Rudy’s Blog

Chapter Four is well underway now, I have about 4,500 words on it and a pretty good outline. It’s the same routine all day, day after day. Write a page, print out what I have, mark it up, type in the revisions and maybe write another page, print it out. Now and then I have to take a break to figure out what’s next. I print out the outline and revise that. Or take a nap.

I’m going to hang out on this blog entry for a week or two, just re-revising it and hoping comments accumulate.

Right now Thuy, Ond and Chu are walking down Highbrane Valencia Street. They’re about one foot tall relative to the Highbraners, and they move six times as fast as the Highbraners. Like speedy gnomes.

It’s Christmas Eve (we have Jesus who died on the Cross, they have some unnamed figure who died on the Triangle and is symbolized by a cuttlefish, not a lamb), and people are out shopping. They’ve had telepathy forever in the Highbrane, also they can teleport themselves at will, also they have omnividence (can see anything), and they have endless eidetic memories. And the objects are telepathic too, although they don’t speak English. I’ll use “teep” for a verb to mean “using telepathy.”

Due to telepathy, people have a better control of morphogenesis, and can tweak organisms to take on desired forms. A shop where a guy grows you the kind of tropical fish or mushroom or orchid you want. Teasing a growing plant or animal into a sought-for shape is a delicate craft. I would call the people who do it shapers, but Bruce Sterling has made that word his own. So call them coaxers.

Question: what’s for sale in the stores?

What’s the street scene like?

The buildings are organically grown, or rather assembled from organically grown parts. The windows are like membranes. Parts from a Victorian tree farm. Branches that look like trim.

I’m thinking they have cars for cruising around and carrying stuff even though they have teleportation. But maybe the cars can be flimsier as it’s pretty hard to run into someone by accident, as you can teep them. The cars can in fact teep things themselves and avoid collisions. They are assembled from morphogenetically grown parts.

The buildings and cars aren’t organisms yet, not like in Frek and the Elixir. They’re assemblages of bio-like parts. The cars know what kinds of parts they need, the mechanics teep with them. Maybe the cars scavenge for spare parts sometimes, perhaps stealing from each other. Azaroth, Ond, Chu and Thuy have their secret meeting in a room over such a garage. The mechanics know they’re there, but don’t bother to squeal.

Clothes stores. Clothes are for warmth and decoration. Not really much point in modesty, as you can see under the clothes. But people are kind of used to that. Maybe sell hush-undies that scold teepers who nose under them, though not talking in words — as I suppose our objects don’t speak language — just reacting with anger and scolding and shame. Of course, for some, hush-undies could make the hidden contents seem forbidden and therefore extra-alluring! Blush-hush.

Food markets, restaurants. If we have telepathy we can really watch the chef. Maybe there’s someone with such a great sensitive palate that it’s pleasure to mind-meld with them as they chow down. Or the food talks to you, showing you its past. You’re eating with the chef’s whole sense of the process, the preparation, and as you eat it, the chef’s eye guides you, he’s put teep-tags onto the food.

Would people still get drunk and high? Sure. Imagine the havoc you could wreak getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just email or phone or conversation. So there are bars that are “screened” so you’d be unlikely to teep out of there and get yourself in trouble.

Screened by overriding musical stylings provided by a black guy with shaved head, sitting with muscular arms crossed, wearing a leopard pelt, he looks like Mandrake the Magician’s assistant Lothar.

Sex work? Well, with telepathy, everything’s free. But you could have a mind that really welcomed you in, and that might be different. Someone who is actually glad to see you. I’ve read that high-end prostitutes talk about johns wanting a GFE (girl friend experience). They won’t be hitting on little gnome Thu, but she’ll witness them trying to pick a guy up. Alternately, imagine a stuffed plush animal — not even a sex-toy — just an object that loves you and is glad to see you.

