Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves

(click photo to enlarge)

Cliff Nakamura, avatar of writer and futurist Dr. Clifford Pickover, took me on a strange trip through the virtual world Second Life as we chatted about cosmic reality onions, the fulfillment of humanity's creative potential...and the possibility of overcoming "death."

My interest in Cliff Pickover's books began in college, when I would think about the way he tackled tangents about life, death and creative brilliance while explaining complex mathematical equations. Imagine my surprise when, a decade later, Dr. Clifford Pickover showed up one day to have lunch with me and a group of writers, inventors, artists, philosophers, journalists and delightfully bizarre individuals of all stripes who come together to discuss ideas. The most recent of Cliff’s forty books had just been published.

I soon interviewed him about his book Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves, over sushi. So when I invited him into Second Life for another interview, this time on his new book, A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality, I searched far and wide in this strange world for a platter of sushi to offer my virtual guest, who later took me to synagogues and Zen retreats as we discussed the possible fate of our infinite souls and the concept of immortality, which is being radically altered by the ever-increasing sophistication of technology. If we don’t destroy our species first, we might be able to upload our thoughts (and our illusions of self) into ageless bodies that closely resemble the way we look today…or perhaps greatly enhanced versions, the way Second Life avatars tend to be.

The following is an excerpted transcript from our trip through virtual reality (click here to see photos of the stops we made as we chatted).

Dejavu: I really loved your latest book. It’s intriguing that we get to discuss it today in a virtual universe, given you devote an entire chapter to simulated realities.

Nakamura: Eureka, thanks for this opportunity to chat with you in Second Life. And may I say your avatar is looking particularly lovely today. Just look around us – this water, the swaying tendrils in the vegetation… it all has the potential to seem so real.

Dejavu: It should be even more realistic in years to come.

Nakamura: These kinds of thoughts in Second Life were part of the inspiration for the chapter “The Matrix, Quantum Resurrection, and the Quest for Transcendence.” Many contemporary movies question our perceptions of reality. What if our lives are mere dreams? What if everything I’m seeing in real life is just a simulation of reality?

Dejavu: Let’s get into the topic of reality simulations in a moment. I’d like to start with your interest in “pop culture.” Pop culture, you wrote, has a “tendency to foster the rapid extinction of books, ideas and people.” All evidence points to the idea that we’re in a rapid cycle of extinction at this time in human history, a crossroads that runs parallel to a path that might lead toward immortality, at least in some form. How significant a role does the obsession with pop culture play into the idea that most people don’t seem to be reacting with the appropriate focus to the unprecedented global crises we now collectively face?

Nakamura: Many humans will morph tremendously in 50 to 100 years. In a sense, this profound change is a kind of extinction. We’ll enhance our senses using genetic engineering. Within this century, some of us will extend our visual and auditory ranges and have synesthesial senses that we can barely imagine. We’ll be in constant contact with one another through wireless mindlinks.

Dejavu: Mindlinks?

Nakamura: At first, we’ll see the nascent seeds of these mindlinks in the form of implantable cell phones. Shortly thereafter, we’ll become more sophisticated. Already, technologists are creating vocoders that convert nerve signals in the vocal chords to computerized speech. Cochlear implants convert sounds into neural signals that the brain can interpret. By interfacing the vocoder and cochlear implant with radio transmitters, we can take the first steps to e-telepathy, kiss the acoustic age good-bye, and enter the realm of thought-to-thought communication.

Cell phones and e-mail began to transform the planet around the year 2000. Imagine the transformative potential of e-telepathy in the next fifty years. Scientific, artistic, and political collaborations that took months a hundred years ago, could be done in a flash.

Dejavu: Is there any real hope for the attainment of a condition you refer to as “immortality?”

Nakamura: This question is one of the key themes of my book. I discuss the fact that your immediate family will know nothing of you within four generations. Your great-grandchildren may carry some vestigial memory of you, but that will fade like a burning ember when they die -- and you will be extinguished and forgotten.

