Artificial Reality

When I started this blog, I called it Artiphys, because at the time I was working with Ed Fredkin on discrete physics (* footnote). I had this idea that one could turn Ed's theory, that the Universe is a digital computer, upside down: create a digital universe of our own, and see what happens in it. Maybe that's why ours exists in the first place (as good a cosmology as any perhaps?)

Lately, I've become involved in a project that may have the potential to realize some of these ideas. OpenSim (www.opensimulator.org) is an open-source implementation of the Second Life protocol, meaning you can use it to run your own Second Life-style 'grid'. In case you didn't know, Second Life uses multiplayer videogame technology to create a 3D world where you can interact with the environment and other characters (called Avatars). It's on the Internets.

My involvement with this project has centered mostly around the physics engine, though my interest in the technology and its implications is much wider than that. But the physics is a great place to start, because it brings up a bunch of interesting intellectual and philosophical questions relating to this whole area, which I like to call "Artifical Reality".

Artificial Reality is different than Virtual Reality in the following way: it doesn't just aim to duplicate our reality in virtual form; it aims to be something 'real' in its own right, with its own rules, entities, interactions, and outcomes. Where VR has always had the connotation that you transform into a digital version of yourself and interact with a digital environment, AR implies a world that exists without you or any 'real' entities, independently. It is a persistent world, that does not stop existing because you take off your VR headset and remove the glove.

Second Life is presently at a stopping point between VR and AR. I think of it as Web 3.0 (see previous post) -- adding presence to information and identity. It also has persistence (it exists when you're not there), but that is mostly due to other flesh-and-blood people who are logged on when you're not. Artificial Reality (I will not submit to the temptation to bump the web version number at this point) adds autonomy and independence to the picture. So we have a heirarchy of information structures that leads from the existence of bits and bytes up to an independent reality that takes its own form and structure:

level 1: information
level 2: identity
level 3: presence
level 4: persistence
level 5: independence

To get to level 5, we need more than just pretty avatars, cool graphic bling, and a slapped-on overlay of videogame-style physics. We need the logic of object interactions to be precisely defined, and that logic has to have some very specific properties if we want the resulting world to be interesting, coherent, and stable. My ultimate dream is to create an alternate reality so rich that it can exhibit some of the features of real reality that I find fascinating, such as the emergence of order out of chaos. This has to do with information theory, entropy, discrete vs. continuous, reversibility, A-life, and a host of other subjects. There is a distinct chance that all of these elements can come together to form something completely new and unexpected. Wouldn't that be fun?


footnotes

* Ed's website, www.digitalphilosophy.org, appears to be down; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_philosophy for background. The paper we wrote together at Carnegie Mellon can be found here: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/danbmil/salt/

Ben Goertzel has been talking about similar stuff, to a much wider audience (see my link to his blog). To my knowledge, he has not proposed a concrete model that addresses the low-level discrete physics issue.

There are a number of sci-fi works that touch on this subject:

- The Matrix -- obviously (here's hoping our emergent AGI's aren't as malevolent as Agent Smith). Note that the paradigm of the Matrix still clutches tightly to the idea that a 'real' body must exist somewhere (the people are all kept alive in vats). What's that about?

- Permutation City, a novel by Greg Egan

- Non Serviam a short story by Stanislaw Lem (reprinted in Hofstaedter's The Mind's I