What is Reality?

Is reality just one kind of thing, or is it many kinds of things? That is, do we believe in “monism” or in pluralism?

If we go for monism, can we really suppose that everything in our world is a type of computation? It doesn’t always feel as if such a “universal automatism” is the whole answer. That is, I don’t always believe that everything is a computation.

Pool at the Mouth of the Big Sur River

I had a moment of disbelief while finishing the first draft of my tome on the meaning of computation: The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. This was in 2014. I went camping in Big Sur with my wife, Sylvia; it was a hot day, and I had the chance to stand in the cool clear flow of the Big Sur River, up to my neck in a big pool that accumulates right before the river flows across a sand bar into the Pacific.

Standing there, I closed my eyes to savor the sensation of water and air. My arms were weightless at my sides, my knees were slightly bent, I was at perfect equilibrium. Each time I exhaled, my breath would ripple the water, and reflections of the noon sun would flicker on my eyelids. Exquisite—and, no, I wasn’t high; I haven’t been high since I was fifty.

I was all there, fully conscious, immersed in the river. And I became powerfully aware of a commonsense fact that most readers will have known all along.

“This isn’t a computation. This is water.”

So is monism wrong? It’s not that I think it’s a waste of time expending energy in trying to believe everything is a computation. It’s not that universal automatism is necessarily wrong. It’s more that, at times, it becomes too cumbersome a way to try to think of things. Like any scientific monism.

Why pretend that reality is any less rich than you know it to be? I’d still include computation as one of types of things that exist. But I’d want to include the sense of the All, and love, and the body. And water. And the reflections in my brass desk lamp. And crows. And…
Once you move past monism, the next logical stopping point is the most comprehensive possible pluralism.

• Reality is endlessly diverse.

But wait. Did I just say that I don’t believe everything’s a computation? I’m abandoning one the main points that I was arguing for during the whole length of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul? Come on, Rudy!

Snapshots from Micronesia, Left to right and top to bottom: a rock island near Palau, kayaking along the edge of a rock island, a soft coral whose shape is a disk with a fractally folded edge, Zhabotinsky-scroll hard coral.

Well, okay, maybe I don’t want to pull back too far from universal automatism. Even though it’s wearisome to continually view the world as being made of computations, this particular monism could really be true.

There was in fact one specific moment a year later, in 2015, when I came back into the fold of monistic universal automatism. Itw during a kayak excursion in Micronesia. I’ll quote from my journals.

Yesterday I went on a kayak tour in the rock islands of Palau. It was one of the best days of my life.

Our guides were three Palauans: Jake, Ding, and Rayna. They were great: wild lively locals, talking rapid-fire Palauan to each other all day. Jake was the very image of the old-style Micronesian chief, although later I found out he’d gone to college, started a career as an accountant, and had thrown that over to be a tour guide.

There were five of us tourists. The guides loaded five single-seat hard kayaks on a boat and motored out to our starting point. For the rest of the day, we kayaked in stages: we’d get to a location and the motor boat would be waiting there, we’d tie our kayaks to the boat, go snorkeling, climb up the ladder to the motor boat, replenish our supplies, and then remount our kayaks. Jake had six waypoints for us: a hidden underwater tunnel leading to a tree-lined lagoon filled with giant clams, a sunken ship from the 1930s, a little point where he speared a fish, a large lagoon with a beach where we had lunch, an underwater tunnel leading to a cave filled with blue light coming up from the water, and an arch connecting two bays with soft corals growing on the sandy bottom of the arch.

Coming into the lagoon for lunch I felt quite weightless; the water was so clear and unrippled, and the sand below it so white. It was as if my kayak were gliding through empty space. And quiet, quiet, quiet all around. Not a whisper of wind in the trees, only the gentle lapping of the waves, the occasional calls of birds and, of course, the sporadic whooping of the Palauans. I had such a wave of joy, wading around that lagoon, and a profound sense of gratefulness, both to the world for being so beautiful and to God for letting me reach this spot. I had another wave of these feelings a bit later when we were kayaking through a maze of small islands in shallow water, bays that no motor boat could reach. Peaceful, peaceful. Eden. The world as it truly is meant to be. I’m glad I lived long enough to get here.

High in the air above one of these sunny backwaters, I see a large dark—bird? It’s the size of an eagle, and, no, it’s a fruit bat, the sun shining through the membranes of its wings. The islands look like green clouds come to earth; mirroring their fluffy white brethren above.

