of Martine Rothblatt’s Transvision July 25, 2007 presentation “On the Destiny of the Species” has not been approved by the author. A low quality mp3 is available. Slides are online at slideshare.net
“What is BNA? BNA is Beme Neural Architecture. It is a code yet to be discovered, bemes being the smallest unit of beingness that comprise our sense of self.”
On the Destiny of the Species
I’d like to share with everybody this afternoon some thoughts on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s book On the Origin of the Species. We’re probably going to get inundated with On the Origin of the Species stuff for the next one to two years. Being transhumanists, we’re always a little bit ahead of the curve. I thought that maybe it was about time to take a look at the destiny of the species.
I’m going to sprinkle the talk with some quotes from Darwin so that it becomes a little less of a pure thought experiment to imagine what he might have intuited was the destiny of the species given everything that has been discovered since the publication of his book. Darwin definitely felt variation, or what we might call diversity today, was the key to survival. Natural selection acts exclusively by the preservation and accumulation of variations, which are beneficial under the organic and inorganic conditions which each creature is exposed to at all periods of their lives. The improvement inevitably leads to the gradual advancement of the organization of a greater number of living beings around the world.
So, in other words, many people hear ‘Darwin’ and they think “Survival of the fittest.” But the deeper I read into Darwin, his main message seems to be “Survival of the diverse,” because one could never know how the environment was going to change. And only by having adequate variation, or adequate diversity, would some elements of the overall population be adapted to the change in environmental circumstances. I’m not yet ready to say if Darwin was a transhumanist, but he was definitely a transspeciest. He saw that nothing was essential to any specific species. He believed that all species emanated from and evolved into other species. He would most likely recognize the possibility of artificial life forms as being a predictable part of the natural selection process. If they are growing in population, the overall environment is likely selecting for artificial life forms. He believed expanding the species brought prosperity. And this brings me to an interesting ancient Chinese proverb. “If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. But if you want a century of prosperity, grow people.”
Well, China is the most populous nation on earth. And if you believe all the experts, it’s merely a matter of time until China becomes also the wealthiest nation on earth with India right behind them. But, actually, the fastest way to grow people is not through the old-fashioned biological way. If we were to develop new ways of growing people, we might have greater prosperity than was ever imagined by the Chinese Communist Party or the Indian government.
To grow people, you first need to know something about it. Evolutionary biologists view human consciousness as an enormously complex firmware subroutine. While it is well known that we have 30,000 genes of DNA, we do know that our consciousness is vastly more complex. Professor Minsky has spoken today about the hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections in the brain. Ray Kurzweil has pointed out that it’s a well known phenomenon in mathematics that you can make enormously complex patterns from just a few simple elements. Several examples of this are shown in his book The Singularity is Near. So, 30,000 genes doesn’t mean that there are 30,000 kinds of consciousness.
Now, to continue the analogy, of course we could grow humans with DNA, but there may be some other way to grow computerized extensions and versions of humans using software, firmware, and hardware of another sort. We might also ask, Why we have so many kinds of DNA codes when the code is just supposed to replicate itself? The answer to this, of course, lies in the concept of mutation. Nature, which developed the DNA code, also frustrated its own programming by building in a process that scrambles its code occasionally. Of course, most scramblings of the DNA code are not very valuable, but sometimes it gives rise to a different type of being. And when the environment changes, that different type of being might be more adapted than other species, and a new flavor of DNA populates through our biosphere. The important thing to keep in mind is that genetics is not just about DNA replicating itself. It is about replicating a coding process. And this concept will be key to the way we grow human beings.
So, scrambled DNA is really the catalyst for evolution. To an evolutionary biologist, history might look something like this: first, there was nothing but gases. The gases collided for eons. Eventually, stars and galaxies formed, the universe was seated with heavier molecules, and eventually those heavy molecules coalesced into simple molecules, like hydrogen cyanide, nucleic acid, RNA and DNA. This gave life the purpose of self-perpetuation. And that is what DNA does, not by perpetuating any particular DNA molecule, but the coding process that gives rise to many different versions of DNA perpetuates. DNA that was goof-proof, that never mutated, eventually became extinct, because the environment always changes. So looking back at history from an evolutionary biologist’s perspective, we could say that the purpose of life is to replicate the replication process. RNA and DNA are just two really great examples of that.
