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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
computations that surround us are richly complex. A tree's growth, the changes in the
weather, the flow of daily news, a person's ever-changing moods --- all of these computations
share the crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic, gnarly
computations are --- and this is a key point --- inherently unpredictable. The world's mystery
is preserved.
Mixing together anecdotes, graphics, and fables, Rucker teases out the implications of his
new worldview, which he calls "universal automatism." His analysis reveals startling aspects
of the everyday world, touching upon such topics as chaos, the internet, fame, free will, and
the pursuit of happiness. More than a popular science book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and
the Soul is a philosophical entertainment that teaches us how to enjoy our daily lives to the
fullest possible extent.
March 31, 2005. Copy-editing.
I'm proofreading the copy-edits of my Lifebox tome. I get a different copy-editor
every time. I often feel that copy-editors are tendentious, ignorant, fussy, overbearing,
inflexible. But maybe that’s just me bridling at someone touching my sacred text. Here I’m
seeing these switches: that->which, each other->one another, while->whereas, spacetime-
>space-time, cellular automata->CA. The replacements seem to be done somewhat
mechancially. Considering matters of style or nuance, I may not want a given change every
time. So I’m rolling some of them back. It feels like mud-wrestling after awhile, and I
worry that I’m overlooking more important things: typos, errors, and repeated words. Well,
I’ll get all that on the next pass.
I did some good work today, did some fixes to the ending, put in a more NKSthumping
conclusion like Wolfram was urging me to. At this point I'm in “whatever” mode,
though, and getting sloppy. Eventually I'll beef up the website with links, addenda, etc.
It's gonna be so good to be done with this. It's been two years now since I went to
that NKS meeting in Boston, although really I started on the book in Sept, 2002, in Brussels,
some two and a half years ago.
After months of discussion, I got a nice blurb from Wolfram! He really likes the
book, which means a lot to me. He keeps saying it's better than I or my publishers realize.
Here it is:
“Rudy Rucker is an outstanding prophet of what will probably be the greatest
intellectual revolution of our times. This book tells the ever-surprising story of his
transformation as he discovers the wonders of the computational universe, and grapples with
their implications for humanity's oldest questions. For people who thrive on new ideas, this
book will be a classic.”
May 31 - June 3, 2005. Page Proofs
I just got the page proofs of my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, in the
mail. Some of the graphics pictures are small and blurred, the tables are quirkily formatted,
the equations are oddly aligned, many of the footnote and exponent numbers are in large
rather than small fonts, it’s disturbing. This comes on the heels of the somewhat maddening
copy-editing job.
So now I gotta read through it. The I Ching throw: Work On What Has Been Spoiled.
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