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 Explorations Exploration 1: What am I? Goal of this book is really self knowledge, rather than pushing for CS. What is the essential you? What you know? How you feel? What you remember? Which parts of these might be modeled as computations? What seems to be left over? Which aspects of our life and thought correspond to the four characteristic computer modes? In what ways have these computer-inspired notions infiltrated our discourse? Compare to thought. Mental activities include: Playing tapes of memories, amping up the emotions. Planning and fantasizing. Creating a story or a proof. Tasks: sensory/motor, like driving or walking. Blank state = quantum mind. Observing, identifying with someone/something. Listening to music, reading a book, watching a movie. Exploration 2: Merging into the computation. Imagine thinking of objects and your thoughts as all being the same kind of thing: computations. How does it feel to let down the boundaries of the self? Exploration 3: Debugging your mind. Think of your own mind as a set of computations and see how the various classes of computation apply. For instance, certain kinds of inefficient or inconclusive Class 2 computations correspond to some of the mental knots that we can tie ourselves in. Becoming aware of this can be a source of liberation. And Class 4 computations are the free-flowing play of the creative mind. Art : Brain :: Program : Computer. How information likes to organize itself. A human mind is a particular kind of recurrent pattern. Natural forms: attractors, CA patterns. Exploration 4: Tracking your moods. Simply observe your moods over a few days, possibly noting them on a piece of paper. How easily are you shunted off into new trajectories? If something disturbs you are you likely to settle right back down? Exploration 5: The many yous. Your body and mind can act in a parallel fashion, with various subsystems within each of them. There’s a tendency to want to control your mind in a serial fashion, to mentally dart around, monitoring everything with the single instruction-pointer-like “I.” We’ll describe some exercises for enjoying one’s intrinsic parallelism. All the different parallel processes in your mind and body. The agents. The cells. p. 26
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker How is it that consciousness even feels serial at all. The Chakras. Listening, seeing, feeling, all at the same time. Consciousness expansion. Letting go of the serial “I.” Exploration 6: Winning the meme wars. Consider the nature of the custom population of memes that you maintain within your own head. How can you mutate and evolve it? The mind generates its own new ideas by a process of mental randomization and winnowing out. Exploration 7: Being superhuman. How different would it feel to be twice as smart? If you can imagine it, you can begin to experience it. Would it feel much different to be transhuman? Couldn’t we already do it? In a way a child’s awareness already seems more intense. Uploading your mind. Hypertext. The future of the “lifebox”. Exploration 8: Living the web. It’s a useful exercise to view the daily world as a kind of Web on its own, complete with links, applets, pop-ups, instant messages, scrolls and zooms. A person with a cell phone is a walking hyperlink. Exploration 9: Between your thoughts. If you pay attention, you can get a kind of awareness of the mental spaces between your thoughts. These would seem to be spots where you might be experiencing multiversal consciousness. Learn to notice the difference between being undecided and answering a question about your opinion. computation is ultimately a metaphor, a notion to be used in climbing towards enlightenment. The true purpose of my book is to help the reader learn to relish the richness of reality; to appreciate the world just as it is. Prepare a state + let the wave equation evolve + make a measurement. Recovering an ecstatic state of consciousness E is hard, as E is probably not the eigenvector of any familiar observable. Yoga is about getting into a certain standard state via the breath. We impose serial consciousness by repeatedly quizzing ourselves and collapsing the sate. Computation as a metaphor. Gaia and divine Nature. Relishing the richness of reality; polishing the gnarl. Daily awareness. Exercises for re-imagining the world. My own experiences with computer consciousness. Liberation and self-acceptance. All is One. All is Many. How can you get in touch with the essential part of your mind that lies beyond computers? Is there any prospect of quantum computation modeling this core part of the mind? How can transcending computers lead you to enlightenment? p. 27
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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