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

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