Yesterday I spent the day in Boulder Creek, visiting my friend Nick Herbert. I have a picture of him plus a discussion of one of his ideas about consciousness in the “Quantum Soul” section of my Lifebox tome.
For that matter, Nick also helped me dream up some of the material in Saucer Wisdom, not to mention the notion of “tekelili” telepathy at the center of the The Hollow Earth. He’s always had this idea that we might be able use physics to bring about something like actual telepathy in the real world. And once you can read the mind of a plant, you’ll have to recognize that all along the plant was conscious. Why not?
Nick is living something of a hermit’s life these days, though since he still gives talks sometimes he says he’s been called a “performance hermit.”
Once a week, Nick goes to work out at the garage/gym of his friend Reno, also in Boulder Creek.
I went along and had fun. I’m a yoga guy not an iron-pumper, but I did some stretches with the light hand-weights.
Nick’s friend Allen Lundell and his wife Sun joined us for lunch at the Blue Sun Caf in Boulder Creek.
Sun seemed like a classic hippie; in the 80s she lived in a famous commune in the Haight. Last year she was the Bad Witch at the Emerald City camp at Burning Man, and she was telling a story about how the Elves from the Elf camp brought them a jar of Elf Magic beads and treated them to some Elven Jello. She joked that everyone in Boulder Creek has learned to levitate, and that the ground of Boulder Creek has levitated as well, which is why people don’t notice.
A couple of other guys joined us for lunch too, including Brooks Blanchard, an electric flutist who sometimes runs the multimedia feeds for performances by the Maui rave band “Lost at Last”. He talked about going to the annual gatherings of the Rainbow Family, a loose affiliation of hippies who meet on National Forest Lands every year — I think this year’s meeting will be near “The Ned,” that is, Nederland, Colorado.
Allen Lundell gave me an incredibly cool toy made by a local Boulder Creek man, who has a website of similar cool inventions. If you read my novel Saucer Wisdom, you might recall that Frank Shook was selling “Lotus Lights” — these were modeled on the “Liberty Lights” available at this site. I didn’t see this cool little fan on the site; what makes it awesome is that there’s four little diode-type lightbulbs on the blade, and the flick on and off in some wonderfully complex and nonrepeating algorithm, which means that the spinning lights makes ever new mandalic designs.
At lunch with these pleasant people, I felt a very long way from yuppie Los Gatos and bustling Silicon Valley.
Nick and I took a long walk through the woods, Nick talking about his eternal quest to make a big discovery relating consciousness and quantum mechanics.
He always brings me back to panpsychism, the notion that all sorts of things might be conscious: ferns, rivers, air currents. That’s the San Lorenzo River, by the way.
I’m working to make this science-fictionally true in Postsingular. The universal computation is already present in nature, even in cracking paint, but most processes don’t have RAM and my friend John Walker has argued, I think convincingly, that in order for natural phenomena to “wake up” they really need memory.
I bid a fond au revoir to Nick, leaving him with the bathtub he keeps on his porch: he calls it his “Neo-Archimedean Research Vessel.”