In the last snorkel spot there are lovely pale blue and pink soft corals, branching alveolar broccolis on the sandy bottom of the archway connecting two bays. Fractals, in short. Swimming through the arch, I encounter a shoal of maybe ten thousand tiny tropical fish, like the fish you’d see in someone’s home aquarium, little zebras or tetras. With my snorkel on, I marvel at their schooling motions, their bodies moving in a unison like iron filings in a field, their ropes and scarves of density emerging from the parallel computation of their individual anxieties. The turbulent water currents compute, as do the clouds in the sky, the cellular automaton reaction-diffusion patterns on the mantles of the giant clams, the Zhabotinsky scrolls of the shelf corals, the gnarly roots of plants on the land.

And I’m thinking that maybe, yes, maybe after all everything is a computation. Universal automatism gives me a point of view from which I can make sense of all these diverse forms I’m seeing here. Maybe I was wrong to want to “take it all back” in September. But what about my thoughts, can I see those as computations, too? Well, why can’t they just be fractal broccoli, flocking algorithms, class four turbulence, cellular automaton scrolls. I ascribe higher significance to them, but why make so much of them. Are my thoughts really so vastly different from the life forms all around me in these lagoons? Why not relax and merge. All is One.

And if I find it useful to understand the One’s workings in terms of computation, don’t think that this reduces the lagoon to a buzzing beige box. The lagoon is not reduced, the lagoon is computing just as it is. “Computing” is simply a way to speak of the dance of natural law.

So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?”

• Reality is made of gnarly computations.

Now to the next question.

The Meaning of Life

One appeal of monistic philosophies is that if we can reduce reality to one substance, there’s some hope of finding a rule of behavior for that substance, and that rule may suggest a meaning for the world.

Let’s see how this works if we believe in universal automatism. If I say that everything is a computation, I’m saying that everything is a deterministic process. And that means that reality is a weave of logical if-then statements, with each phenomenon linked to a cause. As an extreme example of universal automatism, there might be some underlying supercomputation that generates not only the entire cosmos but also the underlying fabric of space and time. But then, of course, we’d have to ask why that particular supercomputation exists.

The point here is that even if the world is the result of a supercomputation, knowing this isn’t much use to us. We still wouldn’t know where the supercomputation came from. And—perhaps even more important, we still wouldn’t know what it’s for.

And that, after all, is really what we’re after when we ask about the meaning of life. It’s not so much the cause that’s puzzles us as does the purpose.

Does a person’s life have a purpose?

Again we can turn to Stephen Wolfram’s classification of computations into four classes. Class one processes do nothing, and stay at one fixed point. Class two processes repeat themselves in a loop. Class three processes are random, patternless scuzz. Class four processes are richly, chaotically patterned. I call them gnarly.

So in terms of the meaning of a life, universal automatism suggests a possible answer. Computationally rich “class four” or “chaotic” or “gnarly” behaviors are in an objective sense more interesting than those that die out, repeat, or have no discernible structure. So a universal automatist might say that the meaning/purpose of a human life is to produce a gnarly class computation!

The human artifacts we admire are computationally rich. An empty canvas is class one. Hack artwork is class two copying of existing artifacts. Ugly scuzz is class three. Great art is class four: gnarly.

The nobler emotions are computationally rich as well. Murderous rage forces some victim’s computation into class one termination. Hatred throws the hater into a class two loop. Too needy a desire to please puts a person at the mercy of capricious class three inputs. Compassion is an ever-evolving class four process.

Get the picture?

• The meaning of life is beauty and love.

One more question.

How to Be Happy

I’ll offer a bouquet of six answers—one for each of the six levels of reality I discuss in The Lifebox, the Seashell and Soul..

Drawing by Isabel Rucker.

After slong and complex mental computations, I’ve compressed my six answers to a couple of words apiece. A to-do list.

• Turn off the machine. Universal automatism teaches us that there’s a common ground upon which to compare nature to PCs. But this doesn’t mean that that PCs are as good as reality. Far from it. On the common ground, we can readily see that the natural world is incalculably more powerful and interesting than the odd flickering boxes we’re wedded to in the Y2K era. I try not to let them run my life.

• See the gnarl. The air is a gnarly ocean; the leaves dance on the trees. I’ve always enjoyed watching clouds and water; and now I realize that the computations they’re carrying out are fully as complex as anything in any book I might read. Each flickering shadow is a reminder of the world’s unsolvable and unpredictable richness.

