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 Perhaps you’re inclined to balk. Perhaps you’re inclined to say, “What could less reality-enhancing, mind-manifesting, or philosophical than computers?” Geek Joke Explained I was in fact tempted to call this tome Early Geek Philosophy. As many will know, in early 20th century American slang, “geek” had the specific meaning of a carnival sideshow performer who would bite the head off a live chicken or eat raw liver. In practice, a carnival geek was a person whose primary skill was a high tolerance for grossness, ridicule, and pain. By the late 20th century, with carnivals a rarity, a “geek” was simply a person who seemed very different from other people, usually a person lacking in social graces. Because so many of these types of people became involved with computers, “computer geek” became a natural name for programmers in general. Given that computers have been around for considerably less than a century, in the grand historical view of things the computer mavens of our time are still early geeks, so call me Rucrates! Working with computers isn’t quite like biting the head off a live chicken, but it’s close. The thing is, computers are somewhat repellent. Computer cases are a dull, ugly shade of beige. Computers are the tools of telemarketers, dot-commers, oppressive governments, and digital snoops. Many of us have office jobs where using a computer is part of the daily grind. The damned things never work like you expect them to for more than a few weeks at a time. You have to constantly upgrade their software and hardware. They flicker and they make an ugly noise. A lot of us lost money on computer stocks in the Dot Com Bubble. And so on. Who but a chicken-head-biting geek could stand to spend much time with such machines? What could less life-affirming, mind-manifesting, or philosophical than computers? Ah, but if you look, the secrets of life float just beneath the pulsing screen. Self-Indulgent Waffling About My Opinions I’m expecting that after I finish writing The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul I’ll know exactly what to think. I am, if you will, initiating an extensive two-year mental “computation” whose final results I can’t predict. Of course, as you read this, you have the option of glancing at the preface or flipping ahead to the last chapter’s conclusion ⎯ but these are shortcuts that, on October 8, 2003, I don’t have access too. False Start on Chapter One, May Have Usable Intro Stuff As a teenager, I imagined that I’d like to become a philosopher. My best friend and I agreed that what we’d most like to do would be to get college degrees in philosophy and spend the rest of our lives as bums talking about the meaning of life. I’ve always had those two drives: the attraction to logical clarity, and the craving for ecstatic enlightenment. Faced with a purely intellectual experience, I’ll wonder if the ideas can change the nature of my immediate experiences. And when I’m in the midst of daily life, I dream of ways to abstract the phenomena into scientific theories. Science-fiction is of course a particularly congenial field for someone interested in mixing science and reality in a not-too-rigorous way — and I’ve published a dozen or more science fiction novels. But I do still have that love of exactitude. I have a Ph.D. in p. 46
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker mathematics and I’ve published three somewhat philosophical books about mathematics: Infinity and the Mind, The Fourth Dimension, and Mind Tools. Each of those earlier non-fiction books was devoted to a specific theme, and so is The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. The earlier books treated infinity, higher dimensions, and information. And the book you hold is about computation. Levels of Software (The Tao of Duh) To be quite general, we might let the system software includes all the other software hidden in the machine. At the lowest level there’s something called microcode that lives on the computer chip and tells it how to interpret machine-language instructions. A step up is the BIOS (Basic Input/Output Services) software, which also lives on a chip. The BIOS helps the computer wake up and begin reading the software that lives on the hard drive. At a third level of system software we find an operating system such as Windows, Linux, or the Mac OS. Taken together, the various layers of system software are, if you will, like the unconscious, memorized knowledge of the machine. And the application software is like the specific instructions for the specific task at hand. Ordinary users (it’s interesting that society employs the same word for computer owners and drug addicts!) rarely change their system software. The only way to get new microcode is to physically install a new processor chip. Changing the BIOS involves a perilous process called “flashing the EPROM,” and is normally attempted only by true geeks (we, of course, love doing it). And even changing the operating system, e.g. by succumbing to a Windows “upgrade,” has a substantial probability of turning your computer into a doorstop. *** Returning to the notion of hardware, in our personal computers we distinguish between the microprocessor chip and the memory. In any generalized kind of rule-obeying system, if we can single out some element that embodies the action of the rules, we’ll call this element the processor. And, by the same token, if there’s some element of the system that retains traces of the system’s states, we’ll call this the memory. Bohr’s Walking Stick, Illustrating Stored Program Concept In this connection I’d like to mention an analogy I once read in an essay by the physicist Niels Bohr. The essay was about the relationship between observers, their experimental apparatus, and the reality they investigate. But the pattern is the same. p. 47
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