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 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
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker that word from Sterling who had “his” character sling it at “my” character in “Junk DNA” when we were quarrelling). What does fatuous mean, really? I’m thinking self-satisfied, superficial, stating the obvious with solemnity. As I’ve stewed over at length before, Lifebox is also skirting the dreaded zones of beating-dead-horses and looking-for-gold-coins-on-awell-policed-parade-ground. But nobody can do it quite the way I’m doing it. Come to me, O scared Muse. *** It also occurred to me that teaching students and writing Lifebox might plausibly be viewed as God’s Will, in the sense that these activities make a positive contribution to society. *** Weak and feverish. I have no thoughts of working on Lifebox any time soon. That’s over. That’s what ruined my health. *** I’m not touching Lifebox for a month. Instead maybe I’ll go ahead and start my novel, Memoirs of a Crazy Mathematician. *** Last night I gave a talk to 120 kids aged 25-35 in San Francisco at the RX gallery. It was for a monthly event called “Dorkbot: People doing weird things with electricity.” I did a little PowerPoint about the Lifebox title triad and about Wolfram’s four classes of computation. Also read three short-short stories from Lifebox and showed some cellular automata demos. *** In a way, this has all been a kind of blessing. First of all it’s given me a lot more sympathy for the mentally afflicted. And, secondly, I’m currently stuck in the middle of Chapter Four of Lifebox, which is about the brain. And this has been a great chance to research some aspects of the brain ⎯ the mood swings, getting stuck on bad attractor. When I was at my most depressed, like Wednesday night, I got the Fall, 2004, Esalen catalog with a description I’d written of a class that Ralph Abraham and I are going to teach. And I had chirpily written, “It’s calming to view moods in terms of chaos and strange attractors,” which seemed so remote from the hopeless agony I was in. Hopefully my recent experience can make it more real. Speaking of Lifebox, John Oakes called yesterday to tell me he’s sold Four Walls Eight Windows, and my book will come out under the Thundermouth imprint of Avalon/Nation. He says he loves the first three chapters I sent him, which is nice. My back and arm hurt so much typing this that it’s still hard to imagine getting back into Lifebox. And I still, sigh, have the taxes to do. I hope my life can get back to normal ⎯ what a joke. Life never does, ever, get back to normal. It’s always mutating onward. The attractors continue to bifurcate, as Ralph would say. *** My coughing finally stopped yesterday, and I’m feeling pretty good. Back into Lifebox. June 2, 2004. Finished Chapter Four. What to say about Society? So now I’m done with my chapter on the mind. p. 131
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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