Rudy’s Blog

I’m going to be printing some excerpts from my notes for my current novel in progress, the second in my postsingularity series, called PS2 for short with working title After Everything Awoke. Today's topic is what I call “lazy eight,” somethign I've posted about several times before. By cotinuing to jabber about it, I'm polishing my rap…

I use the portmanteau phrase “lazy eight” to speak of a change which combines: the eighth dimension, infinity as ∞, and the fact that infinity is “right here” in the eighth dimension as an ubiquitous lazy-man’s enlightenment.

(Lazy Eight 1) Unfurling.

We add an infinite extra dimension at every point. We suppose that the eighth dimension is normally curled around into a Planck-length circle, but that a superspace perturbation caused the magic harp’s Lost Chord unrolls the eighth dimension to infinite length.

There are two possible equilibria for any region of space, having to do with whether the eighth dimension is infinite or not. The eighth dimension is compactified in the neighborhood of Lobrane Earth, but is fully unwound in the vicinity of Hibrane Earth. The equilibria are like the two bottoms of a W. If nudged, a world might move from one equilibrium to the other. One equilibrium is our present mode, the other is the lazy eight mode.

The Hibrane has had lazy eight since Hieronymus Bosch’s time (say 1492 just for fun); our Lobrane achieves it at the end of PS1.

(Lazy Eight 2) Universal Infinite Memory Upgrade

The infinite expanse is accessible; you can reach any location along it in some fixed time. It’s psychically possible to overview the whole infinite expanse of the eighth dimension in a finite amount of time.

The infinite length is metricized so as to require only bounded finite access time for any location. (Ph. D. = Piled High and Deep, .) That is, a Zenonian duality makes the lazy eight point at infinity be both ∞ far away and quite close. It’s like squeezing an infinite number of meters into one vatometer via a Zenonian shrinking. You can view it dually, that is, the other end is both infinitely far away and within a Planck length away, accessible in one tick of Planck time due to the Zenonian access.

You can store info as bumps anywhere you like along the infinite expanse of eighth dimensional space. So the infinite accessible spike provides endless memory at every location, and thereby gives people endless eidetic memories and produces panpsychism.

By panpsychism, I meant that lazy eight adds an infinite amount of state to any physical system, even to an electron. Physics is no longer micro-reversible, for even if an electron is repeating it’s actions, it can “remember” that it did all this N times before. And thus everything awoke.

(Lazy Eight 3) Universal Entanglement

All the eighth-dimensional lines meet at a point at infinity, and due to the Zenonian metric this point is accessible. It’s like you took the vanishing point of a painting and made it be adjacent to every point in space. The point at infinity is ubiquitous. This accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity. A router, a switchboard, a nexus. This leads to omnividence and thence to teleportation, as well as to telepathy.

I taped my readings at Booksmith in the Haight in San Francisco and at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. Rather than podcasting the whole readings, I’m just putting up the question-and-answer sessions at the tail ends of the two readings. In some ways the Q&A, being a one-time event, is the most interesting part of a reading.

Click on the icon above to access my podcast of these two Q&A sessions via Feedburner. I’m still getting my taping skills back together, and there’s some noise from the lavolier mike bumping my sweater. The sound quality is slightly better in the Black Oak reading #3 than in the Booksmith reading #2.

Before the talk, I hung out with fellow SF writer Terry Bisson; we walked out on this really long pier off the Berkeley Marina — into the setting sun. Terry said this was a symbol of our current status in life.

I got to hang out with my son Rudy and his wife Penny a little bit, too. More upbeat than Terry! And Queen Mu of the Mondo 2000 days turned up at the reading.

[Mustard spoons.]

Lately I’ve been reading Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, by Jos Koldeweij, Paul Vandenbroeck, Bernard Vermet, (Abrams, 2001). I plan to put him into my PS2 novel. The quotes I post today are all from this Bosch monograph.

Bosch as panpsychist: “Bosch painted all kinds of objects from the life with great precision, as can be seen in the musical instruments [including a harp] that appear in the Hell scene from the Garden of Earthly Delights. He also produced detailed ‘portraits’ of jugs, plates, knives and other utensils. It is in this degree of realism that the difference lies between copies of Bosch and his own work. The imitators cannot match his quality, reducing real objects to tokens.”

“Bosch’s work is … simultaneously cryptic and inaccessible, yet totally open, with the lowest of thresholds. This is painting for both the most serious art-lovers and for those who virtually never visit a museum…”

Bosch was born around 1450, on the market square in a house of his father Anthonius van Aken, son of Jan, who was son of Thomas — all three previous generations were artists. His brothers Goossen and Jan were artists as well. By 1481 he was married to Aleid van de Meervenne, daughter of a wealthy merchant’s family. He joined the upper crust Confraternity of Our Lady in 1488, and hosted a swan dinner of the Confraternity of Our Lady in July, 1488, in July 1498, and again on March 10, 1510, when he served fish. His funeral ceremony took place in on August 9, 1516. He might have died from a deadly cough that swept the town around then.

