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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
Figure: Detail of a Cubic Fractal Akin to the Mandelbrot Set.
But wait. Humans do carry out immense amounts of repetitive information
processing. Consider vision, for instance. As you walk around, your brain is effortlessly
crunches huge amounts of data from your retinas’ rods and cones. You pick out lines and
surfaces, you fit the surfaces together into three-dimensional shapes, you assemble the shapes
into coherent models of the world around you. You do all of this unconsciously, and it
doesn’t strike you boring at all. Far from it! One of the particular treats of tourism is looking
at unusual three-dimensional objects: cathedrals, reefs, ballparks, forests, skyscrapers,
canyons and the like
One also tends to think that personal computers have exceedingly good powers of
data retrieval. If you open the file of a book-length manuscript, the machine has no problem
in searching through the whole file and replacing, say, every occurrence of “towards” with
“toward.” For a person this is feasible, but somewhat tedious and time-consuming.
But again, we humans have incredibly powerful data retrieval skills as well. It’s just
that our brains haven’t evolved for the kinds of tasks that the machines excel at. You can see
an object like a spatula from any angle and immediately know what it is. You need only
glimpse part of a person’s face to recognize the individual. On a good day, in a spirited
conversation, the words leap from your tongue tip; you call up apropos phrases drawn from
the great body of media you’ve taken in.
Word Virus
virus.
A successful creative artist parasitizes people’s minds. Burroughs: the word is a
The Use of Logic
Logic is a tool for reaching beyond your simulations. Logic unearths new facts that
you can’t see, or that haven’t happened yet.
Sand and Books
Books and art works, after all, aren’t indistinguishable grains of sand, and people
aren’t identical cells that always react to inputs in exactly the same way.
But most books are like feathers dropped into the Grand Canyon.
p. 81