• Feel your body. There’s always something interesting to feel in this wonderful meat computation that I’m privileged to inhabit. It’s fun sometimes to think of my body as being very large—like an immense starship that I’m inside. I can focus on the inputs from all the different parts. Meanwhile my breath and heartbeat are gently chaotic. As a heavy computer user, I need to remember not spend more time upgrading my machine than I do in exercising my bod.

• Release your thoughts. Underneath the wanting and worrying is the great river of thought. I don’t control much of the world, and things rarely turn out as I predict, so why waste my time in focusing on fears, desires, and expectations? And why invest all my energy in logic which, as we now know, only goes so far? Released from the class two channels of attachment, I can watch my mind like fireworks above a wavy sea.

• Open your heart. People are the most interesting and beautiful entities I’ll ever see. Society isn’t about the news and the leaders. It’s about the people I run into every day. Recently I saw a show of photographs by Diane Arbus. Diane must have been such a character. She had a way of getting to the essential humanity of her subjects—ordinary people lovingly depicted and made fully human in all individuality. They always seem to be as interested in Diane as she is in them. People sense when you look at them with utter interest and compassion; they look back and smile.

• Be amazed. Our studies of computation teach us that none of our theories will ever get very far. Not everything can be explained, nor even expressed in words. We’re fully immersed in the incomprehensible. Life is a mystery; it’s good to savor this.

Lest this list seem preachy, let’s say the advice is actually aimed at me. I need it. I forget the simplest things.

And I’m glad to see these slogans emerge from my long and gnarly chains of reasoning. They’re a nice place to end up.

One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect.

[Check out the whole book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.]

My family and I moved to Silicon Valley in 1986, and we never looked back. I had a job teaching computer science at San Jose State, and Sylvia began teaching ESL at Evergreen Community College. She’d teach them English, and then I’d teach them Java. For while I also worked as a software engineer at Autodesk in Sausalito.

But mainly, as always, I was writing. During the period 1994 – 2021 I published ten novels that are directly set in Silicon Valley, and two more that edge into the Valley as well.

It’s annoying and disheartening when I do a Google search for Silicon Valley novels, and my works don’t appear. As my Texas cyberpunk collaborator Bruce Sterling would say: that chaps my ass!

I mean, come on, I live and work in Silicon Valley. I’m an original cyperpunk, I know about computers, I hang out with oddballs and programmers, and I write wild, entertaining adventures set in this acctual world we live in.

Here’s my twelve novels, counting backwards in time, with extras at the end. Each is illustrated by one or more images of its cover. All of them are in print as paperbacks and ebooks, and many can be browsed free online.

#10. Juicy Ghosts, Transreal Books, 2021. Juicy Ghosts page.

Telepathy, digital immortality, gossip molecules, and artificial ghosts, set amid a pitched battle to oust the evil forces of the nanopercenters, the Citadel Club, the Top Party, and the evil President Ross Treadle.

#9. Jim and the Flims, Night Shade Books, 2011 & 2019, Transreal Books, 2016. Jim and the Flims page.

A rogue bioengineer opens a sub-nanotech opens a portal that leads from Santa Cruz, California, to the afterworld.

#8. Hylozoic, SF novel, Tor Books, 2009. Hylozoic page.
#7. Postsingular, SF novel, Tor Books, 2007. Postsingular page.

A pair of neo cyberpunk thrillers. In Postsingular, the planet merges with a realtime virtual model generated by a trillion gnat-like orphids. And in Hylozoic every single object in the world wakes up.

#6. Mathematicians in Love, SF novel, Tor Books, 2006, Transreal Books 2016, Night Shade 2019. Mathematicians in Love page.

What if quantum soap bubbles could predict the future? What if they opened up a door into an alternate world, ruled by giant jellyfish?

#5. Spaceland, Tor Books, 2002. Spaceland page.

A tech middle-manager meets a being from the fourth dimension. His boss finds a way to use hyperspace as a new channel for wireless signals.

#4. Realware, Avon Books 2000,
#3. Freeware, Avon Books 1997. Both included in The Ware Tetralogy, 2010. Wares page.

The Ware Tetralogy includes Software and Wetware as the first two novels, written before I came to an California. The second two were written out here.

Freeware might be my most degenerate book ever, with mold-infested imipolex creatures trying to infest our brains with AI slugs.

And in Realware it’s a full-on Silicon Valley push to start programming physical objects on the fly.

