Even though this post could have been called PS2 Notes #11: Hylozoic, I got tired of putting that tag into my entry titles. I guess I could flag these novel notes via a Category tag at the end of each entry, but I find that too much trouble, too. The blog’s internal Search box takes care of categorization actually. Search for Hylozoic or PS2, and you’ll find the entries about the novel.
I was set off on today’s line of thought by a comment on my blog from RedSlime: “I think you need a good physics reason for limiting teleportation — suppose that, say, humans’ Higgs particle interactions are unique, with the difference caused by some quality of human mentation.”
Yes, what if the human ability to teleport is very rare among the intelligent beings of the cosmos? It would be cool if the Khan and need humanoids to drive the teleportation engines of their intergalactic spaceships. Maybe they’ve enslaved a humanoid race in another galaxy.
This puts me in mind of Robert Sheckley’s 1953 story ‘Specialist,’ from his landmark anthology, Untouched By Human Hands. In the story, humans are so-called Pushers, who can push starcraft to faster-than-light speeds. The starcraft is in fact a symbiotic organism composed of cooperating aliens: Walls, Engine, Thinker, Eye, Talker. Their Pusher has died, and they land on Earth to abduct a regular guy to help them.
He Pushed. Nothing happened.
“Try again,” Talker begged.
Pusher searched his mind. He found a deep well of doubt and fear. Staring into it, he saw his own tortured face. Thinker illuminated it for him. Pushers had lived with this doubt and fear for centuries. Pushers had fought through fear, killed through doubt. That was where the Pusher organ was!
Human—specialist—Pusher—he entered fully into the Crew, merged with them, threw mental arms around the shoulders of Thinker and Talker.
Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate.
[Passage quoted above is from Robert Sheckley, “Specialist." The image below is from Sheckley's journals.]
It occurs to me today that this is a transreal description of becoming a writer! Doubt and fear is why I write. Also, of course, the jonesin’ for “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” But in any case, it’s the doubt and fear that make me need that rush so much.
Back to teleportation, yeah, it’s gotta be what the Sheck-man says. Doubt and fear. That’s what makes me write; that’s what allows humans to teleport. And hardly any other beings have our levels of doubt and fear.
Certainly it seems as if animals don’t have doubt and fear in the same way that we do. If a predator comes, an animal runs away, end of story. If cornered, a rat bares his teeth and fights. Animals don’t worry about what might happen; they don’t brood over what they did in the past; they don’t mentally agonize—or at least one can suppose that they don’t. [Maybe elephants do, though. Maybe elephants can teleport, too.]
And it’s easy to suppose that the silps that inhabit natural processes don’t have doubt and fear either. Silps don’t much care if they die. A vortex of air forms and disperses, no problem.
And for the purposes of the story, we can suppose the aliens—the Kang and Rull—are also lacking in doubt and fear. They’re like kiwis/cockroaches and manta-rays/rats. So they can’t teleport either.
I still need to cook up some physics-like explanation for why the human qualities of doubt and fear entail the ability to teleport.
As a first stab, I’m thinking that having doubt and fear involves creating really good mental models of alternate realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternate realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. And this means that we can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can’t. We carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation.
I found a version of the kiwi-like Kang’s starship in a photo supply store, it’s a black natural-rubber dust-blower bulb called Giottos Q.ball. The tip tilts over and poof, the kiwi Kang come tumbling out.
And, dig this, the Kang have a pilot. A humanoid Pusher who allows them to teleport between the galaxies. He’s black and stocky and he wears shades. He’s modeled on the jazz hero Charlie Parker! Maybe he’ll win Thuy away from Jayjay. Maybe he plays an alien instrument that’s something like a saxophone.
I’ve been listening to Charlie Parker all day every day lately—I’m a born-again late-life convert to the Church of Bepop. I’m reading this great biography, Bird Lives, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse, New York 1973). Got this picture off a KC library site. Not much video of Bird online, most of it seems to be excerpted from an unfinished movie of him with Coleman Hawkins playing first, you gotta wait a minute for Charlie.
Also there’s a nice YouTube clip of Bird playing “Hothouse” with Dizzy Gillespie at a DownBeat awards event where Charlie only gets “Alto Sax of the Year 1951” and Diz gets “All Time Jazz Great” award, which I’m sure bugged the Bird a certain amount.
I’m not so into embedding YouTube video on the blog page as I was a couple of weeks ago, as I find the embeds really slow down the page load time.
My old kind-of friend Frank Shook was in town the other day. He materialized right out of the ether, emanating form a tree fungus. I have a lot about my adventures with him in my “novel” Saucer Wisdom.
Frank was telling me some stuff about teleportation, which fits in with my Hylozoic novel project.
Constraints on Teleportation
In order to keep the world from getting too chaotic, and also not to make things too easy for my characters, Frank suggests constraints on teleportation: No Mass Limit, and Silps Can’t Teleport.
(Mass Limits on Teleportation) On a single teleportation hop, a single person can only move a certain limited amount of mass.
(Not “Everyone” Can Teleport) The power to teleport is limited to certain people or perhaps limited to the human race. Animals, plants, and objects can’t teleport.
Mass Limits on Teleportation
Suppose that on a given hop, a person can only carry along about as much mass as would fit in a suitcase—say twenty kilograms. In PS1, the heaviest things that people teleported were the magic harp and a battlefield backpack-style atomic bomb.
But suppose that a group of people working together can teleport larger things. So if you have a two thousand kilogram pre-fab home to transport, you might need to get a dozen or more people to pitch in.
Make it thirteen, like the Last Supper. One of them flubs—the Judas. And the front porch is lost in the subdimensions. n.
[This week my dear old friend Gregory Gibson visited as well. He's a dab hand author himself, as well as being an antiquarian maritime book-dealer. He was in town for a book fair under the aegis of his firm Ten Pound Island Books. Greg helped me discover the writing style I call Transrealism; in 1969 this sage suggested, "Suppose you were to write about your real life as if it were science fiction."]
Not “Everyone” Can Teleport
Can objects teleport? What a mess that would be… I have enough trouble keeping track of my wallet, keys, and glasses without them sunnybucks teleporting themselves. Teleportation for objects seems risky. Think of fire, and of how joyfully the flames hop from branch to branch—wouldn’t fire want to teleport itself from tree to tree? This would be a disaster; the whole planet would go up in the spreading inferno.
How to justify the lack of teleportation by the silps? I’d like a fairly firm reason.
