Rudy’s Blog

More notes towards Postsingular #2, a.k.a. After Everything Awoke.

How Telepathy Works.

As mentioned in the lazy eight note a couple of days ago, there is a singular shared point accessible from each location, as if the vanishing point of a painting were in contact with each spot in the picture plane. This universally accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity. A router.

Animals, plants and objects are telepathic too, although I still need to figure out how this feels. I’ll call the intelligent, telepathic objects “silps.”

I’ll use “teep” for an all-purpose verb to mean “doing telepathy.”

How Telepathy Feels

This is hard. Thinking about it is like trying to stare into the sun.

William Burroughs, in 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. The vibrating soundless hum.

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

As I mentioned in the omnividence section yesterday, lazy eight telepathy is going to be participatory rather than voyeuristic. Think in terms of our brains having empathy circuits that let us internally emulate someone else—it’s said that autistic people are weak in these abilities.

In Saucer Wisdom (Forge Books, 1999, pp. 78-84) I describe telepathy along the following lines:

You’re looking far away, but you’re looking inside your head. People can get into endless mirror-regresses, seeing each others’ images of each other inside each others’ heads, and it can lead to feedback with an unpleasant effect. Strong emotions bring this on, too. Whipping each other up, possibly to the point of having a seizure. One way to block the regress is to focus on a specific detail. Also, to prevent the emotional feedback, you try and project a low affect. “Just go, ‘I’m all boo-hoo,’ instead of actually slobber-sobbing.”

It’s easier to understand a stranger’s telepathy if you have a context for them, that is if you absorb a lifebox model of their mind.

The telepathic fields can feel like gnarly egg-white-stiffened dreadlocks or Mohawk spikes on your head.

Lovers enjoy skirting around the white hole of telepathic feedback, bopping around the fractal edges of overamplification.

It’s more than omnividence; you’re not just seeing through someone else’s eyes, you’re picking up shades of feeling.

Blocking Telepathy.

* Intrigue. It makes it easier to create a story if we can evade certain teep contacts, as plots depend on people tricking each other or surprising each other. Could I have intrigue in a world of perfect information? Maybe—I think of a game of chess between two masters who can very well deduce what their opponent plans to exfoliate from a given move. If I had perfect information about the plans and motives of everyone in my real life, and they conversely could see all my thoughts—then some outcomes would still be unpredictable. For instance, you know that I want to write a good book, but you dan’t predict if I’ll succeed. Or think of two male rivals courting ths ame princess and they know each others plans and schemes, but they still can’t predict whom the princess will choose.

* Offensive thoughts. A blogger is almost like someone who’s broadcasting telepathically. On my real blog, I don’t express my less attractive fears, worries and dislikes. If I did, I’d seem like a hot-head, a depressive, a pig. Everyone does have certain unattractive thoughts that they know better than to vent lest they become social outcasts. But if telepathy airs everyone’s secret seething, then maybe no one person’s seething seems like a big deal?

This said, on a one-to-one basis, arguments could really escalate, I see violent feedback loops flaring up. But perhaps after a period of adjustment, people would get thicker skins? Like in some subcultures, people yell at each other a lot without necessarily getting excited. Also it could be that we’d all become more accepting, as telepathy would be hipping us to the fact that we’re really all the same on the inside. Sometimes I remember to try this in daily life, to trying for empathy with fellow humans.

* How to Block Telepathy. In PS1 I had a high-tech substance called quantum-mirror varnish to block orphidnet “telepathy”. But in PS2, no spatial barrier is possible. For the telepathy is via a higher dimension (the eighth) and it hops over any three-space barrier. So the only way to get privacy will be to use jamming or camoflague. Help I’m a rock.

I think, as with internet security, many people won’t bother to hone their jamming or cammo skills. And even those who do will have an ongoing struggle; there will be an arms-race akin to the spam vs. spam-filter co-evolution.

Entertainment After Telepathy.

* 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. 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.

* “Sin.” 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. You’d really need to have a filter to block this. But maybe you forget to put it up. Some will be addicted to the high of intense feedback via mutual mirrorring.

