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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
among thoughts/computations/physics. This suggests some interesting possibilities about the
science of the centuries to come.
To continue our intellectual journey, we need to get a handle on the kinds of
computations that can possibly occur. This is where Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of
Science presents such a great advance. Like Alexander Humboldt in the New World,
Wolfram attempted an exhaustive taxonomy of the kinds of computation. But there are a
number of missing species in his catalog. I spend some time discussing, for instance, some
two-and-three dimensional self-organizing embryo-like reaction-diffusion computations
which Wolfram has given short shrift.
It’s inherent in the nature of computation that we are unable to predict the workings
of our own minds. A complex computation is unable, as it were, to outrun itself. This
phenomenon is evident, for instance, in one’s daily changes of mood. It’s very useful to
think in terms of chaos. I debunk the popular misconception that chaos “means” that a
butterfly’s wing can cause a hurricane. The world’s randomness is in fact intrinsically
generated by computation, and chaos is really about strange attractors. As a writer and as a
software engineer, I’ve had a lot of experience in exploiting the mind’s strange attractors —
and I lay out some basic principles for the reader to use.
Perhaps the main reason that the world is so rich is that it’s a parallel Class 4
computation. Every tiny region of the air is continually updating its wind vector. And
human society is a perfect example of large-scale agents acting in parallel. In addition,
quantum computation seems to open a further avenue of parallel computation. I discuss the
fact that, if you open you consciousness a bit, you find that your mind and body contain
parallel processes that your can productively work with.
Some of the more alarming applications of the computational world view occur in
genomics and biotechnology. But a brief study of computation theory brings a measure of
humility regarding what humanity might actually do. A simple back-of-the-envelope
calculation rules out the possibility that an agribusiness might destroy our biome with some
hideous gray goo. In fact open-source genomics may be the safest approach of all. This line
of thought opens up a discussion about the ecology of the memes interacting within the
computational matrix of one’s mind.
If everything is a computation, why can’t we get intelligent robots some time soon?
It turns out that the boosters of AI have made systematic errors regarding what kinds of
computation can feasibly be set in motion. Perhaps the most fundamental weakness is the
reliance upon search algorithms for optimization. As I explain, the spaces searched are in
fact always too large for real progress. AI can be achieved in principle, but not in practice —
at least not by us. I expose the essentially hoax-like nature of the millennialist fervor over an
impending computational “Singularity” leading to superhuman AI. I point out that, if only
we pay closer attention to our minds, we find that we are already functioning at exceedingly
high levels.
The cleanest large-scale computational system we have to think about is the Web. By
looking at this system at a more abstract remove, I pick out a number of interesting new
features. Chaos, fractals, emergence, and self-replication — all can be found in the web
pages’ battles for more hits. Looking ahead a bit, blogger sites may lead to a kind of
electronic immortality and possibly even a form of radiotelepathy. I also look into the
question of whether the web itself might ever achieve a kind of consciousness. Lifting these
notions free of the hardware, it’s useful to view the quantum-mechanical multiverse as a type
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