Disinclination. Through the eons, objects have been immobile or, at best, passively mobile—why would they want any kind of new-fangled travel now? Maybe they don’t have desires. Maybe that part is lacking. Maybe, if you don’t reproduce, that whole part of you is eliminated. So then they’d simply be too mellow to teleport. Imbued with Buddhist non-attachment. But I’d like an explanation that’s firmer and more science-like.
Interdiction. Maybe the planetary mind Gaia won’t let objects teleport because if they did it would mess up her ecosystems. That’s a little arbitrary.
Mental Structure. Silp minds differ in essential respects from human minds. Compared to a silp, a human’s methods for producing thoughts is weirdly complex and roundabout. They think via a direct quantum computation with lazy eight memory, we do it via our neurons. Perhaps silps are inherently literal minded and can’t cohere themselves into two alternate views?
But keep in mind that, I’d also prefer than plants and animals don’t teleport. Otherwise the rats and ants would eat everything or—if the vermin use third-party teleportation—all our food would always disappear down into the rat warrens and the ants hives. So let’s suppose there’s something unique about a human-style mind that permits teleportation. The painfully evolved ability to be ambiguous and unsure and self-doubting.
If Objects Teleport…
It could be that, later on, maybe bit by bit, the objects do learn to teleport . Maybe that’s a bad side-effect of the Kang parasitizing our silps’ computations, or of the Rull trying to slime us. The objects get restless and bored—or frightened—and wander around. “Where’s my chair?” “He got bored. Went for a jaunt to Alaska.” “He got scared. He’s at the bottom of the ocean.”
But the Kang or the Rull will, as I mentioned before, mess this up.
Social effects of Teleportation
People can live anywhere they can find a vacant lot to build on.
You could be stealing stuff all the time; not only can you see it via omnividence, you can hop there, grab it and carry it home.
If people can reach out and move objects by teleportation, then no woman’s jewelry is safe. Or your food, guns, sculptures, paintings, furniture, and so on. Criminal gangs like the Beagle Boys could work in concert to whisk away cars or even houses. Does property no longer matter then?
Suppose I wake up and my shoes are gone. A passerby has nicked them, and taken them home. The up side is that I can always locate my stolen shoos and teleport them back home. An ownership revision war.
Another possibility is that I can tell the silp inside a valued object to make itself and the object telepathically invisible by pinching off its connection to the point at infinity router in the eighth dimension. But silps might not like to do this. It’s lonely to be cut off.
I was up in San Francisco with Sylvia this weekend. Here are some pix and notes, with a few more remarks about teleportation mixed in for filler.
I gave a reading at Borderlands Books, always one of my favorite venues. A good crowd, a lot of sales. I forgot to bring along my tape recorder for podcasting purposes, but my old friend Faustin Bray of Sound Photosynthesis was there to videotape the event. When will this video be obtainable? ”Soon come,” as they say in the islands…
Always nice to be on magical Valencia Street.
“How does teleportation work?” Thuy asked Ond.
“Teleportation works by getting mixed up about where you really are,” said Ond. “In quantum computation, we use the word ‘coherent’ to mean mixed up. The usage is opposite of what you might expect. It’s like if you’re sufficiently coherent you can’t talk at all. If you’re sufficiently coherent your whole body folds up into a single wave function. As if you were this one exceedingly complex electron.”
“I’m not an electron,” said Chu. “I’m a Higgs particle.” He giggled and made pig noises. “Oink, squeal, wheenk.”
“Alright,” said Ond. “And I’m a quark. Thuy can be the electron.”
“I’m dark matter,” said Thuy, getting into the silly jabberwocky game. “So what’s that ocean we see in between the worlds?”
“The Planck frontier. Fall through it and the subbies eat you.”
The colors in the Mission are so great. Especially in the rain. Viva Mexico! I’m thinking for my two alien races in Hylozoic, the Rull and the Kang might in some ways resemble the Mexicans and the Chinese. Note that we do use that same word “alien” for immigrant…
The murals covering the Women’s Building on18th between Valencia and Guerrero are mind-boggling. I love this image of the woman artist. Note that she’s reaching down through a layer of reality to paint. She’s reaching into the subdimensional world. It’s great that this image is also reflected onto the sidewalk.
Might teleporting bodies ever collide with each other? Or get merged, like the scientist and the fly in The Fly? I don’t quite see that happening here as it’s all about a single coherent wave function’s behavior, and not about a signal through space.
Generally, quantum mechanical state-function waves behave linearly and don’t interact with each other. But I might suppose that in some situation we get a nonlinear interaction, a coupling, and we get The Fly. The character is all, “Buzz, slobber, hi guys!” Maybe do this to a bad character. Dick Too Dibbs.
We were staying at Hotel Boheme , a little place I like in North Beach, right by the Stella Caffe and Bakery, with their cozy (non-blinking) neon sign near our window. The pastries in North Beach…ah.
I had my scrap of paper with me, working on the first chapter of Hylozoic — I like to print out what I have, carry it folded in four in my butt pocket, then get it out and mark it up in cafes. Always more interesting for me than the newspapers.
Nice to be doing the writer thing in an actual beatnik cafe, the Caffe Trieste, with guys even wearing berets. I missed a trick and left my own beret at home. But I got in some good scribbling.
There’s this funny tradition about brass bands for Chinese funerals. When Hong Kong was a British colony, the Chinese saw the British marching bands and decided this was just the thing for a fancy cortege. So the Green Street Funeral Home has a marching band, and just about every Saturday and Sunday morning, they’re out there playing these great old hymns and then leading a hearse down Stockton Street.
The procession goes right past the Tang Fat Hotel, which I spotted about two years ago, and ended up working into Mathematicians in Love, as I like the name of it so much, also it’s handy to the Vallejo Street Garage where my characters have their getaway car.
As it happened, this weekend they had a Chinese New Years fair on Grant Street, which was cool. I like the line of the tents’ tops, it reminded me of Bruegel’s painting of the two dancers at the fair.
Using Occam’s Razor, I’d do best to suppose that the aliens—the Kang and the Rull—use a telepathic teleportation method for their intergalactic travel. A catch is that they need to be able to visualize the target. But aha, it’s precisely due to the awakened Earth’s telepathic emanations that the Kang can come to us! Like if you light a cigarette, the sniper can aim at your flame. They couldn’t teleport here until we became telepathic.
Perhaps an individual needs help from his or her peers in order to teleport a long distance. We might suppose that a single unaided person only has the power to teleport themselves from one side of the planet to the other, and that they need to get others to help push them for the longer jumps. However I wouldn’t want the requirement to be linear, as then I’d need so very many people to help me jump a distance of many light years. Maybe it only take about seven helpers to get you up into the light-year-jump zone, and when you’re in that zone you can jump as far as you like in our space.
