The Salmon of Doubt

It’s much more difficult to see it happening in the case of the evolution of life. The time scales are so vast and our perspective so much complicated by the fact that it’s ourselves we’re looking at, but our invention of the computer has for the first time let us get a real feel for how it works—just as our invention of the hydraulic pump first gave us an insight into what the heart was doing and how the circulation of the blood worked.

That is also why it’s impossible to divorce pure science from technology: they feed and stimulate each other. So the latest software gizmo for transferring an mp3 sound file from one computer to another across continents is, when you peer into its innards and at the infrastructure that has given rise to it and that it, in turn, becomes part of, is, in its way, every bit as interesting as the way in which a cell replicates, an idea is formed within a brain, or a beetle deep in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest digests its prey. It’s all part of the same underlying process that we in turn are part of, it’s where our creative energies are being poured, and I’ll happily take it over comedians, television, and football any day.

OCTOBER 2000

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Present somebody with a questionnaire clipboard, and they lie. A friend of mine once had a job preparing a questionnaire for people to fill in on the Web. He said the information they got back was enormously heartening about the state of the world. For instance, did you know that almost 90 percent of the population are CEOs of their own companies and earn over a million dollars a year?

Is There an Artificial God?

This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn’t think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, thought, “What could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you’re just a bunch of guys! It’s been rife with ideas, and I’ve had so many myself through talking with and listening to people, that I’d thought what I’d do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I’ll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there’ll be an outburst of chair-throwing at the end. Before I embark on what I want to try to tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time because there’s a lot of stuff that’s just come in from what we’ve been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of go ... I was telling somebody earlier today that I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first two or three weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages—she was rebooting!

I was thinking about this earlier today when Larry Yaeger was talking about “What Is Life?” and mentioned at the end something I didn’t know, about a special field of handwriting recognition. The following strange thought went through my mind: that trying to figure out what is life and what isn’t, and where the boundary is, has an interesting relationship with how you recognise handwriting. We all know, when presented with any particular entity, whether it’s a bit of mould from the fridge or whatever—we instinctively know when something is an example of life and when it isn’t. But it turns out to be tremendously hard exactly to define it. I remember once, a long time ago, needing a definition of life for a speech I was giving. Assuming there was a simple one and looking around the Internet, I was astonished at how diverse the definitions were and how very, very detailed each one had to be in order to include

“this” but not include “that.” If you think about it, a collection that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef is an awkward set of objects to try to compare. When we try to figure out what the rules are that we are looking for, trying to find a rule that’s self-evidently true, that turns out to be very, very hard.

Compare this with the business of recognising whether something is an A or a B or a C. It’s a similar kind of process, but it’s also a very, very different process, because you may say of something that you’re “not quite certain whether it count as life or not life, it’s kind of there on the edge, isn’t it, it’s probably a very low example of what you might call life, it’s maybe just about alive or maybe it isn’t.” Or maybe you might say about something that’s an example of digital life, “Does that count as being alive?”