Art. A painting that decides what you want to see and shows you that. But I’m not supposing objects are all that smart. An object that simply projects the raw experience of transcendence or sense-of-wonder. Groundless euphoria, mindless pleasure, a vision of actual infinity. Or sensual beauty. Perhaps a rock that’s lain in a stream bed and you look at it and sense the lovely currents of the water.

Books? Maybe no books? I could suppose the telepaths won’t actually use language that much. But that would make them too alien, I think. So they have language for superficial small talk, but they more often use teeped images and emotions. They barely use the written language. Books are normally not written in words, they’re rather like hieroglyphs. A beautiful mind loop saved into the endless memory network, glyph by glyph. Writing is more like being a bas-relief sculptor. An array of teep tags. Perhaps there’s a book store like Metotem Metabooks run by a woman who’s just a bit like Darlene from the Lowbrane. And they let Thuy record her memories. Darlene gives Thuy a spice cookie, and she sees the Spice Islands.

Ads. Things projecting vibes of paranoia to get your attention. Or anger or lust or ecstasy: the whole palette of extreme emotions.

Up on the Highbrane, they think of Chu as being very valuable because he wiped out he nants; he’s like a “nanteater”. Here’s a page describing three kinds of anteater found in the Iwokrama forest in Guyana, South America. And here's a video.google.com video of an anteater.

Azaroth, Thuy, Chu and Ond are disguising their mind vibes so Gladax can’t teep them. They’re in a back room over that auto shop on Valencia St. in SF (see previous blog entry just below).

Azaroth sat next to me in traffic school last week. Turns out his parents are from the Punjab; he has a topknot wrapped in a stocking. He's about thirty-five feet tall, typical for a Highbraner.

I was on Valencia St. in San Francisco yesterday, thinking about my next scene with Thuy Nguyen for Postsingular. She’s over in the alternate brane — I’m calling it the “Highbrane” now instead of the “Mirrorbrane.” And she’s hiding out from the universal telepathy by emanating the vibes of, I think, a dog. But where? I’m thinking upstairs at the auto shop next to the storefront church I photographed before.

Later she’ll deliberately drop her mindblock so as to be captured by Gladax — as a way to get inside Gladax’s house to steal her magic harp. This amazing mural is on I think 16th St. between Mission and Valencia. An image of the mindscape.

Thuy will go out with her dog-vibe turned off, walk by this nice Mission pool and tennis court.

And then Gladax corners her in this dead end. Gladax is jamming Thuy’s teleport abilities by strumming her magic harp and disturbing the eighth dimension.

I saw some posters for Scanner Darkly. That’s a movie I’m eager to see.

Does this sign seem spelled wrong? Isn’t it a bad idea to have the letters “shat” inside any business name?

They’re still selling zoot suits on Mission St. Red? Of course! Comes in large sizes too.

Meanwhile back in Los Gatos, the ne plus ultra of public entertainment is, sob, an Elvis imitator.

Could we live in San Francisco? Maybe it would be a bit more work, like you're out on a sidewalk as soon as you go outside. More room down here in Gatos. Whatever. Time to get back into the Highbrane.

Yesterday I spent the day in Boulder Creek, visiting my friend Nick Herbert. I have a picture of him plus a discussion of one of his ideas about consciousness in the “Quantum Soul” section of my Lifebox tome.

For that matter, Nick also helped me dream up some of the material in Saucer Wisdom, not to mention the notion of “tekelili” telepathy at the center of the The Hollow Earth. He’s always had this idea that we might be able use physics to bring about something like actual telepathy in the real world. And once you can read the mind of a plant, you’ll have to recognize that all along the plant was conscious. Why not?

Nick is living something of a hermit’s life these days, though since he still gives talks sometimes he says he’s been called a “performance hermit.”

Once a week, Nick goes to work out at the garage/gym of his friend Reno, also in Boulder Creek.

I went along and had fun. I’m a yoga guy not an iron-pumper, but I did some stretches with the light hand-weights.