I think I’d like to allow third party teleportation. So our psychic power of teleportation can be used not only as a point-to-point travel method, but also as a kind of aethereal hand by which we can reach out and move distant objects around.
How would third party teleportation work? Suppose that, sitting in my living-room, I want to teleport an apple from my fridge to the top of the table at my side. How do I proceed? I visualize the source and target locations as when doing personal teleportation, that is, I visualize the fridge drawer and the tabletop in the living room. But now, rather than doing a cohere/collapse number on my body, I need to do it on the apple. I teep into the apple and coax the apple’s state function into doing the cohere/collapse. I become the apple for a moment, I merge with it, I cohere it’s state function to produce locational uncertainty, and then I collapse the apple’s wave function into the apple-on-table eigenstate.
We saw some boys doing a lion dance; two of them per lion. It was great.
Always good to be in San Francisco, with so much to see.
I mentioned I’m having some computer problems, and Rudy, Jr., persuaded me that I need to flash my ABIT motherboard’s BIOS with an upgrade. If you’re a computer hacker, BIOS flash day is a rare and sacred event. Like the day when the ants get wings and fly out of the hive. Like the five dead days that roll around every three years in the Mayan calendar. A hush falls…
The hard part about flashing your BIOS is that you have to do a clean boot either off a CD ROM or off — scared relic of our ancestors — a floppy disk drive. And, like most modern machines, my computer doesn’t HAVE a floppy disk drive.
Making a bootable CD ROM with a DRDOS.IMG file didn’t work for me, though I told ROXIO to use to make a bootable CD.
So I went to the High Temple, that is, Fry’s, and I got a USB Floppy Disk Drive and OH NO it installed itself as the B: drive, not as the Floppy A: Drive, so when I entered ADVANCED BIOS SETTINGS to set FIRST BOOT to FLOPPY, and rebooted, the machine was looking for a (nonexistent) internal A: floppy drive and spurned my my USB floppy disk drive B:
Gnashing of teeth. Rending of garments. Panic and fury in the ant hill that is my brain. But then I noticed that in my ADVANCED BIOS SETTINGS, I could set FIRST BOOT to be USB-FDD, and oh, joy, it booted off the floppy and showed me the beloved A:> prompt and I entered the sacred formula:
RUNME.BAT
……………….and I flashed the BIOS.
Five minutes ago. SO FAR everything’s fine. I’m livin’ in a fool’s paradise! Might as well get this post up before I reboot once again and discover my machine is a doorstop.
On a later day, I’ll tease out some SF metaphors of flashing the BIOS, but now I have something to say about Omnividence and Telepathy.
This is another of my series of notes towards my novel in progress, a sequel to my Fall, 2007, novel Postsingular. I call the sequel PS2 for short, though the final title is probably Hylozoic. For earlier notes, you can run a search on my blog, or just click to this list of the notes.
Teleporting is all about making yourself uncertain about which of two possible locations you’re actually in. The trick is to eidetically and precisely visualize both your source location and your target location. Video isn’t good enough for this very rich visualization; you need something as strong as telepathy or omnividence—I used the orphidnet in PS1, and in PS2 (and in the Hibrane) I use lazy eight telepathy.
Once you have your source location and your target location clearly in mind, you can confuse yourself about which is which by linking up the two scenes, feature by feature. Thus if one scene has a cliff then the other scene needs to have something that you can at least think of as a cliff. If there’s an espresso machine in the coffee shop where I’m sitting, and I want to go home, then I have to think of my TV as being essentially the same thing as the espresso machine and, conversely, I have to think of the espresso machine as being essentially the same as my TV. Angular boxes that make noise.
In PS1, I initially have people using Jayjay’s so-called metamorpher agents to help set up the links, but soon people get the hang of weaving scenes together on their own.
Where I’m going with this is that I view teleportation as a three-step process. First you perfectly visualize two locations and mentally weave them together, second you become uncertain about which location you’re actually in, and third you abruptly observe yourself, asking, “Where am I?” Thereby you precipitate a quantum collapse of your wave function, putting you into a specific location.
[Generally I’m just going to act as if the collapse puts you in the target location. But, logically, you have a fifty-fifty chance of finding yourself either in the source spot or in the target spot. If it doesn’t “come up heads” on the first try, you might need to keep “flipping the coin” till you get where you want to go. But I didn’t mention this complication in PS1. Perhaps I can hint at it in PS2, by remarking that there’s a strobing quality to some teleportation jumps, like a lightning bolt striking repeatedly. Like the lightning strokes at the start of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Like the multiple camera flashes in a nighttime video on the bitchin' celeb-stalker site X17online showing, like, Lindsey or Britney or Paris walking from a limo to a restaurant door. The Advent of the Great Old Ones. Whoah. Is this BIOS flash day? But generally I’ll suppose you don’t notice the false starts on the jump. Suppose you just view them as part of the observation.]
I’ll summarize teleportation once again (avoiding any mention of the repeated measurement issue). First you eidetically visualize your target, second you turn off self-observation and spread out into an ambiguous superposed state — neither here nor there, neither now nor then, not inside, not out — and third you observe yourself in such a way so as to collapse down into the target location.
I’m also supposing that anything I’m tightly coupled with (i.e. whatever I’m clutching) will teleport along with me. That way I can rescue or kidnap other people by whisking them off to distant places; also I can steal things. I’ll suppose that I can carry anything up to weight of, say, a heavy suitcase. Twenty or thirty kilograms.
I’m now going to replace the word “uncertainty” by a more buzz-worthy word: “coherent.” In quantum-speak, having no particular location is called being coherent . Note that being coherent is as opposed to our normal, unexciting bourgeois state of being nailed down in one particular spot, which is decoherent .
Becoming coherent means tuning out the real-world stress-questions like “How much do you weigh?” or “Where are you?” or “What do you think of Iraq?” or “Do you love me?” Bailing out of the meaningless social games. Like a junkie on the nod—or a yogi in a state of bliss. “I have no feelings.” “I have no body.” “I’m everywhere.” “I’m coherent.”
The process of becoming coherent feels like a single psychic gesture. No need for drugs, a simple breath can do it. Inhale Many, exhale One.