[Terry Bisson in the waning light.]

“The donor’s portraits in original Bosch paintings like the Last Judgment in Vienna have been overpainted, probably by the artist himself … Relations with his customers were evidently strained at times…”

Reminder: I'm reading in Berkeley tonight at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, 7:30 PM Thu, Jan 18.

This is a spirit board; I saw a bunch of them from Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art on the second floor of the DeYoung museum in SF the other day. I got a book about it, the catalog of a show called “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance,” which is at the Met in NYC untl next fall, and includes a lot of stuff from the Hood Museum of Dartmouth.

[Irrelevantly, this is a door from Borneo. Love those BZ scrolls! This is clearly a teleporation portal.]

Used to be that everyone in PNG had a dugout canoe, and when the canoe wore out, they’d salvage some flat wood and carve a spirit representation on it, usually with a face and a navel. The idea was that the spirit could get into the board via the navel. The images are NOT of ancestor spirits, they’re spirits of place like, hmmm, genii loci, or beezies who’ve moved out of the orphidnet into natural computations, inhabiting gnarly spots of the physical world.

Georgia sent me an email about the year’s best fonts, and I went to MyFonts site

to look at some of the grungy or hand-made looking fonts.

You see hand-made-looking fonts on store signs, and it’ll look cute and human, but then of course you notice that, say, two 'e' s are exactly the same.

A few of the fonts, like BOYCOTT come with two versions of each letter so you can avoid the really obvious side-by-side repeats.

As a computer scientist, I’m thinking what is really needed for grunge and handwriting fonts is fonts that produces letters that vary slightly each time an instance is invoked. That is, a letter would have three or four slider parameters with lower and upper bounds so that within this letter-space each version would look reasonably good. And when you called for that letter, a random number would be picked as seed, and attached to that letter-instance in the background, and letter would use that random number to pick the instance in letter space, and when you saved it, you'd be saving the seed number, so if someone viewed it again it would look the same. And if you didn't like a letter's look when you were desigining, you could keep clicking on it and with each click the seed number would change and the letter would change a little.

Next up on my Bay Area Mathematicians in Love promo tour are:

Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., San Francisco, 7 PM, Tue, Jan 16, 2007.

And Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, 7:30 PM Thu, Jan 18.

Rick Kleffel interviewed me in the KUSP studios near the Santa Cruz Harbor beach on January 11, 2007, for his online zine The Agony Column.

Click on the icon above to access Rick’s podcast of the interview via Feedburner.

As a side effect, Rick’s podcast got a nice mention in Boing Boing.

At the very end of Postsingular, I make everything in nature become alive by giving everything endless memory. And now I’m gearing up for a sequel with working title After Everything Woke Up. In my notes I call the two novels PS1 and PS2 for short. Right now I’m busy figuring out how to write a sequel in a world that’s turned so weird and panpsychic.

I guess we’d adjust. Already my car talks to me, so does my phone, my computer, and my refrigerator, so I guess we could live with talking rocks, chairs, logs, sandwiches. But they’d be really smart, not like chirping electronic appliances, which is really kind of different.

How did everything wake up? The technique has to do with strumming a magic harp to unfurls the wastefully rolled-up eighth dimension of space, creating an extra axis upon which any particle or system can store bits about its previous states. This works because (in my opinion):

Life = universal computation + memory

The more I look at things like air currents, swaying trees and, above all, flowing water, the more I become convinced that in fact the majority of analog natural processes are class four and (probably) universal.

But there is something missing in a brook or a swaying tree or a flame, something that keeps it from being alive in the sense that we use the word. And the burden of this ongoing SFictional thought experiment of mine is to present the missing piece as being memory. If this is too confusing, just think of everything being a quantum computation, and all you need for that is atoms and perhaps light.

As I say, I’m still figuring out how wind, trees, weather, fire will act once they “wake up.” Given the ubiquity of quantum computation, in fact every object will be conscious once the eighth dimension is unrolled. Forest fires will be better at spreading, but perhaps trees will be better at not catching fire. Small objects really will hide under the dresser as I already suspect they do.

And the cursed plague of digital electronic computers will wither away.

In Postsingular I had some higher-level AIs called beezies. Very useful agents in the (then) digital web. So at the time of the Great Awakening, I’m gonna have the beezie migrate into physcial processes. Like a pond, a breeze, a tree, and a campfire.

