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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
ideas can help the average person live a richer, more enlightened life. Working with
computers has changed the way I see the world in some interesting ways — and I want to
share that. I'll tell you more about it later on.”
He answered, “COMPUTERS AND REALITY sounds good — and it's right up my
alley.”
How refreshing to get an answer like that!
I was looking at this book by David Deutsch called The Fabric of Reality (which kind
of validated the use of the R word for me), and I noticed that his book, which I think sold
pretty well, doesn’t have any displayed equations or computer code at all. I wonder if I could
write my whole book without equations, code, or even subscripts. If something requires
technical symbolism, then just don’t put that in. This would mean, however, that I couldn’t
explain, for instance, how Rule 30 works, or show my nice clean CA wave equation
Wave(C) = NeighborhoodAverage - OldC. But maybe I could live without them. (If not, I
could banish the equations to footnotes — but then average people would know they were
there and still be scared. Maybe put them on a website? But why go to all that work for
something that isn’t even part of the book? But the geeks could find it then. Could have a
website with downloadable programs, Java applets, and the hard-core symbolic stuff in
PDF.) But I’m getting off the point, which is that it would make the book more commercial
to have no equations. I think it might be doable.
I’m on an airplane now with Sylvia, flying to Boston to attend Wolfram’s first NKS
(A New Kind of Science) conference. And then on to Greg, Karen Johnson, Maine,
DiFilippo, Block Island, and Readercon.
June 27, 2003. At the NKS conference.
Brian Silverman says call it Computation and Reality, not Computers and Reality, but
right now I’m thinking, no, it’s the latter book I want to write. I do want to include
computers as media machines (games, the web) and not just talk about nature as being made
of computations. He doesn’t like my book plan, I (perhaps incorrectly) imagine he’s a little
miffed that I’m not writing the book with him as we’d vaguely discussed.
I have to go present at a panel on NKS in Higher Education now. Looking back at
the Leuven syllabus, I’m thinking I should maybe use those chapter titles after all. Each
followed by a colon and what’s actually in the chapter, though.
July 2, 2003. Wolfram’s Input.
I saw Wolfram this week at the NKS 2003 conference. He took me aside and urged
me to write my next book all about NKS. And I’m tempted. His NKS sold, he says, 300,000
copies. And people might want a shorter simpler version. I can visualize a sleek, slender
volume called, say, On Computation.
But to just do that would be subjugating myself. I want to express my ideas about
computation, dammit. There could possibly me a middle way, of sorts, that is, to bring NKS
repeatedly into the book, relating it to all my chosen topics.
Nobody seems to like my present Computers and Reality title all that much. Maybe I
should go with The Lifebox. That’s “my” new idea, that old lifebox thing. So it could be the
payoff summary of what the book’s about. Or The Lifebox and the Quantum Mind, which
would be more inclusive. Maybe I should drop some topics and focus on those two. In
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