Nick’s friend Allen Lundell and his wife Sun joined us for lunch at the Blue Sun Café in Boulder Creek.

Sun seemed like a classic hippie; in the 80s she lived in a famous commune in the Haight. Last year she was the Bad Witch at the Emerald City camp at Burning Man, and she was telling a story about how the Elves from the Elf camp brought them a jar of Elf Magic beads and treated them to some Elven Jello. She joked that everyone in Boulder Creek has learned to levitate, and that the ground of Boulder Creek has levitated as well, which is why people don’t notice.

A couple of other guys joined us for lunch too, including Brooks Blanchard, an electric flutist who sometimes runs the multimedia feeds for performances by the Maui rave band “Lost at Last”. He talked about going to the annual gatherings of the Rainbow Family, a loose affiliation of hippies who meet on National Forest Lands every year — I think this year’s meeting will be near “The Ned,” that is, Nederland, Colorado.

Allen Lundell gave me an incredibly cool toy made by a local Boulder Creek man, who has a website of similar cool inventions. If you read my novel Saucer Wisdom, you might recall that Frank Shook was selling “Lotus Lights” — these were modeled on the “Liberty Lights” available at this site. I didn’t see this cool little fan on the site; what makes it awesome is that there’s four little diode-type lightbulbs on the blade, and the flick on and off in some wonderfully complex and nonrepeating algorithm, which means that the spinning lights makes ever new mandalic designs.

At lunch with these pleasant people, I felt a very long way from yuppie Los Gatos and bustling Silicon Valley.

Nick and I took a long walk through the woods, Nick talking about his eternal quest to make a big discovery relating consciousness and quantum mechanics.

He always brings me back to panpsychism, the notion that all sorts of things might be conscious: ferns, rivers, air currents. That’s the San Lorenzo River, by the way.

I’m working to make this science-fictionally true in Postsingular. The universal computation is already present in nature, even in cracking paint, but most processes don’t have RAM and my friend John Walker has argued, I think convincingly, that in order for natural phenomena to “wake up” they really need memory.

I bid a fond au revoir to Nick, leaving him with the bathtub he keeps on his porch: he calls it his “Neo-Archimedean Research Vessel.”

I had a feeling in yesterday’s blog entry that I was missing something so on I emailed the young computation-wizard Scott Aaronson. Scott has a number of interesting avatars on the Web, such as his blog, and his “Complexity Zoo” now in wiki format. Scott was actually helpful enough to reach through the second-to-last draft of my Mathematicians in Love to find logical holes in it, by the way. His articles can be a bit abstruse, but I’m planing to study “Quantum Computing for High-School Students” next time I feel really smart!

Anyway, yesterday I asked Scott about his thoughts on the Turing Oracle, as I half-remembered a conversation I’d had with him about it in San Jose last year.

Scott answered:

It looks like you've covered the “stoner” implications of a halting oracle about as well as I could have. (“Sure, you could instantly find any mathematical proof, create an AI model of a human being that best matches his or her observed behavior, and indeed, simulate the entire physics of the known universe, but what could you REALLY do?” )

Unless you had a more specific question, I'll confine myself to one remark, which is that you could already get plenty of zany implications with an oracle for NP-complete problems (forget about the halting problem!). See my paper “NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality” for more about this point.

I answered:

“Stoner” implications! Harrumph. Possibly the fact that my previous blog entry was about Wm. Burroughs fosters this impression…

What I REALLY want is a way to finish my new novel without having to write it.

You you give me hope in your remark that with a Turing Oracle, I could create an AI model of myself that best matches my observed behavior. Aha!

Mulling this over today, I get the following line of thought. The weakest kind of Turing Oracle form it tells me in some finite but unbounded-in-advance amount of time whether or not a given computation C will halt. In a stronger form, there is some fixed finite amount of time such that the oracle always returns its answer within that amount of time.