Back to Darwin. Natural selection we shall see is a power incessantly ready for action. So, have we reached some kind of pinnacle with DNA? Darwin in his time resisted the claims of many of his contemporaries who said that man is the epitome of the process. He saw humans as one set of DNA that did extremely well in the environment that existed at that time. So where do we go from here, after centuries of goof-ups in DNA since the beginning of Homo sapiens sapiens? Particular dangers await us, and perhaps all the manifestations of DNA on the earth: massive floods, diseases, local catastrophes, asteroidal impacts, gamma ray bursts, super nova bursts, cometary particles plowing through the earth. So perhaps there is yet another form of reproduction that might be a better solution. And I would like to suggest a new acronym here of BNA.
What is BNA? BNA is Beme Neural Architecture. It is a code yet to be discovered, bemes being the smallest unit of beingness that comprise our sense of self. BNA could be defined as a to-be-defined set of mindware that enables our sense of self to be digitally realized. You could think of BNA as synthetic consciousness.
A way to appreciate the importance of bemes, one could think how much deeper is mind than matter. The beme is mightier than the gene. We could abstract our minds into artificial general intelligence in one form or another and have a continuation of our sense of self, even after our bodies give out. Our mind is the residency of our bemes. Those 30,000 genes have very little to do with our uniqueness. That comes from the experiences that comprise most of our lives.
The nice thing about BNA is that it can handle reproduction. We can reproduce ourselves as BNA much more quickly than we can reproduce ourselves as DNA. I think the coolest thing about beme neural architecture is that one could have an unlimited lifespan. Now, some might say, Don’t mess with Mother Nature. Mother Nature worked a long time to create DNA, and it seems to be her purpose to replicate it, because the shit’s all over the place. So is BNA reproduction consistent with nature’s purpose? I think it is. I think it’s hugely consistent with her purpose. Because BNA is a self-replicating code, and that’s what nature loves.
Software replication is much faster than biology, so BNA is a more efficient way to carry out nature’s purpose. We are already beginning to see the beginning phases of this, with sites like Second Life. There are other sites doing similar things, like my cyber twin.com. There are numerous people now who are realizing that we have the tools to recreate our consciousness using one or another form of beme neural architecture. We are really lucky to be alive during when that is happening.
The Turing test is really just the beginning, I think. We can expect a whole lot more from digital consciousness than a chatbot that can answer back and forth. Kurzweil has pointed out to us that the artificial intelligence in our cars, planes, and whatnot are vastly superior to anything that wet biology can do in those domains. And people like Ben Goertzel and Marvin Minsky are showing that now we are connecting together all the narrow artificial intelligence applications into a more general intelligence.
One interesting question is like, well, what if we want our bodies back? Just because our life is made of bemes, that doesn’t mean we can’t have bodies. We’re only going to get batter as we begin putting molecules together intentionally with nanotechnology. So don’t think that just by going to bemes you will have given up all the sensations of the body. Just like we love an acoustic piano or Stradivarius today, we will always love bodies, but we won’t have to put all of our selves into just one.
Another question is the ethical question. There are those who believe we should not alter our code. They fear the results of translating life to a digital form. But I think that if Darwin were back today, he for one would not have feared the endless possibilities of a digital form. Here’s another quote from Darwin. “A new variety raised by man will be a far more important and interesting subject for study than one more species added to the infinitude of already recorded species.” So he was there. That guy’s the first member of the WTA, as far as I’m concerned. Darwin would say yes to improving our programming. In his own words, “[I]t would be far more ‘important and interesting’ to see on which evolutionary path our high level of intelligence can take us.”
Now, I think there are some good Darwinian reasons for and against BNA reproduction. One argument against it is that we might make some very unfriendly monster minds from our BNA. And maybe this evil BNA mind could destroy all life faster than an asteroid could. But I think there are actually stronger arguments on the other side of the coin. There already are monster minds made of DNA. And a good way of dealing with them is to put a large number of good DNA minds against those monster minds, either wiping them out, or locking them in jail, or giving them psychotropic drugs. Whatever it is that they need. So, I think any way that you look at the pros and cons, BNA is a good thing.