Even writers, like myself, don’t have much of a chance. In fact, most best-selling books are destined to fade quickly. Consider, for example, how few of hardcover bestsellers from the year 1950 are still in print or even remembered today. But we may be able to build a small legacy if we are hypercreative and are able to leave some kind of mark through a creative work. For a different kind of immortality, we may be able to embody our minds in eternal software simulations. In the book, I also discuss exotic concepts like quantum immortality and quantum resurrection.

Dejavu: Will we extend our biological lives to the point we are immortal?

Nakamura: Certainly. And if we ever encounter space-faring aliens, they will probably live for centuries because they will have solved the mysteries of aging or can repair any damage that might be caused by aging. Similarly, humans will soon achieve biological immortality for the same reason. Immortality is not such a rare thing -- many creatures on Earth are virtually immortal. As just one example, consider desert creosote plants in Southwest California, some estimated to be over 11,000 years old. Lichens can live just as long. In 1997, scientists in Tasmania discovered one of the world’s oldest living plant, a 43,000-year-old Lomatia tasmanica, or King’s Holly.

Dejavu: People can start wearing tee-shirts that say, “43,000 is the new 30!”

You envision a time during which virtual reality has become so sophisticated that users can control a dial to determine the degree of realism, immersion and sensory impact. What effect might that have on the psyche of users?

Nakamura: In the future, as these simulations become more realistic, we’ll have more transcendent experiences in virtual temples than actual in ones. We’ll also have our own adventures instead of watching the adventures of others. Second Life, and other virtual universes, are the start, but the experiences will eventually become absolutely real to us. We’ll have less of a need to observe movie actors for excitement. Instead, we will participate directly in the journey and have the vivid virtual experience of climbing Cheop’s pyramid, scuba diving in neoproterozoic Lake Vostok, or exploring the Brazilian rain forest while being accompanied by Julius Caesar or a scantily clad Cleopatra or Eureka Dejavu.

Dejavu: Did you think you could sneak that one past me?

Nakamura: A “dial” will allow us to determine the degree of realism, immersion, and sensory impact. One danger is that we will obviously enjoy the virtual world more than the real.

Dejavu: Do you think we’ll lose the need for real-life adventures?

Nakamura: In a century, many of us may lose adventure entertainment entirely and exist in a state of “higher” consciousness and bliss. We will no longer crave relentless action such as car chases, gun shootings, or shark attacks. How many movies do you think the Dalai Lama or any other holy person needs to watch? How many James Bond movies does a monk studying the Ambrosian Rite in the Church of Milan want to see?

Dejavu: In what ways would a highly sophisticated and sensory simulation of reality differ from the concept currently known as “reality?” You mention brains in jars, which carries the stigma of old science fiction films, the likes of which you relish and the influence of which is apparent in your work. But it’s really not so farfetched at all to imagine consciousness being uploaded or the brain being preserved in some way that we can’t imagine now. Do you feel gypped that this technology might not exist in your lifetime?

Nakamura: Yes, I do feel a little sad sometimes. Consider this. What if the greatest numbers of happy minds are produced by living in an environment like The Matrix? If I could opt for hundreds of years of subjective time having wonderful adventures, ideas, and relationships in a Matrix -- achieving bliss -- I’d take it. Would you?

Dejavu: I’m starting to see the foundations of “reality” differently since I took up residence in Second Life. In the future, when it’s much more sophisticated, I can see how people, especially those who have severe physical, social and emotional limitations in real life, might prefer it. I agree with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s recent assessment while being interviewed by John Hockenberry for the Infinite Mind in Second Life and I urge readers to check out this clip.

Nakamura: Let’s talk about the author Italo Calvino.

Dejavu: I like your use of the word “chameleon” when referring to a special class of creative people on which you focus in your book. Many of the artists and other chameleons you reference are among my favorite members of the human family—Truman Capote, Italo Calvino and the pianist Glenn Gould. Calvino, who died in September of 1985, is the author of Invisible Cities, a thin volume that manages to capture both the concrete reality and ethereal externalities of human social evolution and sense of geographical belonging and exile, all laced up with the most exquisite poetic prose. Each short chapter is named for a different city.