Now let’s postulate a still stronger magic tool, a Turing Evaluator or TE. There is a fixed finite amount of time such that within that amount of time TE me (a) whether a given computation C will halt and, (b) what was the final output of C, in the case that C does halts.

A Turing Evaluator tells me more than whether the computation C halts, it gives me a short-cut for finding out what C does.

Another way to express what a Turing Evaluator does: Whenever I want to search through the integers for a special integer Special_N having some property, then TE will quickly tell me the value of the smallest such Special_N, and if there is no such integer it’ll tell me that as well.

There’s a well-known method for coding up pairs or triples or n-tuples of integers as single integers, so I can in fact be searching for several integers at once.

Suppose I’m given finite string of integer variables u, v, … z and a property Good(u, v, … z). I want to find if there are any specific values Nu, Nv, … Nz which satisfy Good. I can use my Turing Evaluator to discover in some fixed amount of time whether or not this is the case, and if it is the case, my Turing Evaluator will return examples in the form of Special_Nu, Special_Nv, … , Special_Nz.

So now I see how to use my Turing Evaluator to write my seventeenth novel Ru_17 (also called Postsingular) as follows.

(i) Code up my first sixteen novels as constant numbers cRu_1, … , cRu_16.

(ii) Establish a system for listing possible neural-net-based AI programs for simulating my writing a novel, list the variable code numbers as FakeRu_1, FakeRu_2, … FakeRu_x, …

(ii) Let y be a variable integer that might code up my next novel.

Define a predicate Good such that Good(Ru_1, …, Ru_16, FakeRu_x, y) means that FakeRu_x codes an algorithm such that, FakeRu_x generates the known novels Ru_1, …, Ru_16, as its first sixteen “novels,” and FakeRu_x generates y as its seventeenth “novel.”

So I apply my Turing Evaluator and get specialFakeRu_x and Special_y, which I can then mail in to David Hartwell at Tor as Ru_17, a.k.a. Postsingular.

Sure, Rudy, sure.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally, sob, finally finished revising Chapters 1-3, and figuring out the outline for Chapters 4 and 5, so now I can continue generating Ru_17 the hard way.

Um … write today? Hell with that. It’s 100 degrees here. I’m heading for Cruz.

Suppose the eighth dimension is normally curled around into a Planck-length circle, but that some perturbation or magic spell unrolls it to infinite length. And suppose as well that it’s psychically possible to overview the whole infinite expanse of the eighth dimension in a finite amount of time. Also suppose that all the eighth-dimensional lines meet at a point.

I will use the phrase “lazy eight” to speak of this change. It combines: eighth dimension, infinity as ∞, and the fact that infinity is “right here” in the eighth dimension as an ubiquitous lazy-man’s enlightenment. So we have an infinite extra dimension at every point. Yet the infinite expanse is accessible; you can reach any location along it in some fixed time.

It’s like you took the vanishing point of a painting and made it be at every point in space. The point at infinity is present everywhere. It’s like being with God. The accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity.

New topic.

I’ve been thinking about Alan Turing’s halting problem. The halting problem is this: Find an oracle such that given any arbitrary computation C, the oracle will in a finite amount of time tell you if a computation C is going to halt or run forever. And we can refer to such an oracle as a Turing Oracle. Turing proved that no computation can act as a Turing Oracle. That is, no computation can serve as an oracle that can tell you whether or not an arbitrary computation will run forever.

Perhaps there could be a Turing Oracle, but its operation would have to involve something other than normal computation-like physics. One option I’ve been thinking of is lazy eight, which I mentioned above.

If lazy eight gives you infinite consciousness, then you could in fact solve the halting problem, as all the infinite searches could be done in finite time. We could in fact have a fixed-time Turing Oracle that always gives you that yes or no answer within some fixed time, say one second. Call this a Strong Turing Oracle.

In Accelerando, Charles Stross boldly writes, “New discoveries this decade include … experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time.”

But Stross doesn’t really delve into what the implications would be. So now I ask you, what would it be like to have a Strong Turing Oracle in hand?

