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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
trains collide and light up fresh associations. Even if you’re lying in bed with your eyes
closed, the flow continues, the endless torrent. Now and then you get stuck in a loop, but
some unexpected glider eventually crashes in to break things up. You’re surfing the brain
waves; and you yourself are the surf.
Backing up, what about those meetings I go to, huh? By the time I turned fifty, I’d
developed some self-destructive habits that I wanted to stop; that’s why I go to meetings.
I’m a new man. Is this, aha!, an example of will power?
My support group espouses a deliberately paradoxical attitude towards will power.
The way for me to change was to recognize that, on my own, I was unable to change. So
how did I change? Well, I jumped out of the loop and asked God to help me.
Does that mean that I think the Creator of the Universe, the Ground of All Being, the
Omnipresent-Omnipotent-Omniscient One has reached down to poke into my brain and
change the parameters of Rudy Rucker’s mental computation? Maybe. An All-Powerful
God would, after all, have enough time and energy to get around to even the smallest tasks.
And why shouldn’t there be a God ⎯ whatever that means? At the very least, one
can take “God” as a convenient and colorful synonym for “the cosmos”.
Having survived six early years in the Lynchburg, Virginia, of Jerry Falwell’s socalled
Moral Majority, I do take religion with a grain of salt. A less supernatural view of my
reform would be to say that my asking God to help me has an organic effect upon my brain’s
computation. Expressing a desire to have a spiritual life activates, let us say, certain brain
centers which release endorphins that in turn affect the threshold levels of one’s neurons.
Do I really think it works like that? Well, to be truthful, I’ve always felt comfortable
about reaching out for contact with the divine. The world is big and strange, and we have
only the barest inkling about what lies beneath the surface.
Maybe the cosmos is dancing with us all the time. Maybe God is in the blank spaces
between our thoughts, like in those white regions of the picture of the China CA.
Anything’s possible.
Enlightenment Is...
world.
Enlightenment is when you let the world think you ⎯ instead of you thinking the
Computers Don’t Get Bored
One seeming difference between humans and personal computers is that that the
machines don’t get bored and give up in disgust when you ask them to do something very
tedious and repetitive. Our machines seem to excel at being stupid really fast. Computing a
fractal image, for instance, requires carrying out several hundred multiplications for each
pixel in the image. No human would ever carry out all these steps. It wouldn’t be feasible.
p. 80