The Forest Spirits of Today Are Computers | Hacker News Reader

The Forest Spirits of Today Are Computers

nautil.us

67 pointsbrycehalley27 comments

Warhammer 40k universum had technopriests - a caste of people maintaining technology and treating that as spiritual rituals (blessing the doors with sacred oils so that they become content and don't scream :), etc).

Funny how we could actually get to a similar point with computer technology.

This is an element of Asimov’s later Foundation series books. I wonder if even then the idea was not original.

Babylon 5 had technomages. Similar, if a little less sinister.

JMS obviously wanted to sneak in some high fantasy into his SF. The mystical themes (an epic battle between beings of light versus beings of shadow, resurrection, reincarnation, immortality, fate versus free will) names like Lorien, Morden, Zha Ha Dum, technomages (wizards - the "techno" part was just a thinly veiled contrivance, they were obviously just wizards) and the like are all basically fantasy tropes.

The Minbari were space elves and I defy you to prove me wrong.

And then you watch Crusade and realize it's literally an RPG party doing quests in a spaceship.

As opposed to Legends of Tomorrow, which is an RPG party doing "adventure of the week" on a timeship. (I enjoy Legends of Tomorrow a lot. It totally feels like the writers are running weekly gaming sessions and turning them into scripts.)

The article argues that because each little computer is a little “sentient”, and because machine learning builds algorithms that are intractable to the people who nurture them, and because in a house there will be lots of these sentient and intractable “learning” machines, that therefore the house (and car and office...) is full of consciousness, much like primitive ancients would have imagined a forest to be. This is simply terrible logic. It certainly resembles the logic of those primitive ancients. It does not follow that just because you don’t understand something or find it awe-inspiring, that it is therefore conscious, or a spirit, or a god. This is a dangerous error, because to worship, or merely believe in, the consciousness of one’s house is to cling to a fantasy and to place personality where there is no personality. Why don’t you continue to attribute consciousness to the human beings around you who actually have it, rather than wasting regard on soulless man-made calculators? Is humanity doomed to always revert to creating their own gods and worshipping them? What is it in us that longs to do that?

You posit your position as being strictly rational, but do you have any evidence that the machines we built to emulate a component of human thought aren’t a little conscious? ...what, precisely, is the mechanism by which networks of neurons conveying electrical signals given rise to consciousness, but networks of metallic fibers conveying electrical signals do not?

It seems to me that you’re telling people they’re wrong based on your opinion — and not a scientific conclusion.

Similarly, the human proclivity to invent “gods”, “spirits”, etc is because that’s the historic mechanism to discuss the behavior of complex systems — in analogy to our own complex behavior arising from the chemical and electrical interactions of brain regions. This is actually an effective mechanism, as we see that it semi-routinely identifies a phenomenon faster than a strictly “rational” approach. (I put that in quotes because it’s mostly a religious claim; it’s neither a rational conclusion such things don’t exist nor a rational approach to not use semi-accurate estimators when doing analysis.)

Let’s talk about a forest. Do you have any support for the position that the complex interplay of chemistry and other signaling along mycelium networks, etc in a mature forest doesn’t give rise to some form of consciousness in the same way that our brains do? ...what precisely is the distinction in your mind between neuronal networks and mycelium networks, which indicates that while both give rise to complex feedback and behaviors, only one has any kind of consciousness?

It seems to me that the minimal position is any system based on signal passing of a certain complexity begins to develop an awareness, given the huge diversity we’ve seen across the animal kingdom.

What’s the support for your position?

To further your point, there definitely seems to be a collective conciousness that emerges from human networks, very evident in the markets, where it is expressed in bull and bear markets, confidence and panic, and the collective concious is aware of itself.

Since nobody knows what consciousness is, we're all going on opinion here, including yourself. So, unless you converse with the fridge in your house and cry a little when it brakes, there's no point in bringing up the lack of scientific arguments in parent's post. You seem to make some assumption based on electric signals and complexity, but they're just assumptions.

I think maybe you interpret the concept a little too literally. The point is that beyond a certain level of incomprehensible complexity, you can no longer model things as deterministic machines - you must adopt a "theory of mind". The abstractions you use resemble those you apply to conscious beings. You don't say "this machine is behaving in this manner because it possesses internal state reflecting X fact about the world and it has been designed to execute Y instructions on that basis" - you say "the computer wants to do Y because it believes X".

The reason we believe in spirits is because it allows us to co-opt our over-evolved social brains to model otherwise intractably complex systems.

Not even very complex systems: up until very recently anything that exhibited more-than-merely-physical behavior was alive.

The spinning governor, arguably the first feedback-based machine, processing information, was described as "alive" and "making decisions" by contemporary observers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor

Line-following robots, as simple as they are, appear alive.

Nothing like this existed in the world other than living things until the last ~250 years.

^ This. Even just on a linguistic level, personifying technology creates a subtext of: "The details are not relevant to my point or is too complicated to explain."

For example, talking about bodies of water "wanting" to be level.

A less metaphysical take on the concept is to think in terms of how much human thought went into creating the world around you. As society and technology become more complex, the more you have to rely on abstractions to understand everything.

thank you for pointing this out so quickly and well -- meanwhile, horrific, record setting forest loss in California over the last twelve years rarely is discussed. Here is another analogy for you .. the "great battelfields" of previous wars, hold the incalculable human pain of death and dismemberment, but who could feel it now? Do you think the living beings in the great forests of California felt no pain in the last twelve years ? Throw in the great starvation of the Pacific Oceans in the last twenty years.. any pain there?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_o...

[1a] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/clima...

[1b] Measuring and Monitoring Plant Populations -- BLM Technical Reference 1730-1 BLM Technical Reference 1730-1

[1c] https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/11/world-has-lost-forest-t...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/world/blob-seabird-study-intl...