I’m going light on hyperlinks today because my desktop machine is — the horror, the horror — back at ClickAway. Of course they can’t reproduce the problem. Of course they won’t listen to me. Going to ClickAway is like descending into a horrible, crippled, slow-motion world. My machine has to spend the weekend there, waiting for them to observe it’s inability to start on Monday morning. If they remember. Wheenk wheenk wheenk. I’m doing this blog entry with some difficulty on my laptop. A desperate voice from the front…
I’ve obsessively collated, edited, ordered, and responded to a bunch of your comments on PS2 Note #1 through #6. To find these notes, you can put put “PS2 Note” into the Search box at the upper right hand corner of the blog.
<<<<<=====rs on One Mind:
I notice that in panpsychism or hylozoism you have many separate consciousnesses, a different mind in each thing. How does this relate to the mystical or Eastern-philosophy notion of the universe being filled by one cosmic mind?
When a log burns, its silp consciousness might experience a great release into the freedom of being the air, merging into the consciousness of the air which previously in sensed not so clearly.
One thing that seems to be consistently reported about awakening, as in enlightenment, is the realization that “I was always awake.” It’s not the personality that wakes up, but the connection to the All.
<<<<<=====Steve H on One Mind:
Why would each pebble have its own separate memory? Why not have all rocks share a big memory, and all fire, etc.
Fires are transient; they’d see their inevitable entropic destruction as soon as they became sentient and panic, try to spread. I feel like a fire wouldn’t have much to say except “Feed me.” But maybe they have a shared racial memory, so you can light a match and talk to it; the next match remembers your question.
=========>>>>>Rudy on One Mind
In any case, I do believe in the One Cosmic Mind. Monism. But that’s a wholly separate issue from whether or not rocks can think as individuals. The name “panpsychism” for the idea of objects being alive is a little misleading, as it sounds like it might mean that there is Cosmic Mind. Monism can be true or false independently of whether or not rocks have minds.
On enlightenment, the other day Terry Bisson said to me, “I figure that your existence is a huge circle, and everything is singing, and when you’re ‘alive’ is the only time that you don’t hear the song.”
I think we could accept that a fire has a localized and rather short life. Maybe the fire accepts it too. Maybe they don’t care about dying. As I think I said before, the reason death is such a big deal to us is that we are genetically reproducing beings. We need to spread our genes while alive. An inorganic being doesn’t have that issue. There’s always more fire. The flame dances and enjoys with no fear of extinction.
This said, there’s something to the idea that the fire might pass its thoughts on to another one. Maybe fires’ souls cumulatively get smarter.
<<<<<=====alek on Living Organs:
Do parts of a human body other than the brain become sentient as well? If so, then as well as your old brain, you’d have silp personalities inside you too, like etheric parasites. Maybe humans turn into something new.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Living Organs
I do sometimes feel like my organs are alive. Richard Pryor had a routine about his heart choking him to repay him for all the cigarettes. But it would be really different to have the parts talk to you in voices in your head. But, you know, they already do. Sometimes you don’t listen and the pain gets worse.
In some ways, I think live in the hylozoic era won’t be all that different. I’m working all the time now to see objects around me as alive. It’s not that big a switch.
<<<<<=====rs on Ghosts:
Maybe when a human dies, there is a real ghost, as the memory persists in the matter that made up the body? Could a body repair itself?
=========>>>>>Rudy on Ghosts:
So you’re brain is mush, but the muscle slips and bone silps are still active. I can see some zombie scenes. This is a great idea. Zombies are cool.
<<<<<=====rs on Googling:
Note that in our world, effective search in the style of Google requires massive indexing and massively distributed hierarchical computing. Does something analogous happen in the world of PS2?
=========>>>>>Rudy on Googling:
That’s an interesting problem. It would be worth at least mentioning this though. About how the silps all have to work together to keep the index working. It’s like a tax they’re paying to Gaia, and Gaia is doing the indexing because it helps her think. Maybe some silps want to hold on her, but she won’t let them.
<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Atomic Silps:
Is there a threshold of size or complexity for an object to wake up? Are your body’s cells awake? The molecules that comprise them? The atoms of the molecules? The quarks of the atoms? There could be disciplines devoted to communing overtly and directly with your cells or atoms. Mindful meditation to the max!
=========>>>>>Rudy on Atomic Silps:
This is a traditional objection to panpsychism, the slippery slope that ends with quarks and electrons being alive. But why be stingy? Let the l’il gaahs have their tiny little lives. Fireflies of mind. Quantum mechanically, even a single electron is a gnarly computation, a vibrating state function field.
There was this stoner bible some forty years back, Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, I worshipped that book. And his big teaching was that there’s only one kind of thing in the universe. Monads kind of. “Nobody here but us chickens.” In his view, the mind of an atom was in fact just as rich and big as the mind of a human, a sun, or a rock. I can see running with this idea a little. If you push too hard, this turns into Monism. The ubiquitous and identical Many are in but multitudinous reflections of the One. I can see using this as a move at some point. But for most of the book, I want the rocks and so on to be nitty-gritty alive. And, yeah, the atoms are alive, but we don’t talk to them so much. They’re like a chorus in the background.
<<<<<=====Steve H on Time Scale:
Silps might not be on our time scale at all. Rocks might think in geologic time, atoms in Planck time.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Time Scale:
In principle a valid point. Atoms might think really fast, planets really slow. But for purposes of the story, I’m not gonna go there.
<<<<<=====Steve H on Silp Intelligence:
Giving a rock the power to think might not be enough. With no instincts or desires, what would they reach for or wonder about? I’d say you need installed software along with the lazy-8 memory or you’d have a Zen rock garden that did its own meditating. You have it right when you say they’d be little gurus meditating, already in nirvana at birth.
Maybe it takes a nudge to start them off thinking. Didn’t Treebeard say the elves wanted to wake everything up and talk to it?
Perhaps a silp mind coalesces around fragments of legacy AI code. Would the new mind find life as a pebble tedious?
I think talking silps would be rare, and silps with something to say even rarer. I suspect silps who spoke might inspire pilgrimages.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Silp Intelligence:
When the lazy eight unfurls and the silps are born, they reflexively “eat” all the nants and orphids, absorbing their data. I’m not going to have the beezies per se survive, but some of that thinky code will be in the silps. It’s good legacy code, it comes to us from when Mars was a Dyson sphere of a jillion nants, the Nant Mind figured a lot of stuff out. So that gives our silps a kind of boost that they might not otherwise have. In fact other planets with unfurled lazy eight don’t have such smart silps as we do. Earth itself is worth a pilgrimage. “See the incredible talking rock!” But those talking rocks are all over the place on our weird wonderful world.
I’m just beginning to get a glimmer of how rocks think. They actually like being made into walls. They like being stuck together with mortar, and they think it’s cool to be raised up a few feet above the ground. Getting high!
