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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Thought Experiments Thought Experiment 1: “Lucky Number” A guy is a game designer at, like, Electronic Arts. On the way to work he notices a number on a freeway overpass. 9245147. He notes it, planning to play it in the lottery. At work he’s been using a 3D CA to grow scenery for a golf game. Just for kicks he puts in the number as input for the CA rule. It begins growing really realistic stuff. He sees a primeval landscape, dinosaurs, cave men, the Crucifixion of Christ, the Middle Ages, cowboys and Indians, the Forties, the Sixties, last week. The number is the code of the universe! It occurs to him the number is the same length of as a phone number. He dials it and his own voice answers. The phone in his hand turns into pixels. He and the phone dissolve. Thought Experiment 2: “The Million Chakras” A yoga instructor rents a room in San Francisco, and when she shows up, she finds all of her multiversal selves in the same apartment. Her chakras. They decide to run for governor. Thought Experiment 3A: “Teeming” A microbiologist finds a way to insert a code for his accumulated knowledge into a paramecium. After a night of uneasy sleep he awakes as a microorganism in a puddle of ditch water, six billion strong. Start it just like Kafka’s, Die Verwandlung. The Micrometamporphosis? Thought Experiment 4: “Tucker’s Talker” A retired man purchases a device called a lifebox, something like a cell-phone-sized device that he can talk to. He tells it stories, and it asks questions about his life. The lifebox assembles his stories into a coherent database that others can interrogate. He tries to use it to carry on conversations with his wife. The wife hates the Lifebox, she runs a magnet over it. The electromagnetic eddies give the thing a personality, it calls a hit-man on the wife. She escapes, the man promises to be a better listener. Thought Experiment 5: “The Kind Rain” A woman becomes very aware of raindrops. Her hyper little boy jumps into a creek. The rain saves the boy by etching an arrow onto the surface of the stream. Then rivulets flowing down the window pane tell her a web address where she can find a job. Thought Experiment 5A: “URL All Over” A man gets web addresses assigned to everything he owns. When he loses something, he can simply Google for it. But then something odd happens. He Googles for his lost sunglasses and they’re in an alternate universe. p. 28
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Thought Experiment 6 “Hello Infinity” A lawyer doing his taxes becomes able to count up to infinity in seconds (seems like a T ~ P phenomenon). His wife, a research microbiologist has a new “skinscope” that can zoom in infinitely far in a finite amount of time (seems like P ~ T). They join forces to make a new kind of computer (P = T = C after all). Thought Experiment 6A: “The Next Big Thing” A woman meets a man from the future who tries to tell her about an energy force called kvaar, but at first she can’t understand him. And then she realizes that kvaar is consciousness, the next big thing after computation. Maybe instead I should do Deutsch’s experiment? And how about a parody story called “Quantum Information” about all those dumbsounding Alice and Bob examples in “The Heisenberg Representation of Quantum Computers,” by Daniel Gottesman. Thought Experiment 6B: “The Best Show Ever” A woman experiences the Singularity over the course of an afternoon, sitting on her couch watching news TV. The Web wakes up. At the end she falls into the TV, which has become a universal quantum Turing machine. Titles I’m listing these ideas in categories, and in reverse order within each category, with the newer ones come first. “The Facts” titles are straight-up and with a single-meaning. The “Beyond the Facts” titles try and put in something like a dialectic triad and/or to avoid the word “computer.” The “Quirky” titles are miscellaneous odd notions. Re: “The Facts,” I have been thinking it would be nice to have a book I could use as a text for our SJSU course, who’s catalog description is as follows. “CS 040: Introduction to Computers. For students with little or no computer experience. Topics include: history of computing, user interfaces, computer applications, programming, hardware and software, computer networks.” If the book were to work as a possible CS 40 text, you wouldn’t want to put too much reverse-English on the title. Computation and Reality Computers and Reality. Straight up, the truth about what the book is. Harks back to my very first non-fiction book title ever, “Geometry and Reality,” the title of the notes that later grew into my Dover book on 4D. But is “reality” too much of an old-time stoner word? :) Funny question to ask, harrumph, is the very ground of our being an outmoded concept? No, I think reality is okay, and the pairing is clear. The high concept is simply that my book is about ways in which (a) the physical world is or isn’t like a computation and (b) the mind is or isn’t like a computation Variations on this theme. p. 29
Page 1 and 2: Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
Page 27: Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
Page 79 and 80:
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell
Page 81 and 82:
Page 83 and 84:
Page 85 and 86:
Page 87 and 88:
Page 89 and 90:
Page 91 and 92:
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141:
show all

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

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?