#2 Saucer Wisdom, Tor Books, 1999. Transreal Books, 2016, Night Shade 2019. Saucer Wisdom page.

What if a crazed fan of mine was taking trips to the future in a UFO, and bringing me reports to write up? In Saucer Wisdom, my ultimate transreal extravaganza, Rudy Rucker is one of the characters. Profusely illustrated with line drawings.

#1 The Hacker and the Ants, !st ed., Avon Books 1994. 2nd ed. Four Walls Eight Windows 2003. Amazon page.

I wrote this one right after I lost my job as a programmer at Autodesk. I’d been working on an entertainment program featuring screens full of ever-evolving virtual ants. In Hacker and the Ants, the ants break loose and infest the heavy-duty chips in people’s TVs. All anyone can view any more is screens of crawling ants. The hero is charged with treason and with sabotage of a national utility. It’s up to him to find the deep web hacker who unleashed the plague.

#11 Million Mile Road Trip 2019. Night Shade Books, print. Transreal Books ebok. Million Mile Road Trip page.

A wild trip across the galaxy in a living UFO. Featuring high-school seniors extrodinaire Zoe Snapp and her pal, and possible boyfriend, Villy Antwerpetn. The first and last few chaps are in Los Perros, CA, my transreal home town in Silicon Valley, and there are some extremely gnarly surfing scenes, so, loosely speaking, this is a Silicon Valley noveltoo.

#12 The Hollow Earth & Return to the Hollow Earth Transreal Books, 2018. Hollow Earth page.

A mesmerizing steampunk-style journey to the Earth’s vast, hollow interior, with Edgar Allen Poe in a guest appearance. The second volume winds up in, you guessed it, 21st C Silicon Valley and includea a transreal encounter with none other than writer Rudy Rucker.

To round it out, you might look at my autobio and journals which include a lot of Silicon Valley action as well.

Nested Scrolls, Autobiography. Tor Books, 2011. Nested Scrolls page.

Journals 1990-2014, Transreal Books 2015. Journals page.

I took up painting in 1999 while writing a historical novel called As Above So Below: A Life of Peter Bruegel about my favorite painter. I wanted to see how it felt to paint, and quickly I fell in love with the medium. I used acrylics at first. Later I came to prefer oils as they seemed richer and deeper. And then I returned to acrylics for their ease of use, and for the brightness of their hues. My studio remains the same: a plastic chair and table in our back yard, with my paints and brushes in a knapsack.

I enjoy the exploratory and non-digital nature of painting, and the luscious mixing of the colors. Sometimes I have a specific scenario in mind. Other times I don’t think very much about what I’m doing I just paint and see what comes out. After I’ve finished a rough first version of a painting, I’ll polish and tweak it through several iterations. I’m never in a rush to finish. I like exploring these better worlds.

My pictures are often realistic in that they contain recognizable objects, but fantastic in their use of heightened colors, cartoony simplifications, and odd scenarios. The genre is sometimes called pop surrealism. Some of my pictures seem to tell a story. The stories may relate to my novels, or they may be free-floating parables, ambiguous, with their precise meanings unknown.

You can get more details about my art on my Paintings page.

Today, I’m assembling ten of my paintings from the Covid years 2020-2021. (I number my paintings in the order painted, and not all of them are included here, so you’ll see jumps in the numbering.)

181: Pandemic #1: Infection. Acrylic, 30″ x 24″, March, 2020.

In December, 2019, I had the lenses of my eyes surgically replaced by soft plastic lenses. My own lenses had gotten cloudy and dark over the years. I was delighted by how rich colors became, seen through new eyes. Maybe I’d been painting with such bright colors because my vision was dim? I held back from painting for three months, and in March, 2020, spurred on by the onset of the Covid plague, I started again. Turned out that now I was using even brighter colors! Working at a fever pitch, I painted a Pandemic triptych. The initial panel, Infection, shows a tumble of heedlessly festive micro-critters, spotted with itchy dots to suggest disease.

182: Pandemic #2: Panic Acrylic, 30″ x 40″, March, 2020.