<<<<<=====alek on Artistic Hylozoism:
I saw a video kind of like yours on YouTube made by an autistic woman, who has her own language that she describes as ‘being in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment’. Living in a panpsychic world would really, really change the way we are.
=========Ira Madclaw on artistic hylozoism:
The artist Andy Goldsworthy totally lives in the hylozoic world.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Artistic Hylozoism:
rs compared my videos to the autistic video too. Thanks a lot, guys! I was just really happy in my video, don’t you understand? Seriously, I get what you’re saying. That’s a great video, too, by the way, I put a link to it up there, and I found it by seaching video.google.com.
I can really relate to where that woman is at. And her argument is that by kind of dancing with the world she’s speaking a kind of language with it — in addition to the regular language that we normals speak. Sometimes I go hiking with people and we end up talking the whole time and not adequately seeing the nature.
<<<<<=====Steve H on Kiqqie Animals:
Sentient dogs and cats might be very common and dangerous. As smart as we are and with less morals, they could become a new criminal class. Insects could be very dangerous - hordes of hyperlinked roaches might be a menace.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Kiqqie Animals:
I haven’t thought much about animals with high IQ or at least perception increase. This is a good point, I’ll have to take it into account. But maybe not till PS3, I have enough issues already I think.
<<<<<=====Steve H on Scary Silps:
I think you’ve had a key insight that some of them might be angry or cold, and not very good company.
It would be a handy trick if, say, a garden gnome took over the planet or your kneecap went on strike; just erase them. Every doorway might have a silp-remover field to prevent your pocket change from screaming “don’t spend me, daddy,” or your rings and jewelry from demanding jewelry of their own.
<<<<<=====Doctor Jabbir on Scary Silps:
Redwoods are not intrinsically unfriendly. But remember our species clear-cut this entire valley about 100 years ago and trees have very long memories. I am wary of redwoods and give them my excess nitrogen whenever i can.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Scary Silps:
I don’t think there’s any way to “stun” the mind out of a silp. Their mind is stored in the eighth dimension, and we can’t really touch that. I do see some limitations on the silps imposed by Gaia. It would just ruin things if objects could teleport, so I’m gonna decree that Gaia doesn’t let them.
I like the idea of cranky silps. That’s what animist religions are all about. Getting in good with the spirit that you annoyed by defiling a certain glade. In animism we have meta silps too, like a panther god that lives in all panthers, which was something Steve H was talking about. But I don’t want to go there. Gotta limit the options. As it is, I’m in more danger than ever in writing the Mathematician Godfather novel: “He makes you an offer you can’t understand.”
<<<<<=====Steve H on Telepathic Parasitism:
In terms of being parasitized or used as a slave on a server farm, someone could come up with a bit of brain software to prevent someone leeching off your calculating ability by distorting the data as it was processed. Or maybe your brainware could give them viruses. If leeches couldn’t trust the data they cribbed, they’d give up.
If we could block parasitic usage of our computation, then we could sell off computer time. Or band together for members-only brain sharing.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Telepathic Parasitism:
I’ve already decided that in day to day life humans simply have the ability to close off our telepathy. Like you can close your eyes or put in ear plugs. We gotta have that or we’re screwed. Maybe rocks aren’t that skilled, maybe they can’t close themselves off, because they don’t need to anyway, as rocks aren’t mind gaming each other much.
The evil Kang are in fact going to parasitize our uncommonly rich silps and use them as a server farm. And they’ll be waiting like slobbering ghouls at the door to parasitize us every time we open our telepathy blinders. So it’s either be parasitized or don’t do telepathy.
The Rull and the Magic Harp will in fact help humanity figure out a way to stave off the Kang parasitism. I’m calling the firewall (obscure math joke) an Ultrafilter. I suppose it could work by warping the input/output enough to make it useless or by spreading viruses. But I’m thinking I’ll come up with some other means of its action.
As for the group mind-sharing, that’s a separate idea, and a good one. Thinking clubs. Well, that’s what this blog is an example of right now, isn’t it?
<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Telepathic Society:
How is individuality preserved? Because of course, the gnarliest behaviors come from just that right mix of boundaries and merging. People are really anthologies as it is: our separate cognitive modules have really high-bandwidth interconnections inside our brains; a group of people is really just a single cognitive entity whose higher-level cognitive modules (whole brains) communicate via low-bandwidth channels (language and other expressive mechanisms). There’s probably an inverse relationship between level of cognitive ability and maximum speed of data transfer between peer-level modules, and that relationship has evolved over millennia for maximum gnarliness (and hence adaptability). The lazy eight telepathy seems like a way around that: a high-quality, high-speed channel between two or more really giant, sophisticated cognitive machines (brains).
But maybe society works worse with high-bandwidth communication. A lot of effort might go into techniques for maintaining and defining inter-brain boundaries, much like the discipline of cultivating Zen non-attachment in the face of the overwhelming material richness the world provides. Increasing the data flow could easily degrade the gnarliness of the computation space, like a flash flood overwhelming a whirlpool in a stream.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Telepathic Society:
This is a rich vein of thought. I’ve played a lot with dynamical systems and parallel systems like alife colonies or cellular automata. And indeed, these things can be very finely tuned for gnarl, and if you change essential parameters you spiral down into dead repetition or up into chaotic dog-barf seething. So maybe society doesn’t “work” when communication gets to be so high-bandwidth. Certainly it would change in ways hard to imagine—thus the need for the PS2 thought experiment.
<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Merging:
It might be hard to restore the flame of an individual mind after too deep a merge.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Merging:
Yeah, I’m all over this idea, I talked about it in my novel Saucer Wisdom already. I also think of the spacecases who took acid too many times. Too much merge. Can’t snap back. But with lazy eight we’ll be more robust. A complete system backup awaits in the eighth dimension.
<<<<<=====Doctor Jabbir on Quantum Mechanics:
The most intriguing property of the quantum world is the notion of complementarity—that you can ask one question (momentum?) or another (position?) but not both and that somehow the world contains both but you can’t get at it. There is also the possibility of asking questions that were simply inconceivable in a classical. Maybe if we could find some classically nonsensical ways to address the macroscopic world we’d produce entirely novel and unexpected outcomes. I suspect that consciousness is one of these answers that the world gives to a weird-ass request and that there are more ways of being out/in there too that can be discovered by learning to ask to right questions.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Quantum Mechanics:
I love this line of thought. Maybe consciousness consists of a weird-ass request. “Am I happy?” I always come back to Damasio’s idea that being consciousness means having a mental image of yourself watching your life. So your conscious mind is the thing watching the feelings of your self-image as it watches your life. That’s how rocks get conscious too, by the way. They become aware of themselves having feelings about things.
