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 Virtual Reality A A computer graphical simulation of reality. Serenity. P Be kind, if only for selfish reasons: it helps you stay serene. The Web H Emergent global mind. The Library of Babel. Painting A Blending colors and forms. An image. An idea made solid. Software Engineerin g Coherent mixed state consciousness Computati on Computer Games A P M A Patterns. Classes interacting with each other. Like logic, but a living logic. Merging with reality. To be “coherent” is to be a pre-collapse state of mind, to not have specific opinions. To adopt one position or another is to be decoherent. Wave with it. CAs, fractals, chaos, software engineering, virtual reality, artificial life all rolled into one. Bring it all together on a computer: Graphics, AI, artificial life, chaos, story, art, sound. Pluralism P All the answers at once. Why should the world be simple, anyway? The cyberspace craze. Mondo 2000 viewing it as an immaterial new drug. I’d always wanted to find Enlightenment and it had never once crossed my mind that the Quest might have something to do with trying to be a better person. The Web isn’t like *ugh* television because you can do-it-yourself. Learning to paint so I could write As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel. A slippery subject to teach. Inherently so? Jon Pearce teaching me about software patterns. My Leuven lectures, Fall, 2003, Satori in Paris. AI shows that any mental process we can explicitly describe can be simulated by a computer. But we “know” we are more than a computer program. The missing ingredient is of necessity not logically describable. Nick Herbert’s “Quantum Tantra” says to view it as pre-wave-function-collapse merging. www.southerncrossreview.org/16/herbert .essay.htm Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science: the dream of an incredibly simple rule that generates everything. Pac-Man to now. I teach a course on game design for five of ten years. I write a book Software Engineering and Computer Games. William James’s book, A Pluralistic Universe. He brings out the point that Monism could well be wrong. 1993 47 1996 50 1998 52 1999 53 2000 54 2001 55 2002 56 2003 57 2004 58 I’m still thinking about The Answers, about all the various things I've thought, over the years, to be "the answer." (curved space, infinity, fractals, chaos, alife, CAs, nature, God, drugs, sex, alcohol, science fiction, literature, art, music, bicycling, consciousness, quantum mechanics, pluralism...) Wolfram’s New Kind of Science would be a chapter of this book, but certainly not the whole book. Problem is, I'm not sure how to structure The Answers. The most obvious form would be a memoir, my life in science, though I question if I'm of sufficient stature for Joe or Betty Shopper to care about my life in science. What would be cooler would be a series of Italo Calvino or Borges-like minifictions. In particular I would prefer to avoid having this get into the “beating a dead horse” territory, that is, avoid simply repeating thoughts I already expressed in my other non-fiction books. Of course lots of writers do repeat their books, and with some success, so maybe this wouldn’t matter. I’m a little worried that writing about computers bores me? Well, it is what I know, and what is, in some sense, expected of me by now. And I really do have kind of a zest for it. p. 112
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Thing is, I need an angle. Like Hofstadter obsessed on self-reference and he came up with Gödel, Escher, Bach. Really it might be best to make a clean fresh start on a book, though, rather than dragging in the older material. My main experiential teaching relates to how learning all these different things has influence how I perceive the world: nature, my mind, other people, society, etc. There’s a highly relevant bit in Kushner’s Masters of Doom, about John Carmack, about how the years of graphics hacking have given Carmack a better appreciation of the world. “In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. ‘These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.” p. 295 June 7, 2003. Book on Computer Games? I could worm my way into Electronic Arts via my ex-student Al Borecky, and into Valve Software via my friend Marc Laidlaw. This is catch-up ball, though it’s for something I find fairly interesting. It could also be a “stations of the cross” book (my term for a nonfiction book where the author goes around interviewing luminaries in a field — there have been pukefully many books like this about computers and complexity, but not so many about games). Maybe I could do a Soul of a New Machine or Hacker Crackdown kind of book about the computer game industry, which I seem to be backing into in various ways (teaching a course, writing a textbook and framework, going to conferences, visiting students and friends at their game companies, and finally buying a PlayStation 2) . I could maybe get a big enough advance to take a semester off from teaching and do lots of leg work ("stations of the cross.") I'd really be interested in anything you or the Media Lab is doing on the game front by the way. I do think it's only a matter of time now till we see lots of CAs in games. Games have (1) Physics Simulation, (2) Graphics Hardware, (3) 3D graphics algorithms, (4) Art: Meshes, bitmaps, skins, texture, (5) Level designs, (6) AI (7) Sound, (8) User Interface, (9) Story, (10) Web connectivity, (11) Product placements. But now I got three books on computer games from Amazon and am rethinking the reality of this. I read David Kushner, Masters of Doom in two days, it’s about John Carmack the hacker and John Romero the gamer, creators of Doom and Quake. A great book, reminiscent of Stephen Levy’s Hackers. I wonder how well the book is doing. Like how big is the market for that kind of book. Kushner bagged great blurbs from A-list pop nonfiction writers. He says the book took him six years and hundreds of interviews. I can’t visualize doing that kind of project at all. And it wouldn’t even be about me, me, me! One phrase I saw in the book and liked a lot was that in Doom there’s a type of enemy called a “Former Human.” June 9, 2003. The Quantum Mind. The nature of consciousness. I see this more as part of a book than as a whole book, p. 113
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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