With telepathy, peeping is unlimited and free, but, again, this won’t be so much of an ocular thing. It’s more like you merge with other minds, you can’t stand back and peep. If you find a mind that really welcome you in, that might be quite sensual.

* Art. A chaotic medium—an agitated tank of immescible fluids—senses what you want to see and shows you that. Someone finds a way to record mood snapshots. So we have objects that simply project the raw experience of transcendence, sense-of-wonder, geuphoria, mindless pleasure, a vision of actual infinity, a savor of sensual beauty.

This gets close to the “teep-tags” I talked about in PS1. How will teep-tags work? How do you create an object that is a copy of a mental state? I guess you mark it out on the eighth dimension of some object that will presumably be passive enough not to go changing the marks you made.

But even rocks have memories. I think of the beautiful memoreis of a rock that’s lain in a stream bed and you look at it and savor the years of lovely currents in the water.

* Books. Telepaths have language for superficial small talk, but they more often use teeped images and emotions. They barely use the written language. Books are now like very elaborate teep tags. Writing is like being a bas-relief sculptor. Or video-blogging yourself. A beautiful state of mind is saved into the a memory network, glyph by glyph.

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

John Walker’s Thoughts on Telepathy:

We want to imagine a world in which telepathy has high bandwidth, but people retain their individuality and sense of self. In other worlds we want a full-on mentally networked society, but without having it turn into a group hive mind where everyone speaks of “we” instead of “I”.

In order to retain individuality in the presence of high bandwidth telepathy, you need some kind of individualized filters. For if all the input reaches everyone’s conscious level, then everyone’s thoughts are in everyone’s head and everyone is be the same, and you have a hive.

But it’s natural for us to filter. The vast majority of what goes on in the brain is below the conscious level. Even for senses like hearing and sight, most of the input is filtered at a low level, and conscious attention is directed only toward things you are trying to concentrate upon or things which your low-level mental processes identify as important threats or opportunities. (Snakes, guns, food, nudity.) The influx of telepathic info will largely be processed at a subconscious level, and we’ll only become consciously aware of, like, things we’re looking for, valid threats and unusual opportunities.

Now kick it up a notch. You’re not necessarily ignoring the subconscious telepathic input. You might, for instance, be providing information and services to others at a subconscious level, but without your conscious attention and without detracting from your own work. I can think of this in a positive light as Mental Google, or in a more sinister light as Mental Slave Computers.

(Mental Google.) You’re supplying memory data to others. In this system, information requests are distributed among a pool of telepaths without the need for conscious intervention. This is an altruistic kind of sharing—the entire knowledge of the species is on tap for each individual. Searching the collective mind isn’t as fast as getting something in your own brain, but you have access to far more information.

(Mental Slave Computers.) In this more sinister form of mind sharing, it might be that you’re unwittingly performing other beings’ computations. When your mind should be contemplating or resting or dreaming, it’s doing work. Mental tasks are distributed among the pool of telepaths; it’s like everyone is a PC hosting some processes in background. Opportunistic individuals increase their own mental powers by enlisting “background computation” in the brains of others. They claim it’s a two-way street, but it’s not.

More notes towards Postsingular #2, a.k.a. After Everything Awoke.

You can tune in on distant objects. The lazy eight link via the ubiquitous point at infinity is like the object in Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Aleph.” It’s like a crystal ball that displays whatever you want to see. Since the lazy eight link attaches to every possible location, the view is endlessly smooth and rich.

Quotes from Jorge-Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, (Viking 1998, pp. 280-285).

“An Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all points…all the places of the world are within the Aleph [which is] the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh!

“I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. … In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems: a bird that somehow is all birds; a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; an angel with four faces, facing east and west, north and south at once…Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but then the report would be polluted with literature, with falseness…

“In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive… Something of it, though, I will capture.

“I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing … was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, … [a wonderful page-long Borgesian list ensues] …, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has every truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

“I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.

“Out in the street…in the subway, all the faces seemed familiar. I feared there was nothing that had the power to surprise or astonish me anymore, I feared I would never again be without a sense of d�j� vu.

“Aleph … is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the little sphere of my tale would not appear to be accidental…that letter signifies the pure and unlimited godhead [and] its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher.”

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.

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.