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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
numbers in every cell acting as activator and inhibitor, each of them obeying Verhulst’s
logistic equation as well. He’s a great believer in looking at the simplest possible rules, e.g.,
his favorites Rule 110 and Rule 30, one-dimensional CAs with a single bit per cell and with
their update rules summarized in eight bits.
I never know quite how to answer him. I tried saying, “They’re beautiful, like lightshows.
I like finding gnarly things,” but that doesn’t quite go over, and doesn’t really quite
express what I think. Stephen he has this notion that it’s more scientifically significant to
find the gnarl coming from very simple things, so as to prove, that the gnarl is inherent in
logic, and isn’t somehow being smuggled in as scuzz stuck to the more complicated rules like
bacteria dropping into a culture dish from a careless lab-worker’s fingers. Stephen has an
almost puritanical horror of using continuous numbers as cell states, so it was a real stretch
for him to be looking at the 32-state Hodgepodge rule.
But I think it’s nice to see that the same kinds of patterns arise in the complicated
cases as in the simple ones. And, after all, nothing in Nature is clean and simple. All the socalled
continuous computations in the world might as well be digital, with possible
randomness in the final bits. But even so the world has its stable structures. They’re robust
against scuzz. You can get scrolls in the messiest systems, and the scrolls can be just as
clean and sharp as in the simplest systems.
April 21, 2004. A Month of Disease
I was sick for the last month, a tenacious bout of fever and flu leading to depression.
Here’s some relevant excerpts from my regular journal.
***
These days I’m mad at the book project because I feel it lured me in under false
pretences. I vainly imagined I’d get a lot of money for Lifebox from a publisher. I could be
writing a fun book like Frek and getting just as much money. A science fiction novel, or a
flesh-and-blood memoir. Yeah, man, I should be writing memoirs. Yes, but I felt it was my
duty to my readers to write the Tome About Computers. And who knows if I could really
have turned around and sold a novel idea so fast. In all honesty, I got into doing Lifebox last
fall because I didn’t think I had the energy to start another novel. I felt drained by the two
years work on Frek and the unexciting advance for it, and by my general hopelessness over
my career.
Another beef against Lifebox is that it’s a physically taxing job. I’m always dragging
around big blocks of text and formatting illustrations. Instead of thinking and writing it often
feels more like cutting and pasting ⎯ or chainsawing and welding. And I always get rushed
and frenetic when I work on it. There’s much to do, many loose ends, it’s a hydra. I hunch
my shoulders when I’m working on Lifebox; I tense up and rush, trying to beat down the
endless blandly nodding pillow of material, I have to hit it and hit it and hit it and hit it some
more, like a kid sobbing and drumming his fists on a locked door. And that’s why it hurts
my back. Lifebox up to 75,000 words now, a shade more than half done. I’m making it all
up as I go along, just like my class syllabi, so that’s a little stressful too. Why can’t I do
things the easy way? Mail it in, Ru, mail it the hell in!
Who cares about computers, anyway? Not the public anymore. The CS enrollment is
down by a third and still falling! A nationwide trend.
***
But the book is worth doing, even though at times I think it’s fatuous (I learned to use
p. 130