In Panic, I went wild, hitting a strong abstract-expressionist style, with super-intense colors. I created some delicious shades of orange by mixing cadmium red and the lesser-known diarylide yellow. In all three of the Pandemic panels, I started by setting blobs of paint from my palette onto a damp blank canvas, along with gobs of heavy gel medium. And then I freely smeared, going for gestural brush strokes, and not letting the colors mix together and get muddy. To bring order, I outlined choice passages of action painting, and filled the extra parts of the canvas with flat colors. I think Panic looks, overall, a bit like a face with holes in it. But some of the smaller areas look like faces as well. Those two pink patches at the bottom might be a hapless Covid victim’s lungs. Or buttocks. Or shoulders. Or neck. Hard to be sure exactly what’s going on…and that makes it interesting.

183: Pandemic #3: Peace. Acrylic, 30″ x 24″, March, 2020.

For Peace, the third panel of Pandemic, I wanted a sense of recovery. As before, I smeared around some blobs of paint from my palette, and then I outlined them, and added fields of violet and orange. The central shape is perhaps a bit like a holy baby or, looked at more abstractly, like the famous mathematical form known as the Mandelbrot Set. I was of course deluded in my hope of peace coming soon.

184: Hazmat Spring. Acrylic, 40″ x 30″, April, 2020.

This was my fourth pandemic painting. It’s thematically inspired by Botticelli’s Spring, but with the person wearing a hazmat suit. S/he might be me or my wife enjoying a rare Covid-era outing, or maybe the figure is the cheerful neighbor who was trimming her hillside with a sickle and a weed whacker, right adjacent to our back yard, which is where I paint. I started with overall action smears, like I’d been doing, then cropped down the marks to form odd, vaguely medieval plants. The flowers of course fulfill the rebirth motif of spring.

188: Cells Eat Viruses. Acrylic, 28″ x 22″, May, 2020.

At this point, with growing hopes of a Covid vaccine, I had a vague, inaccurate notion of healthy blood cells killing off viruses by eating them—and I painted it. Cheerful round cells, and the viruses looking like stick-and-ball molecules. Nice colors, lively action, happy feeling. Almost like a Mardi Gras crowd! If only.

199: Zoom Meeting. Acrylic, 24″ x 18″, December, 2020.

By the time I painted Zoom Meeting, we’d been under Covid lockdown for nine months, and one of my few social interactions was to attend Zoom meetings. I was taken with the look of the Zoom screen, and I’d play with the layout during the meeting. Here we see an underlying “speaker view” with a “grid view” overlaid upon it, with part of the grid offscreen. I like how the speaker also appears in the grid, and that she has a window behind her looking out onto the “real” world. There’s a sense of multiple realities. That’s me in the top center, of course, with my beloved bookcase of my published editions. Some users show static photos of themselves instead of live images, and the coiffed woman in the center is one of those. And of course we have an alien.

203: Invaders. Acrylic, 28″ x 22″, May, 2021.

I created the background of Invaders one by “stamping” the canvas with the still-wet palette paper I used for a previous painting. It made a nice, mysterious pattern resembling what an SF writer might call a subspace continuum. It needed critters, and I thought of a flock of invaders. Kind of like eyeballs. Or maybe Covid viruses. Or maybe something worse..

204: Escaping Death. Acrylic, 40″ x 30″, June, 2021..

Soon after Invaders, things did get worse, but not due to Covid. I had a vein burst inside my stomach, and I nearly bled to death. A surgeon stapled the vein closed, and I needed a transfusion of four pints of blood. Then I was better. I had some heavy visionary dreams in the hospital. I saw Death as a shadowy figure with a helmet. And I saw the afterlife as an “underside” of the world, with the underside covered in shifting white fuzz. And I had a vision of returning to life in the form of a glowing image atop my sheet. I kept revising the shapes in that image, and ended up with a woman warrior. A heroine fending off Death, possibly on her way to escaping into a pool that resembles her shield. Escaping Death seemed important to me, and in my somewhat desperate, I began to think of it as a talisman with healing powers. Like a Tibetan sand painting. Who knows. Oh, and what about that big eye? Well, I like painting eyes, and it was fun to shape this one like a torpedo. Maybe it’s the Cosmic One. And the duality between the inner and outer skewed frames on the painting and on the image—that reflects my notion of there being a hyperdimensional “underside” of our living, daily world.

214: My Back Yard. Acrylic, 28″ x 22″, November, 2021.

