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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
though. The idea is base a line of thought on my Leuven lecture notes, On Computation
and on “The Missing Mind,” the paper-in-progress I’m ever-so-slowly writing with my
Leuven philosopher hosts Mark van Atten and Leon Horsten. I’m getting exceedingly little
input from the boys, maybe 5% of the paper, so I feel it would be okay to use it as my own.
The pay-off in the paper is based on Nick Herbert’s little essay “Quantum Tantra.” I do need
to see if Nick minds if I use his idea. Conceivably I could collaborate with him, but that
would be more work I think.
(Thesis) Upon introspection we feel there is a residue that isn’t captured by any
scientific system; we feel ourselves to be quite unlike machines. This is the sense of having a
soul.
(Antithesis) But (a) the work in AI and simulations, (b) genetic algorithms, and (c)
simple considerations of degrees of computability seem to indicate that any clearly described
human behavior can be emulated by a machine. Where is, then, the missing soul?
(Synthesis) The “soul” can be given a scientific meaning as one’s immediate
perception of one’s uncollapsed wave function, particularly as it is entangled with the
uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.
(Two possible conclusions) Either (a) machines, qua physical objects, have
uncollapsed wave functions as well, so they too have the same kind of “soul” that we have or
(b) there is something so far unique about how we manage to couple our soul experiences
with our logical reasoning. Re (b) it would be worth looking into quantum computation as
currently formulated.
In other words it’s time to play some catch-up ball re. quantum computation. Well,
right now I have tons of time, so why not read up on Quantum Mechanics again. I found my
nice old intro by Daniel T. Gillespie A Quantum Mechanics Primer. I bought it at Rutgers
and read it in Geneseo. On the back pages were written a couple of drafts of 1976 poems,
from Geneseo days, “Drunken Hearted Man,” and “She Got a Phonograph.” I also bought a
new book on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.
I finished reading the Primer on the beach at 14th Ave. in Santa Cruz yesterday. It
was so lovely, there, lying beneath the tall Monterey pines, with the long luscious crunches
of the clean green waves running a hundred meters parallel to the beach.
More and more I’m fascinated by the idea that my state of mind is exactly like a
quantum state, a wave function me that is a complex-valued function over an n-dimensional
space with n quite a large number describing my degrees of freedom (the log of my number
of mental states?) If A and B are observables, this means they are questions you might ask
me. If A has answers a1 and a2 and B has answers b1 b2 b3, then there are corresponding
eigenstates Ai, Bj. When I am in eigenstate A1 I for sure believe the answer is a1. But
normally I’m, like, 0.7exp(iu1) A1 + 0.7exp(iu2) A2. I’ll go into this at greater length
outside the journal notes, it’s too mathy and too preliminary for this venue.
June 11, 2003. Discover Memoir Notes Once Again.
I remembered that at Esalen I flashed on this a book idea: Memoirs of a Crazy
Mathematician. And then I once again stumbled onto the Memoir Notes document I’d made
in April and forgotten once before. I only found it because while spell-checking I noticed I’d
made a dictionary file called “memoir.dic” and I’m all, huh? My mind is like a sieve, maybe
the sooner I do memoirs the better. I’m gonna integrate the Memoirs notes into this
document.
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