<<<<<=====rs on Quantum Computation:
From the perspective of quantum computation as described in Set Lloyd’s “Programming the Universe” it seems easy to have memory and computation all over the place, there are lots of bits to go around.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Quantum Computation:
Yes, I recently came to realize that, given quantum computation, a rock really is as rich a system as a fire or a waterfall. At the quantum scale it’s like a sun. Or like a ball and spring model with a trillion chaotic strings. I had some nice email from Seth Lloyd after I reviewed his book on my blog (use the Search window to find it…). He said something along the lines of, “even if you don’t LIKE the idea of a quantum reality, that’s what’s really TRUE.” I’m letting the quantum into my heart.
<<<<<=====rs on Silp Happiness:
Consciousness centered in inorganic objects would have different motivations, different mental axes. For instance a rock might not mind if it never moved? Perhaps it’s only humans that are so often unhappy with their situations. Maybe silps don’t even have the unhappy/happy axis.
=========>>>>>Rudy on Silp Happiness:
Maybe not, but I think it’s gonna be more fun to pretend that they do. The animist religions always have the spirits being happy or unhappy with what we’re doing.
Thanks for all the feedback, y’all. This is a big help to me.
I have a really long and intricate post today, so I’m gonna leave it at the top for the most of the week so you can absorb it and comment. But first, I need to mention that I’ll be reading at City Lights in North Beach on Wednesday, January 31st at 7 pm. As their announcment puts it: “Legendary novelist, mathematician, computer scientist, and cyberpunk innovator visits City Lights for an evening of readings, conversation, and synchronicity in action.” I’ll try and podcast it.
[“California Artist” sculpture by Robert Arneson. This was one of the first works of art I saw when I moved out here 20 years ago. Note that the artist’s head is empty; those “mirrorshades” are black holes. It’s like the artist is saying, “Yeah, we’re flaky in California. You got a problem with that?”]
I recently turned in a novel called Postsingular, or PS1 for short, and now I’m working on a sequel called PS2. Last week I was calling the new novel After Everything Woke Up, but today my working title for the new novel is Hylozoic, which means “relating to hylozoism,” where hylozoism is the doctrine that every object is alive.
I’m working on a series of notes for ideas for my new book PS2. So far we’ve had
and today’s PS2 Note #6: The Noospheres of PS1 and PS1. Later, maybe this Friday, I’ll post PS2 Note #7: Teleportation. And then for PS2 Note #8, I’ll do a post which summarizes some of the comments you readers have made on PS2 Notes 1-7. This post will be similar in form to the Postsingular Comments post I did last February 14, 2006, when I was getting reader input for some of the ideas for PS1. So go ahead and post some comments on this long note today. The comments can relate to any of the earlier PS2 Notes as well.
In today’s entry’s title, I’m using the word “noosphere” to refer to a planet’s collective forms of mind. Just as the biosphere includes all living things, or the atmosphere includes all the air, the noosphere includes all the minds on the planet.
A Pyramid of Mind.
In both PS1 and PS2 I have three levels of intelligence in the natural world. The pattern is something like a pyramid with a broad base, a tapering hierarchy, and a single point at top.
(Base) A low level of ubiquitous entities which store data and carry out processing;
(Hierarchy) An extensive medium level containing a successive layers of AIs which first emerge as distributed processes based upon the low level but which then pile higher and higher upon each other.
(Top) A top level containing a single entity that stores its data in the base level and which incorporates all the mid-level agents that are in the AI hierarchy. An alternate model is that there are two or three of the highest level entities, and they compete for the allegiances of the mid-level agents and for the base data space.
The PS1 Pyramid of Nanotech Mind
In my recently completed SF novel PS1: Postsingular, I implemented the mind pyramid as follows
(PS1 Base) The lowest level base consists of uniform hardware units that are molecular computers or nanomachines called orphids, each of which has about a gigabyte of memory and a gigaflop of processor power and is roughly as smart as a dog.
(PS1 Hierarchy) Emergent lifelike AIs resembling the Belusouv-Zhabotinsky scrolls found in cellular automata. They’re called beezies. They act as helpful agents for people, carrying out things like complex and tedious searches for information or simulating and evaluating multiple alternate action scenarios. Some groups of smaller beezies coalesce into single higher-level beezies, and so on in an upward cascade.
(PS1 Top) The so-called Big Pig, a god-like mind that people enjoy tuning in on. Communing with the Big Pig is something like a mystical experience or a drug trip. People who become addicted to this are called pigheads.
The PS2 Pyramid of Natural Mind
Now I’ll outline how I plan to realize the mind pyramid in PS2. Some of my ideas about universal analog computation are “explained” in the 2005 video below. I love putting in these YouTube links! By the way, you want to click the big transparent arrow you see the video. If you click elsewhere in the preview image you go to a YouTube page. And to stop the video you click the pause button. I know the sound quality is terrible; it’s the Big sur wind blowing across my pocket-sized SONY digital camera.
(PS2 Base) Every bit of matter is endowed with endless “lazy eight” memory, and the computational seething of the quantum states provides the processing power. Using a word made up by the philosopher Leibniz, I call the lowest low level natural minds monads. Most simply, I can regard a monad as the mind of an elementary particle. (Eventually, but not yet, I’ll need to consider the effect, if any, of lazy eight in Subdee, the subdimensional world below the Planck level.)
(PS2 Hierarchy) The monads support higher-level intelligent emergent minds that I will call silps. An extended large object has a fairly hefty silp mind. Groups of objects have silps minds as well, as do larger regions: cities, counties, continents. As with the beezies, we have an upward-mounting hierarchy of silps.
(PS2 Top) The top level mind is Gaia, the world-soul of planet Earth.
[Graffiti on former ticket kiosk of a closed movie theater on Mission Street. Is that a Mayan god, or what?]
The Transition From PS1 to PS2
(Eliminate the orphids.) At the end of PS1, lazy eight is unrolled, and the emerging silps immediately destroy some bad nanomachines called nants. The silps also destroy the orphids, even though the orphids were relatively benign. I eliminate the orphids because, applying Occam’s Razor, I don’t want to have two distinct low level ubiquitous computation networks in PS2. If I have monads, I don’t need orphids. A second reason to kill off the orphids is that I want to cleanse the world of digital machines.
