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

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Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker something like that. May 23, 2003. The Answers Spreadsheet. I worked this up for a guest lecture to Ralph Abraham’s “Chaos and Complexity for Non-Scientists” class. All the “Answers” I’ve believed. I took out some of them for the book. "The Answers", by Rudy Rucker. 5/23/2003. (Key: A=Art, B=Body & Senses, H=Human Society, M=Math, Science, Computers, P=Philosophy) Answer Key Everything Is... In My Life Year My Age Family H Memories, talk, sharing Childhood before differentiation. 1946 0 Society H Rules, strangers. The pecking School. A heavily pecked 4th - 9th 1954 8 order. grade chicken. Self P Thoughts, reflections, desires, Autumn, dusk, I’m 9 years old, waiting 1955 9 fears, plans, simulations, fantasies. for Mom to pick me up at school, a moment of feeling my future self looking back at this moment. Religion P God Try to take church seriously, don’t 1958 12 Science Fiction A Sense of wonder, goofs and eyeball kicks, transformation of mundane reality. succeed. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Random stories in anthologies. Heinlein, Sheckley, Dick, Lovecraft. Gibson, Sterling, Laidlaw and me (13 SF novels.). Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross. Nature B Alive Black Forest. Walking in the pastures near my house. The flow of the brook. Literature A Stories. Characters. Perceptions. Joyce. Kerouac. Burroughs. Pynchon. Internal monologue. Personae to Borges. Poe. I’ve tried my hand at Lit, don. Creating a literary school. A making my SF literary and writing a sensibility. historical novel, also essays and Science M Explanations via laws about unseen primitive entities: atoms, heat, magnetism, fitness. Sex B Orgasm. Pure pleasure. Sensuality. Skin as sense organ. Stop thought. Marriage B Companionship, love, sharing, communication at a near telepathic level. Music A Beats, chords, embodied logic, emotional color. memoirs. Reading Scientific American, popular science books, didn’t learn much in college, couldn’t integrate it. Didn’t really get into the deep aspects till after marriage. Sex takes practice. Somehow my wife and I have stayed together for 38 years now. There’s a sense in which she’s my best connection to my youth. She was there. Bo Diddley, Flatt & Scruggs, Beatles, Zappa, Stones, Ramones, NOFX, it goes on and on. Politics H Power War. Fear, greed, hatred. A steady drain on psychic energy and mental equilibrium. Math M The bare forms of thought. Equations. Grad school, teaching Calculus and finally understanding it. My survey Mind Tools. 1959 13 1959 13 1964 18 1964 18 1966 20 1967 21 1967 21 1968 22 1968 22 p. 110
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Children B Passing on information. DNA + nurture + teach + love. I often think that the best thing I ever did (or luckiest thing that happened to me) was to have three children. Studying mathematical logic. Meeting Logic M Rules of deduction applied to axioms. Kurt Gödel. Mysticism P One The Perennial Philosophy, as Aldous Huxley called it. Seems obvious, uncluttered, true. Teaching H Passing on memes. Watereddown parenting. Space M Higher dimensions. Curved space. Spacetime. Sheets of spacetime. Infinity M Infinite sets make up the forms of reality. We can, like, pixilize the world. Altruistic social good. Learn on the job. Good work hours. Performance art. My first teaching job, I lectured on this. I wrote two books on 4D, the best known is The Fourth Dimension. My thesis work was on Set Theory. I liked finding infinity in mathematics as this seemed almost like mysticism and theology. My Infinity and the Mind. Fitness B The body Jogging, cross-country skiing, cycling, yoga, back-packing. Runner’s high. Pleasure of the rushing motion. Wringing out the pain with yoga. Publishing H Teaching without face-to-face. Constant struggle to get in print. Blogging lets everyone do it! Fractals M Infinitely detailed self-similar patterns. (Synthesize infinity and space). Gnarly. Cellular Automata Artificial Life M A Very simple locally based rules that act in parallel, the same rule everywhere. Gnarly patterns and behaviors emerging. Gliders. Autonomous agents, don’t need synchronization. Interacting. Simulations. Use genetic algorithms to evolve. Improve DNA-like genomes by fitness proportional reproduction. Fitness = gnarliness? Chaos M Deterministic yet unpredictable (in practice) processes. Wander around upon a characteristic attractor occasionally hopping to a new attractor. Gnarly things have fractal “strange” attractors. Why? The Mandelbrot set. A new paradise. And I needed the microscope of a computer to explore it. Fractal patterns seem to go hand in hand with chaotic motions. Life, Brian’s Brain, Vote, Ranch. Visiting Toffoli and Wolfram in 1985 was a conversion experience. Writing CAs in assembly language. Using the CAM-6. Working with John Walker at Autodesk to make the Rudy Rucker’s CA Lab package. Creating the CAPOW package with my students at SJSU. The exciting early Artificial Life conferences. My Artificial Life Lab package from the Waite Group. The simulated robotic evolution in my *Ware novels: information evolves away from the robot hardware to soft plastic moldie limpware to the freeware of intergalactic wave signals. The 1980s computer scene in California. Key insight: Look at the motions of objects in nature, e.g. swaying branches. Looking at a tree combines Nature and Chaos, not to mention Self as you reflect on diggin’ it. Creating the James Gleick’s Chaos the Software package at Autodesk, (which includes fractals). Love P Opening my heart. The universe loves itself. Yosemite vision. Love is practical in any situation: nothing else really works. 1969 23 1970 24 1970 24 1972 26 1974 28 1976 30 1978 32 1980 34 1984 38 1985 39 1988 42 1988 42 1992 46 p. 111
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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