Nakamura: I love Calvino. In his book Invisible Cities, he discusses the inhabitants of a city who decide to connect their homes and apartments with various strings. Calvino writes, “In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, [or] agency.”

As the days passed, the strings grew so thick, interwoven, and complexly textured that the people could no longer walk through the city nor distinguish all the intricate relationships. “When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave; the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.”

Dejavu: Can this help us think about modern society?

Nakamura: Pop culture and today’s Internet function a little like the Calvino strings. Innumerable “threads” connect movie stars, scientists, priests, inventors, and composers. Sometimes I imagine drawing strings among all the inhabitants of the planet. The tangle of strings would offer us a glimpse of the invisible connections, the network of relationships that envelope the world like an infinitely complex spider web.

Many people today have lost interest in the old cultures and ways of life, but we can still enjoy the ancient thinking in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, ancient Greek plays and myths, or even history itself. Historian Will Durant notes, “Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than ever in his own day and land.” Do you think that most of the great thoughts are lost?

Dejavu: I often wonder how often the great ideas people get have been thought of before. I imagine every life contains epiphanies and that almost all of them vanish as the mundane necessities of life swallow them. We owe a debt of gratitude to those who record such thoughts, as well as to those who struggle to keep those ideas alive.

You use a Glenn Gould quote in A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality: “In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary…the audience would be the artist and their life would be the art.” Is the immersion in virtual reality drawing us closer to that creative ideal?

Nakamura: In our own future, when we transcend the need for traditional external expressions of music and art, whether we are uploaded to virtual worlds or are still present in this one, we will be able to induce a feeling of stillness, serenity, a sacred presence, as if we are on the threshold of transcending space and time. Person-to-person communication will be pervasive and instantaneous. Each one of us will serve as a nucleation site around which form the crystals of spiritual expression that lifts a totally interconnected society out of purely pragmatic endeavors and places us in direct contact with the numinous. The notion of “I” will periodically dissolve; the thinking mind will turn off, but we will still be conscious. There will be no suffering; we’ll enter a timeless state in a seemingly endless “now.”

Dejavu: You envision a reality in which the notion of self begins to dissolve and yet thinkers will still be fully conscious. That sounds like Buddhism, the only spiritual system that Albert Einstein believed could respond to the needs of modern science.

Nakamura: Even today, researchers like Warren Meck and Catalin Buhusi of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, are investigating how the brain monitors the passing of time via a region of the brain called the striatum. Could a tiny alteration of the striatum give us a simulacrum of immortality? In the future, all of us may be able to alter our experience of time by using designer drugs or by manipulating the brain’s dopamine system, which is known to alter temporal perception. According to Robert Levine of California State University in Fresno, “Time is our most valuable possession. Until the biomedical people can make us live forever, the closest thing we have is to stretch the moment.”

Dejavu: Do you believe that the world changes when your perceptions change?

Nakamura: Let’s consider your question as it relates to human senses. One way to imagine how other realities could exist side by side with our own is to consider the forces that produced the diversity of senses and intelligences right here on Earth. Alien worlds are clearly right here among us. Every Earthly creature perceives the world in an “alien” way. Dogs. Bees. Bats. Cats. They experience the world with different kinds of senses. They can smell what we cannot, they can see what we cannot, they can hear what we cannot. If the organisms of the Earth were somehow able to describe their world, it would not be recognizable to you. It would seem like the wildest world from any science-fiction story. Moreover, if you were able to describe the world to another species, they would “see” no resemblance to their own. We do not have to contemplate science fiction to imagine alienlike senses and bodies. The animal world of Earth is so diverse and full of different senses, that creatures are already walking among us possessing “alien” awareness beyond our understanding.

Dejavu: What’s the best evidence, if any, that this reality we’re in currently might actually be a façade? Do you feel there’s a chance that this is actually a simulation?