(The Big Pig survives.) The Big Pig of PS1 manages to port herself or embed herself or somehow come into being within the Gaian mind of PS2. I require this due to the following considerations. The Big Pig is very smart and powerful, and if she had wanted to, she would have been able to prevent the lazy eight from coming about. She could, for instance, have killed Jayjay or the magic harp alien before Jayjay and the harp teamed up to unfurl lazy eight. But, to the contrary, the Big Pig repeatedly said she would be okay with the change, and that it might be a good idea, so evidently she believes she will in some form survive the transition. Given that she is smart enough to work out very deep consequences, we can assume that she’s correct in her belief that she will survive Therefore it must be that the Big Pig does indeed survive in some form or another.
(Preserve the data from the orphids.) In order for the Big Pig to survive, at the very least we have to assume that the data that was in the orphids survives. I believe that, given the data and enough computational ability, the Big Pig can regenerate herself. Like a Unix system recompiling itself. Like a simulated mind called PIG from a Windows machine coming into being on a Mac that’s been fed a PIG data disk. We’ll suppose that the silps read and store the data that was in the orphid nanomachines.
(Wipe out the beezies.) In PS1, the Pig sits at the top of the pyramid of the beezie hierarchy, but we can have her sitting upon a silp hierarchy just as well. Occam’s Razor tells me to wipe out the beezies so as not to have two hierarchies of mid-level minds.
Having absorbed the beezie data and beezie code that was stored in the orphid memories, the silps can in fact emulate beezies. But they are richer and quirkier than the emulations. I don’t want the silps to be exactly like the beezies. I don’t want to flinch away from the juicy problem of figuring out how it will feel to do telepathy with brute natural objects and with spirits of place. I want to teep into objects and locales that are just being themselves. I don’t want to devalue nature by having it taken over by the beezies, which are more like computer-science agents. I don’t want my awakened objects to be co-opted immediately. Perhaps later some evil aliens try to co-opt objects, but we don’t want it to happen by default right away.
This said, the beezies were quite human friendly, much more so than we can expect the silps to be. So if we lose the beezies then we lose some mental power. Unless the silps are more helpful than I expect them to be, humans lose much of the intelligence amplification (IA) that they had enjoyed by using beezies as virtual agents. In any case, humans do still have considerable IA in that they have omnividence, telepathy, and “mental Google.” All that’s now missing is the ability to effortlessly conscript beezie mind agents.
Comparing the Noospheres of the Lobrane and the Hibrane
In my postsingularity series, I have two parallel worlds, our Lobrane and the another world called the Hibrane. The Hibrane’s lazy eight unfurled five hundred years earlier than ours. They never had a need to develop our type of high-tech digital science; in particular, they never had nanomachines. And their local silps were careful to exterminate any nanomachines that we might have brought in when we began traveling there during our relatively brief nanotech era preceding our own lazy eight.
As kind of legacy from our nanotech era, our Gaian mind is somewhat Internet- like. She inherited the base-level data of the Big Pig, and reconstructed the Big Pig as a kind of interface. Having absorbed the data and the beezie program routines stored in the former orphids, our silps are fairly personable and adept at communication
The Hibrane’s native computations are relatively unsophisticated, as is the Hibrane’s planetary mind. The Hibraners can’t “Google” their objects. Some of our silps will emigrate to the Hibrane by riding upon humans who travel to there and by then hopping over to Hibrane matter. But the few silps that we transfer will not be able to carry across the planet-sized data base and code legacy that our orphids and nants created during our nanotech era.
Given that the contemporary Hibraners’ silps are unsophisticated, it has to be that our silps can’t easily upgrade them. For, due to a bend in the direction of our Lobrane timeline, some of our silps will in fact emigrate to the Hibrane’s past. If they could upgrade those past Hibrane silps, we’d have a time-paradox, given that the Hibrane silps we saw in PS1 were relatively primitive.
About Silps
To the human eye, a rock appears not to be doing much. But viewed as a quantum computation, the rock is as lively and seething as, say, a small sun. Up till now I’ve been placing a high premium on visible and human-scale forms of gnarl: wobbling leaves, flowing water and flickering flames. But now I realize that, if I look at the atomic level, there’s all kinds of stuff going on in a rock. For instance, in a crude molecular model, a rock is like a zillion atom-balls connected by van-der-Waals-force springs, and we know this kind of compound oscillatory system behaves chaotically. My point is that even a dull-looking object constraints enough gnarly natural computation to support a sophisticated silp.
We’ll also have the higher-level silps that are genii loci of spirits of place. Maybe I need a better word for these. Local silps?
When I decided to have all objects come alive in this novel, I was thinking of, like, Disney or Crumb-style teapots and clocks and spoons and hamburgers and salt shakers, each object an eager little pal. But we can also have surly silps. The silps might sometimes be like the peyote-trip vision I had in 1964, of tree branches like evil claws. (Disney shows this kind of animistic vision too, come to think of it, in scary lost-in-the-forest scenes.) Certainly those spirits of place I saw in the creek bed when I was lost in Big Basin weren’t friendly beezies. They were, at best, indifferent.
Self-Teleporting Objects?
I definitely don’t want objects to be teleporting, at least not for now. But mightn’t an object want to hop around to improve its situation? Naw, an object computes the same wherever it is. I want objects to be disinclined to move around. They’re, like, fully enlightened, each object like a tiny guru on a tiny mat, with no thought of doing anything other than going with the flow. The higher-level silps can move around, but in the style of programs in the web; the high level silps could move simply as information patterns, and wouldn’t need to move the hardware around.
I’m worried about smart fire, though. If flames teleport, maybe the planet goes up in a firestorm. Or maybe the smart trees know to bend away from the flames. Fire and trees chasing each other around…
If I start out with the objects being mellow and inactive, then this is something that the Kang’s enslavement might interrupt, making objects restless, to very bad effect. So by making the restriction now, I gain a plot point later on.
The flow could be that (a) the silps start out just as themselves, natural, some of them slightly hostile or at least selfish, some of them friendly, then (b) the Kang can’t get to the high-level silps or to the Big Pig/Gaia, but they are able to exploit our monads and low-level silps and in this makes silps a bit more awake and discontent, and then (c) after we block the Kang, there is some residual revolutionary fervor in objects and maybe they are teleporting and making trouble. Maybe the objects march en masse against the Kang. Try finding my glasses then!
What About Animals and Plants?
It’s natural to think in terms of a great chain of being:
Monads, Silps, Plants and animals, People, Society, Gaia.
How does a human’s or an animal’s old-school mind relate to the silp mind of their enhanced body? I’d want to see these as merging; wouldn’t like to have the mind-body problem turn into an ongoing debate, with two voices in your head.