Given any mathematical statement S, I could decide whether S is a provable theorem. I fix on a particular axioms system for mathematics and I define a computation ProofSearch(S) that searches through all possible proofs from these axioms, looking for a proof of S. And I’d feed the ProofSearch(S) computation to my Turing Oracle. If the Oracle tells me that ProofSearch(S) halts, I know that S is provable. If the Oracle tells me that ProofSearch(S) runs forever, I know that S isn’t provable.

Given any possible story S, I can decide if this a story I would ever write. I create an AI model of how I think and write. And I define a computation RuWriteSearch(S) that searches through all possible “creative processes” carried out by the AI model, looking for a process that terminates with writing the story S. And I’d feed the RuWriteSearch(S) computation to my Turing Oracle. If the Oracle tells me that RuWriteSearch(S) halts, I know that S is a story I might write. If the Oracle tells me that RuWriteSearch(S) runs forever, I know that S isn’t a story I would write.

Given any possible scientific theory S, I can decide if this a theory we might adopt. Again I create an AI model of human scientific thought, feed a ScienceSearch(S) computation to the Turing Oracle, and discover whether or not S is a possible future theory or is out of the question.

Lazy eight and the ability to do an infinite search in a fixed amount of time leads to a Strong Turing Oracle. Could the implication run the other way? Could the discovery of the Turing Oracle lead to lazy eight? I mean science-fictionally speaking.

New topic.

Note that having a Turing Oracle is much weaker than having a Truth Machine computer TM such that if S is any sentence in number theory TM(S) outputs a True or False to tell us whether S is true. The Turing Oracle only decides provability, not truth.

We can’t solve the truth question with a single infinite search because arbitrary sentences of number theory have alternating quantifiers that set off nested searches within searches. Perhaps if you had a transfinite time line to work with you could do this, that is, if you could fold together infinitely many infinite searches.

Suppose I let the variables x and y range over the integers. If you had infinity times infinity seconds to play in, you could check the truth of “(for all x)(there is a y)P(x,y)”. You set off a fresh infinite search for each value of x. As it nests deeper the ordinals would stack up. Is that what Gentzen was talking about when he spoke of the ordinal epsilon-zero in the context of proof theory? I never really studied that work.

What would it be like, SF-wise to have a truth machine. The War Against the Rull. Our Flooping Federated Galactic Goobs have a Turing Oracle, but the Rull have a Truth Machine! Looks like the home team is in for it! But wait…

William Burroughs’s Junkie came out from Ace Books in 1953. When I later went to publish my first novel, White Light, I sent it to Ace partly because I knew they'd published Burroughs.

Junkie book was bound in a 69-style double edition with a “balancing” book, Narcotic Agent. My book dealer friend Greg Gibson gave me this rare edition a few years back. I actually removed the book from its plastic bag to read Narcotic Agent, told Greg, “It wasn’t all that bad,” and he's like “You touched the book? You took it out of its bag.”

Be that as it may, Junkie has an appendix with a description of various drugs Burroughs had taken at that time, and the prophetic closing sentence is “Yage may be the final fix.”

In 1963, City Lights published The Yage Letters. I first read the book in 1965, when I was a sophomore in college. It struck me then as one of the funniest books I’d ever read — Burroughs’s jaded laconic descriptions of people and scenes are priceless.

Also the book has Allen Ginsberg’s incredibly heavy letter about his yage trip in Peru seven years later, June 10, 1960. For a while he’s filled with this intense fear of death, a sense that he’s dying right now, “…as if in rehearsal of Last Minute Death my head rolling back and forth on the blanket and finally settling in last position of stillness and hopeless resignation to God knows what Fate…”

Some of you will understand that this is in some sense funny. I lifted the vision for a scene where my character Sta Hi Mooney is having an acid trip on the beach in my novel Software and he thinks he’s dying. “A film came to mind, a film of someone dying on a beach. His head rolled slowly to one side. And then he was still. Real death. Slowly to one side. Last motion.”

