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 messages get noticed. Power laws. [The sand pile model and self-organized criticality?] The most significant thing about the web is that it makes every page roughly of equal importance. Or does it? I discuss how page ranks work, and how this relates to theoretical notions of computational networks. Power laws. How come some artists get so much more? Clinton got 10 million. It’s also useful to see the web pages as agents that are competing with each other in an evolving environment. They are a type of artificial life. Fads, tipping points. Criticality. I’d like to write a little about graphics here. Also virtual reality. “...after so many years immersed in the science of graphics, he [John Carmack] had achieved an almost Zen-like understanding of his craft. In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. ‘These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works. I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.’” ⎯ David Kushner, Masters of Doom, (Random House, 2003) p. 295. Kushner is describing the programmer John Carmack, who developed most of the code for the firstperson-shooter computer games Doom and Quake. The Web provides us with an unprecedented level of knowledge amplification; in effect we have access to a global mind. The blogging phenomenon of online diaries is of key significance. In effect, people are already implementing “lifeboxes” as highly elaborate home web pages. What kind of software would it take to animate a website so as to enable it to pass the “Turing test” and converse like a human? I propose that something like a turbulent cellular automaton could well be enough. As we pursue higher and higher web bandwidth, we’ll soon develop what I call an “uvvy” or universal viewer, a multimedia communication device that’s like a cell phone on steroids. With lifebox web pages in place, uvvy users will quickly reach a communication level akin to radiotelepathy. 5.4: The Group Mind. Group memory. Elections. Stock market. History of technology as a history of computation. A different notion of parallelism involves separate agents moving around and interacting. Society is a prime example of this kind of Class 4 computation. This is why social movements, such as the stock market, are day-to-day unpredictable while being globally limited to some specific strange attractor. The most dramatic social upheavals occur when a fundamental change alters the system’s parameters, leading to a bifurcation and an entirely new computational strange attractor. The emergence of fads. Politics and voting rule simulations. Bureaucracy. Kafkaesque. Workman’s Insurance Company of Prague ~ CAL-PERS. The anthill wakes up. As we add more agents and intelligence to the web, we approach the old science-fictional scenario of having the internet “wake up.” Could this be a good thing? How might we bring it about? Or has it already happened? The multiversal web. In a different vein, the parallel worlds of the quantum multiverse are in many senses p. 22
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker the same as web pages. Can I use the web as a model for the universe itself? 5.5: Computation as Historical Force First review the insights of Marshall McLuhan and others about how new technologies have changed the way people thing. Secondly is to see if we might view each of these technologies as being in some sense about computation in the extended sense. Chapter 6: Universal Automatism Chapter 6 Contents 6.1: Thoughts, Computations and Physical Processes 6.2: The Computational Zoo 6.3: Intrinsic Randomness 6.4: The Principle of Computational Equivalence 6.5: Making Sense of Automatism 6.6 Climb the Ladder and Throw it Away Eight Digital Philosophies In his recent book A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram generalizes about the kinds of things computers might possibly do and comes to the conclusion that everything in the world can usefully be regarded as a kind of computation. To many this will come as a somewhat strange suggestion, right out of the blue. I work here with a distinction between three sets of things: thoughts, computations, and physical processes. What makes the notion of computation so potent is that a computation is both a thought and a physical process, as indicated in the diagram below. Physical Processes Computations Thoughts The big questions we ask about computations and reality involve asking whether the three sets are really distinct. Certain scientists espouse what I call “automatism”. This is the belief that everything is a computation. We explain why such a claim is to be taken more seriously than, say, an athlete’s platitude that life is a game — or a carpenter’s opinion that the moon is made of wood. A little logical analysis reveals there are seven viable alternatives to automatism; I briefly describe and characterize each of them. p. 23
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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