I got better, but there’s still plenty to worry about. When I can, I focus on my immediate surroundings. Like our backyard. I like old paintings that illustrate proverbs that have been forgotten. Unknown parables. In this context, I think of three works by Peter Bruegel the Elder: Peasant and Bird Nester, his sinister drawing Beekeepers, and his late career Misanthrope . As I mentioned above, I once wrote historical novel about Bruegel’s life, and I still think about him a lot. Making a new painting of an unkown parable on your own is, I would say, a type of Surrealism. In My Back Yard I started with a scene from my backyard, and added a squirrel, two chickens, and three somehow symbolic-looking bumblebees. Plus a cool towel with a mandala design. And a woman, perhaps my wife, who’s perhaps hanging the towel, or perhaps painting something on the back of it. And deliberately with no explanation. The lost parable of the towel!

215: Mr. Gray. Acrylic, 24″ x 18″, November, 2021.

Here I’m just thinking about paint. Mr. Gray is a little like M. C. Escher’s images of tiled-together creatures. But I made Mr. Gray more random and irregular. In grade-school my friends and I would play a game of drawing a squiggly shape on a piece of notebook paper, and your fellow player would have to make it into an animal or a person. Reallly any shape at all can be a critter if you stare at it long enough. It’s just a matter of figuring out where to put the dot for the eye. The one human form here is “Mr. Gray” himself. And maybe he’s having these colorful visions. I was also thinking of the Bob Dylan song “Idiot Wind” that opens with the line, “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.” To me this line represents Dylan toppling the old regime and running off with the country’s youth. Taking them somewhere pleasant and colorful. And becoming the new Mr. Gray.

For further info, see my Paintings page. Or check out my book of my paintings, Better Worlds, available as paperback and as a free online PDF.

I’m going to get into some deep philosophy today, relating to the fact that we don’t know how to create a mind, and we can’t really predict natural processes. And we never really will know. And it’s not because we’re not trying hard enough. It’s because of the nature of the world. There’s a basic principle at work, which I call Natural Undecidability.

More on this below, but to start with, I’ll have some stuff about what my family and I have been up to in this dear natural world.

And lately I took lots of photos with my new Leica Q2.  Reviews say it’s a “point and shoot” but that’s not exactly true, to say that would be like saying a Fender Stratocaster is a ukelele.  The Leica is like a piece of equipment left behind by a flying saucer. Day by day I’m figuring out more and more of the settings.

As usual, my photos don’t necessarily have any obvious connection with the text.

Our neighbors are building an extra dwelling right on the other side of the fence of the back yard, which is ny painting studio, and general hangout space.  The Algerian ivy on the fence makes a pretty good privacy screen, but its heavy and the fence has been drooping. Son Rudy came down, and we put in five steel pipes to prop up our fence.  A fun, sculptural activity. The temporary 2×4 props were to hold the fence back while the cement hardened in the metal pipes’ postholes. Surprise: a deer is in this shot.

Then our gang drove north to spend Thanksgiving with daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, a few miles past Mendocino.  Well out of the Bay Area bustle, which dies down after Petaluma. We stayed at the Beachcomber, a relatively inexpensive motel right on a cliff by the bluffs and the beach.  Sunset in the photo above, with a low cloud/fog layer, and the sun just angling in through the slit. Obviuosly a UFO mothership. This was the view from our room.

Being 75, I’m thinking about mortality more and more these days.  Forever trying to grasp the ancient riddle: “What is like to die?” Or to accept it, or come to term with it.  Not that any of that makes a difference.  It’ll come. I often list to myself my friends who’ve died.  So strange.

Anyway, with that in mind, I noticed something about the ocean waves—I never get tired of watching the sea and pondering what I’m seeing.  When a wave is just starting to break, a transparent lip of water curls over and reaches down to touch the face of the wave.  the part I’m interested in just now is the few moments when the falling lip hasn’t yet touhed the body of the wave. Like what you see in the photo above.

And I formed the notion that the fleeting sheet of water was at some level a perfect metaphor for a full human life.

Back at home at my mad-scientist-type desk/laboratory, I described my insight to my writer Marc Laidlaw as follows.

Looking at the big waves breaking, so endlessly various and, at a more superficial level, the same. The ocean is vast and eternal, Syliva says the sea is a little scary as it’s so utterly indifferent. The ocean doesn’t care about the biggest storm, or how to move. The arriving water sloshes off the rocks and returns to the waaves.

I was focusing on the thing where a tube forms, often just a smallish teardrop-shaped-in-cross-section flap and not a full-on tunnel. I focus on the second when it hasn’t yet hit the face of the wave. This transient pompadour of water IS YOUR LIFE. Yes, that gnarly curved sheet, ridged-with flow-lines, edged-with-loplop-droopy-fronds,  with drops flicking off, and light gleaming on it—IT’S YOU. You flow. You are flowing. That flap of water is your whole entire life. It lasts—from our point of view—only a second or two, but in and of itself it’s a complete life.

