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 imagine that our mindscapes are really just different views of one Platonic super-mindscape. It’s like we’re in different rooms in a big town looking at the city outside. Though it’s hard for us to see the stuff hidden in each others’ rooms, when we look out our windows we pretty much the same collection of streets, buildings, clouds, mountains, pedestrians and so on. And if you can’t see a particular mindscape sight from where you are, I can tell you a way to get there. But looking at the mindscape really isn’t very much like looking out a window after all. Things change, and split, and melt together. Each thought sets off fireworks of associations that in turn lead to further thoughts. You start out thinking about a soda, and the next thing you know you’re thinking about tap-dancing. Earlier in this section I talked about a kind of fractal curve (the Koch curve) where a new bump buds out of the middle of every line. We can see this kind of thing happening in thought as follows. Suppose I say that A (soda) reminds me of B (tap-dancing). Then I have a node A, a node B, and a line between them. But now you ask me about why A reminds me of B, I form a bump C, which holds a concept having to do with the connecting branch. C might be, for instance, the Rockettes. Soda reminds me of tap-dancing because of the Rockettes. What could be more obvious? Obvious to me, but not to you! So now I make the bump bumpier. I’ve got an image of myself as a twelve-year-old boy at Radio City Music Hall drinking a Pepsi (sponsor product placement!) watching the Rockettes. Fine. But there’s another bump upon this. I’ve never been inside Radio City Music Hall. It was my boyhood friend Niles who went there, and he told me about it so vividly that I felt like I’d seen it myself. So now I better tell you about Niles and me back in 1950s Louisville... A and B lead to C, D, E, and on beyond Z. As it turns out there are many different kinds of fractals, so we might well ask which kind of fractal might best serve as a model for the Mind. The Koch curve in particular is not so well-fitting a model for the web as is a tree or a cloud. You get a tree by repeatedly shooting new branches off the old branches, and this is a little like the way web-links (and mental associations) form. Viewed as a geometrical structure, this kind of tree is hard to draw, for if you try and draw a densely branching tree on a piece of paper, you quickly run out of room. Some of the lines end up crossing over the other lines. (To fit the extra lines in we can either ask for more room or we can bump our drawing up into higher dimensions.) But it’s easy to imagine such a tree. And the Web lends itself to representing a highly branching mind-tree because we can stick in as many links as we want. But before committing to the idea of a tree, let’s think a bit about clouds. When I say that a cloud is a fractal, I have in mind a model in which we think of a cloud as a certain shaded volume of space. This shaded cloud region has a very complicated shape, with lots of holes and tendrils. One way to imagine mathematically constructing a cloud is to start with a cube of space and to then subdivide it into, say, twenty-seven subcubes (cutting it in three along each dimension, like a Rubik’s cube.). Remove each subcube that doesn’t have any of the cloud in it. Then take each of the remaining subcubes and divide it into twenty-seven subsubcubes. Again remove the pieces that don’t touch the cloud. Repeat the process of dividing and winnowing out for a number of levels. If done in a regular fashion this can lead to a regular fractal such as the “Menger Sponge.” p. 36
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker [Show The Menger Sponge. (Image is in Rudy Rucker, Mind Tools (Houghton-Mifflin 1987)] Of course you don’t have to build clouds up in such a regular way. You can use a more random process for removing subcubes, and then you end up with something more natural in appearance. Maybe a mind is as much like a cloud as it is like a tree. You have some vague notion (like a cloud seen from a distance), and then when you examine it more closely it breaks into a number of denser regions. And these chunks in turn break into smaller chunks. Like the mindscape, the Web has a fractal quality to it. One starts out headed for topic A, but when you get to the page for A, you notice a link to topic B, and you go look at B before reading A, but on page B, you find a tempting link C that you just have to read first, and so on. In some sense you never can get started drawing a true fractal like the Koch curve, because you always have to put in another bump before the bump you want to get to. This is similar to the experience you have when you try to fully explain any aspect of your mindscape. And this is an experience you can also have when you surf the Web. The attractive thing about the Web as a model of the mind is that its a kind of “paper” where you never have to “run off the edge” or “run out of dimensions.” You can always add scrollbars or links to give yourself more room. Certainly at this point in history, the Web doesn’t match the branching-tree structure of a real human mind, but a Web-like structure could be tuned to be a tree like this. Or, again, if we want to think of the mind as being like a cloud, we can also think of a web page as being like a cloud. It’s a collection of concepts, and many of these can be hyperlinked to further web pages. In other words, we can either think of a web page as branching like a tree or as having denser regions like a cloud. Whenever I present these ideas to people I get a lot of objections. Here are a few of them, with my attempts an answers. Objection 1. Just because the Web and the Mind are like fractals doesn’t mean they’re like each other. A Koch curve, a tree and a cloud are fractals, but they aren’t the same. Answer 1. The Web is endlessly tunable. I’m not saying that the Web right now is like the mind. I’m saying that it should be possible to use the Web to make a good representation of a mind. Objection 2. What’s so special about the Web? Couldn’t you use a very fat book with a lot of footnotes to present a similar kind of branching hypertext? Answer 2. Indeed you can make a printed model of a big hyperlinked Web site. You might, for instance, print out the text content and the images, and use footnotes for the hyperlinks. But it would be hard to maintain and cumbersome to read. This question suggests an interesting analogy. A good Web model of, say, Johnny X, would be something like The Encyclopedia of Johnny X, with lots of cross-references from article to article. How p. 37
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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