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 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 p. 116
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker particular could I drop VR and computer games? I’m planning such a radical revision of the notes that I think I’ll save off my current outline as “Computers and Reality Notes, July 2, 2003.doc”. July 4, 2003. Lifebox, Quantum Mind, NKS Triad. Thesis: the lifebox. Antithesis: the quantum mind. Synthesis: NKS-style automata, which possibly are quantum computers. Maybe just call it The Lifebox. I see the mind’s churning as being like the eddies in a von Karman vortex street bouncing off each other. I love Wolfram’s notion of coming up with a higher-order automaton procedure involving the eddies. In this way we are free to ignore sensitive dependence, that is, we can ignore (a) the thermal bath randomization and decoherence, and (b) we don’t have to pay so much attention to the excavation of digits. July 14, 2003. Popular Interest in AI. Yesterday I was on a panel about “The Singularity” at the science-fiction Readercon 15 in Burlington, Mass. I was surprised, again, how really naive most people are about AI. Always you hear the same arguments why a machine can’t be like a person. That a machine “doesn’t care” if it wins (but it does “care” if we give it a utility function), that a machine “doesn’t make mistakes” (not only can random errors easily be produced but, in use, machines tend to accumulate dead storage areas that make them run less well), etc. As always, the faces light up when I talk about the merged higher consciousness that we know, from the inside, that we have. My fellow SF writers seemed wholly unable or unwilling to discuss the Singularity argument’s three moves as formulated by me: (a) strong AI will occur, that is, machines equivalent to humans in mental power will be evolved, (b) once we have strong AI, we can easily get superhuman intelligence by running the machines faster and giving them more memory, and (c) each generation of superhuman machines can design a still smarter next generation, setting off a cascade of more and more powerful artificial minds. Of these three steps, only (b) is unexceptionable. (a) may in fact never come true; strong AI may forever remain a will ’o’ the wisp. At this point really the only strong general purpose method for AI we have is neural nets. Training a given net isn’t terribly slow, but trying to evolve towards the correct net architecture is an exponential search problem. (c) is by no means a given. For if we look at the first step of the cascade, in which we humans design machines able to work as well as (let alone better than) ourselves, we find that this step is an exponential search problem. So why should it necessarily be the case that machine generation n can very easily design generation n+1? July 23, 2003. Brockman Enters the Fray. So I’m signed on with John Brockman; he only wants to represent this one book, doesn’t want to touch an SF novel, we have a single-book agency agreement. Though he p. 117
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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