>What is it in us that longs to do that?

It is animism, the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive things only indirectly, via our mental representations of them. We (our minds) live in an inner, virtual, world. It matches the outer world only partially. The match is limited by matters such as how rational we are, how much we know, how much our culture knows, what our misconceptions and mistakes are, and so on. All very much in line with Karl Popper's epistemology.

Our mental representations are alive in the sense that they are labile and interconnected in all sorts of ways that make up our worldview. Creative geniuses don't consider their tools dispassionately. They literally relate to them, e.g. a certain equation might be like an old friend.

The problem for the animists is that just because things (trees, rocks, equations) are connected in our minds does not imply they are connected in the real, external universe. There aren't spirits 'out there'. If there is a spirit, it's 'in here' working behind the scene. It's the operation of our own brain. So primitive cultures had a very limited knowledge of how the outer physical world worked outside of necessary activities such as hunting. Scientific knowledge came later.

Materialists, on the other hand, i.e. most of us nowadays, assume that they perceive external physical reality directly. They forget they had to spend months just learning to see things when they were babies. (Or that this process was more about sorting out what was what than about building a telescope.) They assume that objects are are unconnected, like atoms in a void. This is of course true on the wider physical level but merely self-fulfilling in the inner world. Thus their mental representations of things (not us) remain relatively dormant. They never hear the 'wind in the willows' and never realise their full creative power.

For me, the mystique and beauty of forests lie in that they grow and thrive without intervention. They are a beautiful, unintentional, complex anarchy. They are the product of millions of years of millions of species going extinct, an incomprehensible sum of events, an unconscious wandering to its current state.

Human inventions and ecosystems are boring in comparison. Every choice was to serve a human desire, and 99% are boring logical reasons. Why does the toaster have a handle? To pop the bread out. Why does the server have a status light? It was a feature request. Why does the computer recognize faces? Because there was a business case for it.

Nature's causal "why" is "because that's the way things worked out", and that's magic. There's a beauty in asking "why are bluejays blue" and not being able to know.

Computers operate semi-autonomously, sure, but so do stand mixers and water-treatment facilities. These are still just human machines built for human uses. Until we have computers that reproduce and thrive alongside us rather than act in our servitude, they haven't even scratched the surface of the magic of an earthworm.

I think this is a matter of perspective. Nature is stochastic - everything in nature happens for a sensible reason, though we may not ever know it in our lifetime. There’s as much (or as little, if you prefer) mystery in the toaster as the bluejay. Why are there different colored toasters? Why do so many have chrome? Why do humans like chrome and other shiny things? Why do humans make toast at all, when the bread has already been cooked once? Conversely, some boring questions about nature: why does the sun appear to rise and fall? Why is grass green? Every effect has cause, and if you trace it far back enough, you get to “it just worked out that way” no matter where you start, and asking past that is getting into cosmology and religion, aka the realm of pure speculation.

The forest spirits of today are the forests. We haven’t destroyed them completely. So far.

The random forests.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

by Richard Brautigan

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

As Arthur C. Clarke say, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

It's easy to distinguish magic from technology, if it works it's technology.

There was a chance for a punchline here.

As I always say: until it breaks :)

I call this the "Daemon-Haunted World" in reference to Carl Sagan's book "Demon-Haunted World", where he talks about the triumph of reason over the "spooks" and demons of superstition. It seems highly ironic to me that we have not yet finished banishing our old demons before conjuring up new ones to confuse and confound ourselves.

Wherever you have a departure of mental model from reality that misunderstanding can give rise to irrational behavior. In the simplest case we have the old lady who, on being told that electricity is like water, went around putting tape over her unused outlets so that the electricity wouldn't leak out... Pretty harmless.

I was watching some normal (non-technical) folks trying to modify something in their office mgmt software a few months ago, and I was struck by the cargo cult nature of their understanding of the internal model of the software. They eventually figured out how to do it but it took ten minutes for something that would have taken ten seconds in an old paper-based system. The core of the problem was the mismatch between users' mental models and the actual (software) machine in front of them.

When these inaccurate models take the form of imaginary entities we have digital ghosts or spooks, and already some have names: Alexa, Siri, Cortana, these are strange new gods with opaque and intricate priesthoods. Their cathedrals are datacenters. They have catechisms and rituals. "Did you try turning it off and on again?"

Multiplication of unnecessary entities is to be avoided, yes? Ockham's razor...

- - - -

Second, without getting into a big long thing about it, forest spirits are the forest spirits of today. It's not hard to communicate with them if you have a good attitude and some basic respect. We are literally of the same family. One life, One Love.

Science is starting to get into the act, backing up and filling out the requisite hard science to explain what's going on when, e.g. you talk to your ficus.

"Wood-wide web" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network

Levin's lab, ambient biological intelligence, "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

"every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." (Conant and Ashby, 1982) http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html

Living systems are evolving self-regulators, they therefore must have self-models, our own is called "ego", etc. Because these models are "software" running on the biological wetware there's no a priori reason why we shouldn't be able to communicate. It's the same software running on the same hardware with the same communication protocols.

Neuro-somatic circuit of the "8-Circuit" model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-circuit_model_of_conscio...

As I say, people have been communicating with forest spirits and such for pretty much all of recorded history (and pre-history if you want to interpret cave paintings that way...) so from my POV science is just filling in the details of a phenomenon that is already commonplace.

It also means that, at least to some degree, Sagan was wrong about the old spooks and demons.

>I call this the "Daemon-Haunted World"

Otherwise known as an application bug dependent on a random initialization variable. It can lead you to believe there are ghosts in your code.

What are the forest spirits of the past then?

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