I feel like plants should have somewhat richer silp minds than mere stones, but maybe that’s a prejudice. Might a stone be as heavy a thinker as man?
Will society actually have a group mind now?
[I took two photos of a painting by Robert Bechtle at SF MOMA the other day. It’s bizarre what the perspective does to your perceptions; from one side the car looks too long, from the other it looks too short.]
Googling the Silps.
Thanks to the legacy ware from the orphids and beezies—the data and beezie-code—the silps have the concept of URL addresses and networking, which is convenient if you lose something. Finally you can “Google” for missing objects. Certainly I was thinking of this the other day, looking for my lost glasses in the forest floor duff. In PS2, I’d be able to telepathically find my glasses. For I know the vibe of my glasses, I can feel them out. This doesn’t have much to do with the fact the glasses have a memory.
Direct Contact with Silps.
What kind of mental contact do I have with silps?
Talking to objects is at the core of what’s important to me. I had a stab at it in my story, “Panpsychism Proved.”: “the mind she’d linked to was inhuman: dense, taciturn, crystalline, serene, beautiful—”
On Tuesday, Jan 23, 2007, I went for a big hike in the woods at Big Basin State Park, which is an hour-and-a-quarter’s drive from my house. I’d planned to walk up the so-called King Trail to the Mt. McAbee overlook, but I missed a turn or something and stemmed off into a smaller trail that dead-ended on an old logging road with trees across it blocking the way. I picked my way around the trees and kept going. At first I thought I was still on the right trail and that it was just poorly maintained. And then I realized I wasn’t on a trail at all, but I figured that as long as I headed uphill, I’d reach the top of Mt. McAbee all the same.
I was enjoying being in the wilderness, thinking about all the silp minds in the trees and leaves and air, and especially the genii loci or spirits of place that inhabit certain spots.
I’d been thinking of spirits of place from reading up on Papua New Guinea spirit boards, in which the natives hope to house some local spirits of place. Kind of like bird houses. As chance would have it, the other day I saw a documentary TV show about a tribe in a jungle, and it was raining too much, and an elder man said the rain was because the spirit of the sacred bend in the river was angry because people were disturbing him, and then we see the kids playing there and they say, “We like playing in the sacred bend of the river!” It was refreshing to see how children are just as ready to ignore elders’ injunctions when the tribe shares an animistic religion as when they’re kids in a Christian society. Somehow when we read about other society’s religions, we imagine every single one of “them” takes their religion very seriously and robotically—but in any society there are jokey, agnostic, practical-minded people who view religion as just another input in the mix.
Anyway, I’m walking along, and suddenly the spirits start harshing on me. I encounter a stand of tough-to-get-through manzanita, with branches like stern claws. I fight my way through, expecting to find a saddle ridge leading up to my targeted peak, but damn, there’s this really deep gorge here with a kind of scary slope to it.
Studying my map—finally really seeing it—I come to understand that the correct trail is way over on my left, passing along the high ground at the head of the canyon. I’m on a wrong (lower) peak, and the gorge is between me and my goal. The good news is that the gorge contains a blue line, which must be stream leading down to the Skyline to the Sea trail which itself wends along the bottom of Big Basin itself. I decide to blow off Mount McAbee and clamber down the slope into the gorge, follow the stream to the Skyline to the Sea trail and take that back up the basin to the park headquarters where I parked my car.
Heading downwards, more and more mental danger signals go off. The thick humus of leaves and sticks slips beneath my feet. Most of the branches I might grab onto are dead and brittle. Up ahead are some giant boulders with fairly sheer drops on their downhill sides. I focus, planning my route, which is something I’ve always enjoyed about tramping the woods and mountains—looking ahead and picking out the safest and easiest route. I’d be doing that a lot on this outing—to the point of getting sick of doing it.
The best route seems to lead over a boulder, and as I work my way down a spirit—that is a branch—plucks off my beloved, expensive, perfected-via-many-readjustment-trips-to-the-optician bifocals and sends them skittering down the slope, who knows how far. I can’t see! I do dig out my prescription shades form my knapsack, but it’s shady and dim in the gorge, so it’s hard to see through them. I search a half hour for my lost glasses with no success.
And now I’m at the woodsy bottom of the canyon. In retrospect—and I did a lot of retrospection in the next three hours—it would have been easier to go up the canyon and find the so-called King trail that I’d lost. But, seriously underestimating the distance to the Skyline to the Sea trail, I headed downstream.
On a good day, with my glasses and with the sun shining and with a walking stick (which I’d neglected to bring) and without time pressure (I’d gotten a rather late start, so I had nightfall to worry about), I would have found this little scramble to be exhilarating. As it was, the passage was a strenuous ordeal. And the walk back up the Skyline to Sea trail was hella long. It was quite dark when I finally made it back to my car—wet, bruised, exhausted, half-blind. I wore my shades to drive home, switching on the brights whenever the other lane was clear.
But it was a useful day. Even if it wasn’t exactly fun, I got some insights. For one thing, it’s always salutary for me to be reminded that I’m not in control. And for another, while I was struggling those miles along the steep, slippery banks of that rock-and-log-choked stream, I came to revise some of my notions about silps, spirits of place, and genii loci. Previously I’d been laboring under a lazy default happy-hippie conviction that Gaia is our friend, that nature is a nurturing mother. But in the wilderness I was reminded that, in truth, nature is utterly indifferent to us. Each object is placidly doing it’s own thing. They have no feelings towards me whatsoever. And the stark disinterest can feel like hostility.
I now see that if, for the purposes of my novel, I do want to ascribe minds and personal feelings to the spirits of place, then these elemental minds are just as likely to be hostile (stealing my glasses, making me slip), as opposed to being helpful (extending a solid branch for me to grab).
So rather than having the silps smiling and dancing around and helping Jayjay and Thuy build their house in the woods—I’d been thinking of an Amish barn-raising kind of vibe—maybe it’s more that the silps will be tripping them up, breaking their fingernails and being sure that nothing fits. Maybe the silps will like hostile xenophobic neighbors jeering at immigrants who are trying to fashion an ethnic little dwelling for themselves. A brick flies through the window, wrapped with a paper saying, “No Humans Here!” In other words, I’m seeing a scene where things go wrong for Thuy and Jayjay in the woods. And that’s fine, it’s more interesting that way for the story. One of the basic tricks for story-telling is to have the characters’ plans go awry.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back there early in the morning wearing my backup glasses and find those glasses that got away. Running as fast as their little legs would carry them…