And then? It merges into the wave and dissolves into vortices and into a new, diffuse, order of being, with the old floppy teadrop-cross-section, striated, sun-gleamer gone. Over and over and over and over it happens. Nature never tires of repeating herself, but it isn’t really ever a REPEAT. Each of those water flaps, or lives, is solo unique entity—due to chaotic dynamics and due to the deep and essential unpredictability of naturally occuring universal computations.

Group mind.  There were nine of us at Isbael and Gus’s loft, and we played some rounds of Banagrams.  To finish one of the sessions, we did a group bananagram, not a contest, just a matter of playing all the letters, a group construction, a Poincare cross-section of the chaotic group mind.

While we were up there, Isabel lined up some heavy-duty old-fashioned redwood outrigger kayaks for us to paddle up the Big River at Mendocino.  I rode with two of the grandchildren, and it was fun.  Much more work than I’d expected. We’d imagined the incoming tide would carry us upstream, peak at the right moment and sweep us back down. Not exactly. Also my nine-year-old grandson perceived this as a race, and was contantly exhorting me to paddle faster.  But it felt good. I was breathing really hard, and even grunting, and it was like I was exhaling some of the malaise that’s been dogging me of late.

“Mr. Gray” acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 18″, November, 2021. Click for a larger version of the painting.. More info on my Paintings page.

Let’s break for a painting that I finished a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Gray. 

It’s a little like M. C. Escher’s images of tiled-together creatures. But I made this one more random and irregular. In grade-school we’d play a game of drawing a squiggly shape on a piece of notebook paper, and your fellow player would have to make it into an animal or a person. Really any shape at all can be a critter if you stare at it long enough. It’s just a matter of figuring out where to put the dot for the eye. The one human form is Mr. Gray himself. Maybe he’s having these colorful visions. I was also thinking of the Bob Dylan song “Idiot Wind” that opens with the line, “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.” To me this line represents Dylan toppling the old regime and running off with the country’s youth. Taking them somewhere pleasant and colorful. And maybe becoming the new Mr. Gray.

And now let’s get down the deep philosophy I promised. The ignorabimus, which is a future-tense Latin verb meaning “we will not know.”

When we got home from our trip, my cyberpunk writer friend John Shirley alerted me to a news item about some scientists, one of them at Harvard, who made some artificial organisms that assemble copies of themselves, and naturally I’m, like, “I wrote about in Wetware. Meat boppers are real!” But some were saying, “This is the end, we’ve had it, Greg Bear’s gray goo is going to eat the world.”

But I don’t think we have to worry about artificial organisms eating the world anytime soon. After all (as I’ve said before) every single species has been trying, for millions of years, to totally dominate Earth, ceaselessly evolving and mutating and refining their wetware. And none of them ever wins. Because their rivals keep getting tougher. Kind of an intrinsic homeostasis, with the competing species keeping each other down.

If a little Harvard-built organism skips out into a rain-slick alley of our realtime cyberpunk future…it’ll be mugged by the skanky millennia-old critters seething around in the gutter, the OG germs of the natural funk.

An interesting point about this newly designed self-reproducing organism is they used a type of simulated evolution to design it. Computer scientists refer to this technique by the phrase “genetic algorithms.” You let a randomly generated population of algorithms compete with each other, and reproduce, and mutate, and recombine.

These days, any effective AI code arises by this type of evolution, which is also called deep learning.. Face recognition programs, or the pattern-recognition code that reads human handwriting—it’s all evolved. And nobody ever really “understands” the result. It’s incomprehensible. It’s a mound of a few thousand seemingly random decimal between 0 and 1. And these serve as weights for the links in a so-called neural network, which is designed by, as I say, an evolutionary process of genetic algorithms.

Back in the early days of AI, like the and 1950s and 1960s, zealots dreamt of finding a few simple rules about how minds work. And then (they imagined) bright MIT robots could march forth, utterly logical, well-programmed, gleaming with rationality. But this was a false dream. Indeed, when Kurt Godel proved his epic Incompleteness Theorem in 1931, he showed that it is even in principle impossible for us to describe human-equivalent code, and to describe it so clearly that it would be obvious that the code is correct and consistent.