What would a tree or campfire or waterfall beezie be into? What if they just hang out, feeling that doing nothing is truly more interesting than rushing around like a fidgeting monkey. Final enlightenment is a campfire by a pond with a pine tree. “I only learn to be contented,” as it said on the fountain by the Zen garden at Ryoanji in Kyoto. Well, that’s too limp for commercial SF. Fine. And then some evil cynical developer-media-mogul-peasant types are gonna want to exploit their computational potential. “Get to work on those spreadsheets for the Great Attractor galaxy cluster!”

Philsophers have discussed a certain problem with panpsychism is this: why is there a dovetailing that fits together, say, the collective wills of, atoms, machine parts, subassemblies, automobiles, and traffic streams? Why do my cells happen to want to do what my brain wants for my body? Solution: everyone’s idea of their motives and decisions are Just So stories confabulated ex post facto to create a narrative for what is in fact a deterministic supercomputation. Like our illusion of free will. Of course everythingl fits. “We don’t have to get it together. It is together.”

I need a generic word for an uplifted awakened object. A grom. A thunk. A glowie. A sprite. A shoat. A sylph, sylp, silp. Silp might work.

I’m concerned that it might make no functional difference for there to be consciousness in earth (lava, geology), air (wind, vortices), water (falls, riffles), and fire (flames and more generally plants). For it seems like these things have no effectors.

Lazy eight provides sensors, yes, but, lacking effectors, objects seem unable to “do.” They’re stuck being deterministic. But, hmm, thanks to lazy eight, they can in fact write to memory. And to the memories of others. So if they can convince motile agents to do things, then they do functionally have effectors. They can “slave” other objects to act as robot remotes. Plants already do this with insects. They get the insects to move their pollen around.

More directly, I might think of silps as quantum computations and say that they do in fact have effectors in that they can change their own matter, perhaps by affecting rates of catalysis, quantum collapses and so on.

If there’s intelligent quantum computation inside a fire, you might see, say, a fire with square flames. Or wavier. Something subtler. Less smoke. It picks up every trick, thanks to the local air slips helping the fire silp.

[Tiles in the ruins where Swann took us spell out one of God’s few direct quotes, “I AM.”]

If the silps control their own matter somewhat via quantum computation — if, in other words, every object is to some extent its own effector — then, say, a drinking glass might be harder to break than before. The glass sheds off the vibration phonons in optimal ways so as to avoid catastrophic fracture. Assuming a glass minds being broken. A bean that slyly rolls away to avoid being cooked — sometimes in the kitchen, objects do seem to want to run away.

Does a log mind being burned? It would be a drag if you had to feel guilty about stoking your fire. But maybe silps aren’t so bent on self-preservation? We humans (and animals) have to be like that, so we can live long enough to mate and to raise our young. Otherwise we go extinct. But a log or rocks individual survival doesn’t effect the survival of the race of logs or rocks. Though I suppose if logs were impossible to burn, fewer trees would be sawed down, which would be perhaps a good thing from the viewpoint of the logs.

[Here’s my old SJSU professor colleague Howard Swann. Last week, or maybe it was two weeks ago, he and his wife Anita Dyer took about 30 of us on an amazing hike into the oak-grown gullies of the Santa Cruz Mountains near Glenwood Road.]

Re. the topic of talking to objects, here’s a quote from Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski’s “The Dance Floor on the Mountains,” translated by my Finnish-American poet friend Anselm Hollo:

I would like to be a poet whose song

gets the stones moving

to organize themselves

into a city wall

the trees walking

to carpenters

who build dwellings for people

Bruce Sterling recently sent me a link to this nanotech photo, celebrating the fact that he and I recently finished our story “Hormiga Canyon,” which is about string theory, giant ants, and Los Angeles.

Yesterday I was in Santa Cruz and neighboring Capitola for the day. I was happy because my old SJSU student turned journalist Gary Singh wrote a great article about me in the Santa Cruz Metro. “It's so California, you just wanna scream, Yeah! Which was always the best thing about Rucker's novels anyway: You'd find profound high-tech Silicon Valley right amid rock & roll, '60s radicalism, counterculture and the fourth dimension.”

I was in town to give a reading at the Capitola Book Cafe. They had my name on a marquee. I was scared to go in. I was scared nobody would show up.

We had nearly 20 people, not bad. I knew a few of them. Karen Joy Fowler even turned up unexpectedly (in red).

And Nick Herbert was there, who helped me figure out the character of Frank Shook for my novel Saucer Wisdom. Of course Nick himself bears no resemblance to actual people living or dead! I discuss Nick's concepts of matter and consciousness in my Lifebox tome. I hope to feature some of his poetry in the Spring issue of my webzine Flurb.

I’m giving a reading at the Capitola Book Caf�, at 7:30, Thursday, Jan 11. Whoops, wrong “capitol” picture.

Nick Gevers posted a long email interview with me on SciFi.com, mostly about Mathematicians in Love.

That’s it for today, I think my hard drive is dying, possibly due to alien meddling, gotta go get it repaired.