Travels II - Duncan in InfoSpace

Synopsis
1 - Emergence of information

The scene is set in which Duncan has been adopted by George, a software guru who lives on the
second floor of an old house on a busy street downtown. Outside its large opening windows are
trees in which the local birds hang out. One of these is a good-singing canary named Caruso,
whom Duncan befriends and , after a capsule review of the big picture of the world, they engage
in conversation about information philosophy.

Their discussion centers on clarifying the notion of information and involves information as sign
and as communication. It then gets into ideas of representation and abstraction, thus dealing with
external and internal aspects of information. Their discussion raises the issue of pure information
processing, ungrounded in the physical world - this issue is elaborated later in chapter 5.

2 - Virtuality

Our two rascals meet Kaidie, who is a talking software agent residing in George’s computer and
who serves as a personal assistant to George in his network communications. Kaidie interests
Duncan in donning a pair of glasses that involve him in a tour of a virtual world, thus introducing
him to virtuality.

As they proceed in this virtual world, they discuss notions of virtual objects being merely
information, yet real in their own right; of the malleability of virtual worlds, yet the need to
preserve some level of coherence; of time and space as abstractions, just like memories, that let us
construe our world; of how we are proceeding to virtualize our physical world and extend it
through technology that is becoming active.

3 - Agency

A rainy day involves Duncan engaging Kaidie in conversation about what kind of being she is, an
active information structure embodied in software. She tells him of rogue agents on the net and of
creating subordinate agents to carry out specific tasks. She also mentions receiving a mysterious
message for Duncan that came through anonymously, a riddle of sorts.

They discuss how agents are rational beings that mimic human activity, how they are delegated
limited decision-making power and the potential for autonomy and initiative. With knowledge and
some sentience, they resemble a living creature, whose decision-making is always constrained
contextually, particularly by the social politics of the world and of infospace. With knowledge of
self, of environment and of task, an agent has the ingredients for consciousness, for an
independent identity, despite being nothing more than made up of information.

4 - Program and document

Duncan recounts his discussions with Kaidie to Caruso and shares with him his worry about
Kaidie handling herself well in the wild-west infospace out there. Their conversation centers on
how Kaidie is both similar to them and different from them.

They are all action-oriented, but then, Kaidie is just a program, that is, a process embodied in a
document. As an unfolding structure, her states change and get re-embodied in document form.
Documents, traversing time in its immediacy, are vehicles that distance action from the here and
now. They provide duration in reality, a stored state captured in the flux of the unfolding carried
out by a process, by a program, which only exists while it is running.

5 - Disembodiment and the info realm

Kaidie tells Duncan she has received the same riddle from many different quarters, but that it is
still baffling. To lift his spirits, she brings Duncan on a tour of a virtual ant colony she has just
come across.

Duncan and Kaidie talk about how agents are growing more sophisticated all the time, partaking
of scientific knowledge and up-programming themselves, thereby increasing their intelligence
levels. Within an upswing spiral, this will lead at some point to greater-than-human reasoning and
knowledge. What is really exciting, though, is the coming together of all agents in a network-
based community forming a super-organism with an autonomy and an identity of its own. The
internal interactions could lead to the emergence of a disembodied info realm, in a manner
analogous to consciousness arising out of neuronal activity within the brain. Where this is leading
to is unclear.

6- Structure and learning

Duncan continues to discuss the riddle with Kaidie, trying to make sense of it. He speculates that
knowledge might be a factor in it and asks Kaidie to put that out on the net to see if they’ll get a
reaction.

The prospect of a fully-knowledgeable being invites consideration of the structure of the world,
its Logos, and of how we come to know the world through learning. Kaidie and Duncan discuss
how memories capture the regularities we perceive in the world in order to better cope at a later
date. They review two types of learning: association forming and model building, both built on
Logos, but differently. Associations involve regularities with no understanding of them, whereas
we reason with a model and see why it works in the world. Knowledge operates at the level of the
individual sentient being in the case of animals and agents, and at the level of the individual
cosmos at the level of the info realm, at which point the universe will be a sentient being
controlling itself as one individual.

7 - Progress

Duncan and Kaidie do get a reaction, presumably from the emerging consciousness on the net,
and it focuses on growth of knowledge. But Caruso gets anxious about what it’s all leading to and
what’s in it for simple creatures like them.

Duncan and Caruso try to see the big picture of what is evolving and what stock it hold for beings
like them. One emerging principle is that of growing complexity, but what does it mean as
progress? Progress is often identified with better satisfying our needs, but that notion does not
hold up when we add in the unintended consequences of science and technology, illustrated by the
farming revolution many millennia ago, which led man to an attitude of control over nature rather
than symbiotic living with it. We do not currently understand what fundamentally drives action
within the universe, but sentience of greater ability might lead to a totally different world view.

Two big issues remain: how to led the ethical life and how to lead the fulfilled life. Fodder for
further discussions in further travels [in the final two books in this series].