This is not a Darwin quote, but it is a Darwinian quote. “We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens–a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal … a creature capable of steering our own evolution.” So that’s kind of looking like the destiny of the species. I like this term ‘Transbeman.’ It means the same thing as cyber sapiens. People who transcend biological and electronic human boundaries. Uploading consciousness allows us to avoid unwanted death. Digital conscious bemes can live longer, impart their wisdom to unlimited generations, and there are any number of forms conscious life can take: virtual forms, mechanical forms. Or take a stem cell and regenerate a body while suppressing that part that generates the brain, then slap in a nano-bio brain there to connect to the neurons. Or print all of our bemes on the neurons within that brain, use only a small portion of our neurons. You know, the possibilities here are limitless. I think that if you take a look at the ability to impart wisdom, the ability to grow many more people and take many different forms, so therefore become much more survivable, that there’s no doubt that under the evolutionary biology paradigm, transbeman development will be highly favored by natural selection and is most likely to be the future form of life.
I think the most compelling reason to support transbemanism and BNA reproduction is to defy death. Some people say that it will get boring. My favorite answer to that is, well, you are always free to kill yourself. I think that’s just the lamest reason. A drain on social resources I think is pretty silly. Several of you may remember that in the 1960s and ’70s they said there is not going to be enough food to feed four billion people. Now we’re at like seven billion people and there actually is enough food to feed everybody. We haven’t even begun to farm the oceans for algae. The resources of the moon and asteroid belt alone are enough to sustain a population of 500 billion people. So, a hundred times our current population by building self-sustaining space habitats. So, I think the resources issue is really lame too.
Darwin also said that it is the most dominant species which, on the average, yield the greatest number of varieties. And varieties tend to become converted into new and distinct species. The most dominant species therefore tend to become more dominant by leaving diverse descendants. This is saying that as we blend ourselves into digital form, we’re going to produce many, many different types of subspecies and we are going to end up being the most dominant form of life. And the only way you are going to lock yourself into irrelevancy and extinction is by being afraid of blending yourself into transbeman form.
Darwin’s theory was developed without any known code. So, it’s most unlikely that he would have been hung up on DNA as the only code for life. He would have likely agreed that because beme neural architecture codes could replicate and diversify, they would stand a very good chance of thriving in a supportive environment. Were he to accept Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, he would have concluded that BNA-based life would dominate the destiny of the human species. We have to figure out a way to get off the planet. The planet is the cradle of mankind, but you don’t want to stay in the cradle forever. A great thing about beme neural architecture is that it allows us to collapse our mass into a much smaller form, and therefore to propel many more people into outer space much more quickly, because the amount of energy we would need varies inversely with mass.
Some people worry that if we start making copies of people with bemes that we would have less varieties of people. The moment you transfer consciousness to another substrate, that separate entity knows it was not you originally. It knows it was copied from you. And it will immediately begin acquiring its own experiences. So, I don’t believe it is possible that multiple copies destroy autonomy, because each new copy of your BNA is birthing a new entity. It may not be birthing a neonate that doesn’t know anything. But Socrates would say, “All I know is that I don’t know anything.” So, as smart as we all are, we’re just like infants in the universe. Kurzweil’s challenge to all of us at the end of Age of Spiritual Machines was save the universe from its own dumb forces. Convert all of the dumb matter and energy in the universe into smart matter, so that we can find a way to outsmart the laws of physics and avoid either a big rip or a big crunch.
So we have a huge number of challenges in front of us, and each new BNA person is a new individual with their own autonomy. So, in conclusion, what would Darwin think? I think that he would think it’s a promulgation of self-replicating code that actually sits at the apex of life’s purpose. DNA is a tool that enabled life to create a superior self-replicating code. The BNA code will be capable of both nanotechnologically creating all that came before it, and transcending a universe of challenges that DNA is unlikely to survive. BNA is just another step in the evolution of life, with not perfect, but just good odds of success.
My last quote from Darwin, “In short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.” I believe that with cyberspace and nanotechnology, we have the sufficient makings of what is called computronium, basically turning the dumb matter of the universe into smart matter. And with the universe comprised of computronium, we will have the ultimate universal adaptation. Thank you.