Yes, due to profound and deep workings of logic, human-equivalent code must in fact be a fucked-up mess. Impossible to understand. No hope of proving it to be consistent. I wrote about all this in the “Towards Robot Consciousness” section of my nonfiction work, Infinity and the Mind. You can read it online.

In a prescient remark, Godel observed that nevertheless it would be possible for us to “bring such [human-equivalent] into existence.” And he was right. We do now in fact make computer code that’s smarter than expected. And, as I’m saying, we don’t do by deep insight. We do it by beating the problem to death with simulated evolution in an toy model of a world. What’s the expression? Nibbled to death by ducks.

Another science news item that got my attention of late is a new nonfiction book, A Natural History of the Future by Rob Dunn who argues that humans can’t fully comprehend the complexities of the natural world, or of evolution, let alone control them. (Full disclosure: It’s not like I actually read this book yet. I glanced at the description on the purchase page. But I certainly approve of it!)

It’s odd to me that even now, nearly a century after Godel, the average person keeps expecting that we’re going to get some simple final answers, and then begin controlling everything in sight. Hasn’t anyone been paying attention? For reasons related to Godel’s Incompleteness theorem, any hope of rational control over the world is dashed, just as was the hope finding a compact, crystalline secret-of-like-type design for an artificial human mind.

We can’t predict or control the natural world. About ten years ago I actually wrote up a formal proof for this, “An Incompleteness Theorem for the Natural World,” see details in this blog post. You could also call my result a proof of Natural Undecidability.

When I was in grad school at Rutgers, getting my Ph.D. in mathematical logic, I had a few golden hours of talking to Godel, I dreamed of writing an essay about the incompleteness of natural science, and then when I finally did, but somehow nobody but Stephen Wolfram cared. I’m not an officially licensed philosopher. And I have a peculiar talent for remaining obscure and underground,

My proof relates to Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (NKS) and his “Principle of Equivalence.” He notes that natural processes can be thought of as gnarly natural computations: processes like flowing water, eddying air, flickering flames, growing organisms. And he posits that all gnarly computations are in fact equivalent to universal computations, capable of emulating any other system. And our man Alan Turing proved that the behavior of universal computations are, even in principle, unpredictable. Turing’s proof is similar to the proof of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. My full version is an anthology on Wolfram’s work, and in the “Random Truth” section of my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, available in ebook, print, and browsable online.

As with producing something akin to AI by means of long-drawn-out evolution of logical systems, we can to some extent predict nature by lengthy, time-consuming emulations, as is done by weather forecasters. But, and this is the key point, there is no quick-and-dirty way to predict nature. Just as there’s no simple golden rule for AI.

The unpredictability of nature relates not only to Godel and Turing’s work, but also to the mathematico-physical notion of chaos. The slightest difference in initial conditions leads to quite different outcomes. Making the point once again, natural processes do not allow prediction by simple formulae, but only by, at best, long emulations which inevitably deviate from the actual course of events..

“But what about quantum computation?” someone might say. “Once we get that working, we’ll have it sucked. We’ll be able to predict anything.”

Well, probably not. Sorry to be such a wet blanket! But, listen. We don’t know, and we never will. Ignorabimus. The best we can do is take pleasure in the state of not knowing. Keats wrote a famous letter mentioning “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

A final note on the quantum computing thing, I wrote about it a little in my essay, “The Great Awakening.” Long story short, given that atoms function according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the natural world is in fact a quantum computation itself, and it’s not clear that we’d get any appreciable game-changing “leg up” on our predictive powers if we had tame quantum computations in our handy pocket flasks.

That that’s a fun thing to think about. Taking a nip off that quantum flask. SF! Chilly! Shivery! Brain freeze! And you’re like, “I see it all!”

But, d’oh, come to think of it, I actually already used this gimmick in my novel Mathematicians in Love, wherein the heroes are in fact able to predict the future by using some quantum-type gizmo.

Cryptomnesia strikes again! That’s when I think I’m having a new idea, but in fact it’s an idea I had a long time ago, an idea that I already wrote about at length. Where cryptomnesia gets pathological is if it’s someone else’s idea that you’re remembering, and you’re imagining you just discovered it.

But ideas aren’t everything. The harder part is coming up with the characters, language, plot, point of view, action, scenes, arcs, and publication possibilities. In Vergil’s words, loosely translated, “Ah, there is the bring-down, there is the drag.”

But writing fiction is doable. Even if we don’t know anything about anything. We know what it’s like to be human, and to be alive—and we know how to tell stories.