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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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. p. 114
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker The Answers: Memoirs of a Crazy Mathematician. That’s very commercial. And everyone but me thinks I’m “crazy” anyway. So why not cry over the insult — all the way to the bank. But no way do I in fact want to call myself crazy. Just for a few bucks? No. Yeah, man, I owe the world a memoir. Seems like every week I see another memoir by a 25-year-old in the N. Y. Times Book sections. Saw another in City Lights yesterday, something about a kid who met Feynman. You pick that up right away. The layperson is more comfortable with a memoir. Eventually I’d like to do a novel about a crazy mathematician as well. His “craziness” could involve some of the ideas in The Answers. But switching to this project wouldn’t solve my current problem of how to write a commercial non-fiction book summarizing, in particular, what I learned in Silicon Valley over the last 17 years. I would prefer to first do the non-fiction book and then eventually the novel. June 14, 2003. Thinking About Computers. I walked around North Beach the other day, making notes. And keep folding old proposals into what I have here. I got it down to two main lines: either a Big Book Of Computers or Memoirs. And now today, I decided to set aside the Memoirs notion for now and go ahead and try and finally put a stake in the Tome’s heart, this project that’s haunted me for going on fifteen years. Just do it. Why didn’t I do this before? Well, whenever I’d show it to my science-fiction agent, she’d be kind of negative about it. And, frankly, when I’ve discussed it once or twice with editors they haven’t been that interested either. Particularly when I mention writing about chaos and fractals, for instance, they feel like it’s been done. But, lord, how many books are there about Relativity? These things are here to stay. Still can’t fix on a title. My persistent illusion that the right title will snap it all into focus as a fresh new book. June 20, 2003. Idea for Story/Novel. Qubits. Netflix downloads a superdense coded info pattern via an entangled qubit and a guy gets the wrong movie, it’s the true story of his life. Air protozoa. Have UFOs shaped like the medusae, siphonophores, etc. in Haeckel’s amazing TK. I picked up a copy at the Monterey Aquarium last week; Sylvia and I were at her “Young Rhetoricians” conference there for four days. Haeckel’s last work was on crystals, I have to find out more about that, the note in the book says it had to do with “artificial life” !?! June 26, 2003. Computers and Reality. Brockman. No Equations. Ever since North Beach, like two weeks, I’ve been working on my book proposal. I wrote the big science-book agent John Brockman about it the other day: “I'm putting together a proposal for what I hope will be a big non-fiction book with working title COMPUTERS AND REALITY. My present idea is to cover all the good old (chips, fractals, chaos, AI, computability) and new (Wolfram's work, the web, quantum computation, videogames) computer things in a non-technical way with a focus on how these p. 115
Page 1 and 2:
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
Page 3 and 4:
Page 5 and 6:
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42:
Page 43 and 44:
Page 45 and 46:
Page 47 and 48:
Page 49 and 50:
Page 51 and 52:
Page 53 and 54:
Page 55 and 56:
Page 57 and 58:
Page 59 and 60:
Page 61 and 62:
Page 63 and 64: Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
Page 113: Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
Page 141: Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
show all

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?