Nakamura: In our own small pocket of the universe, we’ve already developed computers with the ability to simulate lifelike behaviors using software and mathematical rules. One day we will create thinking beings that live in rich simulated spaces -- in ecosystems as complex and vibrant as an Amazonian rain forest. We’ll be able to simulate reality itself, and perhaps more advanced beings are already doing this elsewhere in the universe. Huge supercomputers would have the capacity to simulate not just a tiny fragment of reality, but a substantial fraction of an entire universe.

What if the number of these simulations is larger than the number of universes? Could we be living in such a simulation? Astronomer and philosopher Martin Rees suggests that if the simulations outnumber the universes, “as they would if one universe contained many computers making many simulations,” then it is likely that we are artificial life.

Dejavu: You discuss a “cosmic reality onion,” in which civilizations that exist further from reality are greatly imperiled by the fact that civilizations above them can switch them off. I thought about that when Second Life was offline for hours recently during maintenance. Some people are fully immersed in Second Life, and being cut off for hours is extremely frustrating for them.

Nakamura: Yes, I coined the phrase “cosmic reality onion” to give readers of my book the feel for worlds within worlds. What can one do to protect recursive worlds in the onion? This speculation about future possibilities of Matrix creation assumes that our civilization will survive long enough to embark on this post-human adventure. It also assumes that we will be interested in trying to simulate complex realities. If we succeed at creating such a simulation, it’s possible that the simulated civilization will someday also become posthuman (i.e. acquire the capability to simulate other humans).

At some point, dozens of simulated civilizations within civilizations may exist like layers within layers of a cosmic onion.

Dejavu: Do you fear death?

Nakamura: Fear of death is why this book speaks of near-death experiences and of some ways we may avoid death. I even mention Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn remarkable suggestions that “your mind many arise not simply from your own brain but from the brains of other people.” He notes that all of us set up “social prosthetic systems,” or SPSs, in which we rely on others to “extend our reasoning abilities and help us regulate and constructively employ our emotions.” A good marriage often occurs when two people can serve as effective SPSs for each other. In some sense, we “lend” parts of our brains to one another. Kosslyn concludes that your mind arises from the combined activity of your own brain and those of your SPSs. Using this line of reasoning, “one might argue that when your body dies, part of your mind may survive.”


Dejavu: We share a deep admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and you use one of his quotes in your book: “I reproach all modern religions for having prescribed to their faithful the consolations and extenuations of death, instead of giving their souls the means of getting along with death and coming to an understanding of death, with its complete and unmasked cruelty.” Does blind faith in an afterlife actually prevent people from being more focused on scientific ways of achieving a longer life, a potential resurrection or even immortality?

Nakamura: You seek optimism. You seek transcendence.

Dejavu: Yes. I am attracted to the idea of humanity overcoming the odds, including an unchecked proclivity for violence and our own shortsighted abuse of the planet and resources. The medium of space-time seems to be transformation, and I’m intrigued by the quest to change with the changing times.

You wrote about a conversation with your colleague, the futurist Chuck Gaydos, who notes that even if your body could survive for a million years, mental changes would accumulate and an entirely different person would inhabit the body. You would no longer exist, and yet there would be no moment of death at which you had ceased to exist. “You would just slowly fade away over the millennia like a sugar cube dissolving in water, like a sand castle being transformed by an ocean of time.”

Nakamura: Yes.

Dejavu: A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality is an illuminating work. Thanks for taking the time to write and discuss it. I hope that if the technology doesn’t exist to preserve your consciousness by the time you pass into the great hereafter, that you will be remembered for a long time to come for your many thought-provoking works. Cliff, I admire your dreams.

Nakamura: Listen to the virtual birds nearby. The sun will set soon. Imagine that you hear a whisper of laughter from the wisps and eddies of wind and smell lilacs and roses. Virtual universes can surely provide this soon. Imagine bees buzzing in the flowers and a child giggling -- and in the distance, the tintinnabulation of bells on an ice-cream truck. Listen! The sounds ebb and flow, composing a symphony for avatars. Even avatars can dream.