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 update everyone in parallel a few times, and I think in the limit Kaufman commonly found limit cycles of a size maybe square root of N. [Can one make Kaufmann network visually interesting?] (2c) Simple neuron rules. This would be in the Wolfram style of making rules as simple as possible and finding the behavior you want anyway, without having to put in a lot of randomness into the system to start with. Make a network of N neurons each linked to k others, but use the same Boolean function at each node. Wolfram would do a search over all the possible Boolean functions and no doubt he’d find the four canonical computation behaviors: dying out, periodicity, seething, and complexity ⎯ the behavior depending on which rule you picked. Could we simplify further? How important is it to have random connectivity? What’s wrong with simply using k-neighbor CAs? And then we really are just talking about CAs, as having the same Boolean update method for each node means stating a CA rule. [To go more towards network, how about giving each cell A its nearest neighbors NA plus one remote neighbor rA. And say we pick the remote neighbors so they aren’t near each other. That is, if A and B are close then rA and rB aren’t close. Maybe there could be a nice canonical way to do this. If I wanted to program this, I could have a CA with an extra real number field dist, and it would take the usual nearest neighbor inputs plus an input from a cell whose index is dist*N where N is the size of the CA array. I could fill the dist fields at startup with a randomizer.] Mind level 3: Patterns of facts. Key mental notions that we form are the following. Each needs its own kind of explanation. • Notion of objects and actions, nouns and verbs. This could evolve. • Notion of self. The videogame notion explains this pretty well. Mind level 4: Lifebox map of what I know. I can statically map all the facts I know. Everything I know can be made into a web page, like a blog, an info dump. As well as the anecdotes and memoirs, I (or a program) can provide a rich set of links connecting the anecdotes. Lifebox is like fossils of a life form. Traces. What makes the traces? To make this a full-fledged lifebox, we supply a browser which fakes understanding natural language well enough to return reasonable links to database elements in response to spoken or written questions. We also incorporate an “I’m feeling lucky” feature to have the lifebox pseudorandomly volunteer information. The lifebox can’t pass a true Turing test, as it won’t understand or remember things about the interlocutor, but in a weak sense it will pass it, the weak sense being that you simply ask it questions about itself. Like having a conversation with William Gibson, who’s been interviewed so much that, no matter what I say to him, he responds with an interview question answer, rarely bearing any relationship to anything about my own life which I may have been trying to interject. More precisely, whatever I say is combed for trigger words to access Wm. Gibson lifebox info. And of course I do the same to others, when I can get away with it. Mind level 5: Artificial intelligence. Now we want to add something to make the lifebox have ideas. p. 126
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker • 3D space to fit objects into. • Time with before and after. • Grammar (5a) A neural net can memorize a lifebox, but it evolves simply towards efficiency, doesn’t really figure anything out. Like a minimal code, really. It can extrapolate a little, that’s why training handwriting-reading neural nets works, e.g. But you don’t expect a neural net to come up with new thoughts.. (5b) Logic as a tool for reaching new facts that you can’t see, or that haven’t happened yet. (5c) Grammar as logic-like tool for producing coherent new utterances. Mind level 6: Creative thought. Here again I think we must turn to complex computational processes, focusing on intrinsic randomness, like in (2). The phrase “train of thought,” is suggestive. In this zone we must be outside rules, I think. A highlighted set of ideas to indicate the lambent spotlight of consciousness. An abstract thought a hyperlink connection of more than three elements. Any two memories can always be connected without much effort, to bring in a third makes it a thought. *** Activator Inhibitor Rule or Some Other Class 4 Computation Browser Links Blog Grammar(Many, Objects), Logic(Spacetime, prognostication), 3D Perception (One, World). *** And none of this even touches Nick Herbert’s mind as quantum system line of thought. Is the collapse like a BZ scroll being squeezed into a tubule? The empty mind, merged, distinctionless, is this like the mind of a dog? Pure attention, pure self, pure now. The quantum mind is a state of generalized activation and no specific bright spots. Zen mind. Empty mind. *** And does twinking fit in? *** Tired in bed, the thoughts aren’t so fun, they are in dull loops. Class 2. Classic example, remembering a fight: I said, she said, I said, she said, playing it over and over. Class 1 would be even worse? Monomania. Though looked at in another way, yogins admire one-pointedness of mind. Thinking of the mind the next morning, walking around. The miracle of all this being done by a carpet of cells that have grown themselves into a mat. How can it be? I see the footbridge, I have a model of it, walk onto it, look down at the ripples in the stream, the standing waves of foam, thinking these are like the mind, a woman walks past, her face twitches anxiously to see a silver-haired man in black jacket and sweatpants on the bridge, I think of Joseph Campbell, of myth, the troll under the bridge. All this coming out of the meat weave in my head. The associations somehow kept alive in the background, ready to p. 127
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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