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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
professor and an author. As well as thirteen science-fiction novels, I published three popular
books about mathematics: The Fourth Dimension, Infinity and the Mind, and Mind Tools.
By the mid-1980s, I sensed something new in the air. I grabbed an opportunity to
move to Silicon Valley, retooled, and become a computer scientist at San Jose State
University. At the time, my writer friend Gregory Gibson said something prescient.
“Imagine if William Blake had worked in a textile factory. What might he have written
then?”
As a CS professor and a sometime software engineer for Autodesk Inc., I’ve spent
nearly twenty years in our dark Satanic mills. I’m covered in a thick lint of bytes and
computer code. And now I’m stepping into the light to share what I learned from the
machines.
***
You might say that The Lifebox is a book about the philosophy of computer science.
“Lifebox” is a word I invented to describe a certain (not yet existing) computer-based
invention. As a science-fiction writer I sometimes try out new ideas in the context of my
stories and novels. But I don’t think the actual lifebox will be very long in coming.
My idea for the lifebox is that it’ll be a small interactive device to which you can tell
your life story. It’ll prompt you with questions and organize the information you give it.
You can feed in as many digital images as you like as well.
Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it’ll become something like a
simulation of you. Your audience will be able to interact with the stories in the lifebox,
interrupting and asking questions.
Why would you want to make a lifebox? Immortality, ubiquity, omnipotence. You
might leave a lifebox behind so your grandchildren and great-grandchildren can know what
you were like, or you might use your lifebox as a way to introduce yourself to large numbers
of people right now, or you might let your lifebox take over some of the less interesting
duties in your daily routine, such as answering routine phone calls and email.
My plan for The Lifebox is that in the process of talking about the lifebox device, I’ll
manage to fit in discussions of most of my favorite topics in computer science.
Designing the lifebox is complicated by the fact that a person’s recollections aren’t
linear; they’re a tangled tree of branches that split and merge. The mind, in other words, is a
kind of fractal. Another way to put it is that the lifebox will be structured something like a
web page, with links hooking your memories together.
Suppose that we look a bit further ahead, and try to imagine ways to “animate” a
lifebox so that it begins putting together fresh ideas in your style. This will bring into play
notions of chaos theory, artificial intelligence, evolutionary algorithms, and some of the
notions randomness discussed in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science.
We might naturally wonder if a lifebox could ever become entirely equivalent to a
human mind. One barrier is the common feeling that the mind as one immediately
experiences it is quite unlike the working of a computer. But there is some reason to believe
that the new concept of “quantum computation” could serve to provide a model of a physical
system more like the mind as we know it “from the inside.”
My goal in writing The Lifebox is to offer new concepts with which to understand the
natural world, the human mind, and ultimate reality. And it wouldn’t be too much to say that
I’d like for The Lifebox to show non-technical people how to use ideas about computers as a
tool for enlightenment.
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