There’s a nice new (fourth) edition of the book called The Yage Letters Redux. I bought it at City Lights last week with Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself behind the counter.

I introduced myself and said I'd been thinking of him on Bixby Bridge coming back from Big Sur last week (after having reread some of Kerouac's Big Sur). Ferlinghetti said he still has his cabin there, was going down for the weekend, and still doesn't have electricity.

I read the new edition of Yage with joy in a couple of days. And today, additional joy, I found that editor Oliver Harris( an American Lit prof at Keele Univesity in England ) has published a fascinating essay that overlaps with his great new introduction. The essay is in a literary magazine called Postmodern Culture; you can find ”Not Burroughs' Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters” online. I gather that it won’t be there indefinitely.

The essay includes some interesting images of original appearances of sections of the novel; which Burroughs published in various small magazines. Turns out The Yage Letters, wasn’t really a direct transcription of actual letters; it’s more that Bill combined letters, journal notes, and essay material to create the illusion of an epistolary novel.

This image is present as a link to an image from the essay, where it’s labeled: “Figure 1: Image from Black Mountain Review 7 [1958]. Image used by permission of William S. Burroughs Trust and Estate.”

This particular “July 10, 1953,” yage letter is important in the Burroughs canon; it’s the last of his 1953 “letters” in the later editions The Yage Letters. Actually it didn’t appear in the first edition (1963) of Yage Letters, probably because by then Burroughs had lifted this passage to use as part of Naked Lunch (1959) called “the market.” But, as Bill wrote the letter one morning while coming down off a night of yage it makes sense to have it in theThe Yage Letters.

Two great lines from the July 10, 1953, letter:

“Yage is space time travel.”

“A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum.”

That second line uses a phrase from his February 28, 1953 yage letter, describing the upper Amazon jungle near Mocoa, Colombia. “The trees are tremendous, some of them 200 feet tall. Walking under these trees I felt a special silence, a vibrating soundless hum.” What a wonderful image for how telepathy might feel.

I’ve always thought of science fiction as an extension of Beat literature.

Speaking of telepathy, Allen’s yage letter of June 10, 1960, talks about “radiotelepathy,” which was a phrase I used in my novel Saucer Wisdom.

One of the nice things in The Yage Letters Redux is that it includes a longer journal note of Allen’s about the same yage trip. Here he writes of beginning “to sense a strange Presence in the hut — or a Being I am blind to habitually — like a science fiction Radiotelepathy Beast from another Universe — but from the series of universes in which I do temporarily exist …”

Allen’s letter and journal note have really wonderful musings upon the psychedelic experience; he has great flashes like, “I was a vomiting snake … the Serpent of Allen, covered with aureole of spiky snakeheads miniatured radiant & many colored around my hands & throat …”

But heavier than the flashes are his repeated expressions of a core mystical revelation: God/the universe/everything/everyone is a One/Many mind accessible to all, and there is nothing arcane or unusual about this fact, it’s staring us in the face all the time, and there’s no secret, nothing to know, this is all there is, divinity is here and now.

“…the realization that we are set there to live and Die, and all man set here together in different bodies in a web of realization of the same fate…”

“… we, here, are it, the great Presence we are the great Presence of the Universe … God himself knows no more than we or I why he was born or where he is going…”

“…this same ancient and familiar mystery Universe…”

“The familiar creepy sexy nosey personal intimate old-known, special re-realization of the Joke sweetness of Illusion fading into the Great Black A**hole of on-Mind one-Love cat-faced snake-faced dog-faced man-faced Mandalic Universal Newspaper Busybody Gossip God. All mine, all everybody’s, all everything’s. And what else could He be but He Himself?”

This is all pure gold in terms of my current work on my novel Postsingular where I’m imagining life in a telepathic parallel world called The Mirrorbrane.

The vibrating soundless hum.