
The Forest Spirits of Today Are Computers - brycehalley
http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/the-forest-spirits-of-today-are-computers
======
ajuc
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.

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

~~~
krapp
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.

~~~
zipwitch
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.)

------
putzdown
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?

~~~
miscPerson
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?

~~~
luckyscs
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.

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fenwick67
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.

~~~
notduncansmith
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.

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

~~~
ElFitz
The _random_ forests.

------
okareaman
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.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

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

~~~
scollet
There was a chance for a punchline here.

------
carapace
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](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](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](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-
circuit_model_of_consciousness)

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.

~~~
pixl97
>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.

------
doodeebatter
What are the forest spirits of the past then?

