Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
Older Versions of the Contents
November, 2003
Chapter One: The New Worldview
1.1 What is a computation?
1.2 Personal Computers
1.3 The Physical World
1.4 Life
1.4 The Mind
1.4 Society
Explorations: What am I? Coherence.
Thought Experiment: “The Kind Rain”
Chapter Two: The Computational Zoo
2.1 Eight digital philosophies
Thought Experiment: “Hello Infinity”
2.2 Stephen Wolfram's four classes of computation.
2.3 Intrinsic randomness.
2.4 The Principle of Computational Equivalence.
2.5 Quantum Computation
Explorations: Merging into the computation. Without words.
Thought Experiment: “Lucky Number”
Chapter Three: Beautiful Gnarl
3.1 Moods and fluttering leaves.
3.2 Turbulent cellular automata. Crashing the stock market.
3.4 Artificial life.
3.3 The fractal of human memory. Programming languages.
3.5 The aesthetics of gnarl.
Explorations: Tracking your moods and debugging your mind.
Thought Experiment: “Terry’s Talker”
Chapter Four: Being Human
4.1 The social network.
4.2 I seem to be a website. The anthill wakes up.
The computational multiverse. The multiversal web.
4.3 The art of artificial intelligence. Robots are possible, but not feasible.
4.4 No singularity ahead.
4.5 The phenomenology of Pac Man.
4.6 The quantum mind. Hylozoism. Other minds. Enlightenment.
Explorations: living the web, Winning the Meme Wars,
Between your thoughts. The many yous.
Thought Experiment: “The Million Chakras”
Original Proposal Contents, September, 2003
Proposal Short
Chapter 1: The New Worldview
p. 10