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Steve Grand An honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology and NESTA Dreamtime fellow, Steve Grand, D.Univ., OBE, has carved himself a reputation at the cutting edge of artificial life. He is Director of Cyberlife Research Ltd. and was formerly Technical Director of Creature Labs, where he was responsible for the architecture and programming of the artificial life game, Creatures. Currently Grand is developing artificial life applications as well as an intelligent living machine that embodies a set of hypotheses about the neurological mechanisms present in various species of animal. He theorizes that every cortical map must be thinking about something all the time, and if there are no signals demanding its attention then the map will generate some itself. He feels this is the explanation for the endless monologue that runs in everyone's head, and the visual day dreaming we do in vacant moments. In his book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, Grand explores what constitutes the conscious essence of existence, what is intelligence, even "how we can make a soul." In Growing Up With Lucy: How to Make an Android in Twenty Easy Steps, he describes his progress building a robot capable of developing a mammal-like intelligence.
Related Links • Steve
Grand's CyberLife Research home page
Steve Grand Quotes Nothing pleases me more than when I stir up moral and ethical questions! The best change comes about through gentle, sustained pressure from thinking people. The trouble with the British these days is that they want innovation, but they don't want to change anything to get it. To me, every level of description in the universe, from atoms through organisms through minds through mobs to societies and beyond, is a real physical form of existence – but an emergent one. I have a strong dislike of attempts to locate consciousness in the fundamental fabric of the universe. I think it's a mistake borne of our historically linear thinking. We assume too readily that any property we measure (viscosity, say) must somehow be fundamental or it wouldn't exist. But this is wrong. Just as wetness is a meaningless concept at the level of single atoms, so consciousness is a meaningless concept at any level below the mind. We need not seek the properties of the whole in the properties of the parts. Women have selective memory; men selective attention. The definition game is very dangerous. So many people seem to assume there's a right answer – that life is a true category in nature and objects carry union cards to declare whether they're alive or not. That's a mistake. The universe is filled with trillions of unique phenomena, some of which we all agree to call alive, some of which we're not so sure. But it's not that they are or aren't alive – they're just what they are; no more and no less. Life is an invented concept. When you think about it, a human being is really a tenth of a trillion stupid single-celled organisms that just happen to be related by birth and covered in glue so that they stay stuck together in a lump. I think it has to be the glue, in a very real sense, that holds us together as a single mind – we can't walk in two directions at once, so all our cells have to come to a common agreement about which way we want to walk. This makes us "of one mind" most of the time. But from moment to moment we are a system in flux, so who is to say that we are the SAME person as we were five minutes ago, apart from our memories? It's the lumpiness of our bodies that holds us together in space, and our memories that hold us together in time. The average person is genetically closer to the average chimpanzee than any individual man is to his wife! Life is not the stuff of which it is made – it is an emergent property of the aggregate arrangement of that stuff. Even the stuff itself is no more than an emergent property of a still smaller whirlpool of interactions. Living beings are high-order persistent phenomena, which endure through intelligent interaction with their environment. This intelligence is a product of multiple layers of feedback. An organism is therefore a localized network of feedback loops that ensures its own continuation. Instead of 'command and control', we need to 'nudge and cajole'. Whether you run a school, run a country, manage an ecosystem or write computer software it makes no difference: complex adaptive systems cannot be dictated to – you have to learn how to go with the flow and nudge individual components in order to encourage the system to go in the direction you want it to. I don't fear intelligence. On the whole, intelligent beings are thoughtful and insightful. They actively seek understanding and wisdom and they are acutely aware of themselves and their effects on others. No, the thing that makes me afraid, above all else, is stupidity. The real threat to us and to all that depend on us, is people who don't use the brains they were given, and prefer to follow the herd or act short-sightedly. Especially, to be blunt, those people who justify their actions in terms of someone else's ideology, because they simply can't be bothered to think for themselves. If people want to believe in divine beings, that's entirely their business and I also don't deny that most religions preach tolerance and moral rectitude. But it's also in their very nature that religions tell us what to do. They make us sign a blanket acceptance that we will adhere to the creed, rather than think things through for ourselves. Nobody in this universe or outside it can know what the future holds, even though it is already set in stone by the mere fact that one thing invariably follows another. So when I sit on the seashore and discover my thoughts beating in synchrony with the lapping waves; when I see that my past and my future are laid out among the ebbs and flows of cause and effect, I am happy to be a part of that great dance – to play my role and hope that I will do it well. The things that I cannot ever know and that no one can ever tell me are a mystery yet to be revealed, and that is enough to make me free.
Steve Grand with the late Douglas Adams.
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