Hello, Mr Chips!
I’m in Rochester, where I worked 30 years ago. I spent this afternoon with two old SUNY Geneseo students of mine: Leander Watts, goth-magic YA novelist extrordinaire, and Amylouise Donnelly, an inveterate scribbler as well.
Here is one of Leander’s favorite sites of Hidden Rochester, a memorial in honor of the Fox sisters who were the mediums who got the Spiritualist movement off the ground.
“[Erected by] Spiritualists of the world in commemoration of the advent of modern spiritualism at Hydesville, N.Y., March 31, 1848 [159 years and 3 days ago, hmmm!] and in tribute to mediumship, the rock upon which demonstrable spiritualism forever stands.
THERE IS NO DEATH. THERE ARE NO DEAD”
Amylouise led us to two cool coffee shops in Rochester: Java’s and Spot. Java’s is next to the Eastman Music school, with people coming in carrying cellows. Daffodils on the piano.
Leander took me into an abandoned subway over the Genesee River and under the Rochester Library where I used to go to Gurdjieff meetings thirty years ago. The subway is full of vibby graffiti.
It was nice to have my old students lead me around. They were both in a class I taught with Bill Edgar of Phil Dept on something like “Unknowability”. For me, this was seeds of my later book Infinity and the Mind.
The house where Rudy Rucker wrote White Light is still to be seen in nearby Geneseo.
You’ve been giveng me some good comments on the post before last, that is, “Missing Gnarl. Peng Parasims.” I ‘ve been editing and re-editing my notes on it. So I’m gonna post about the idea some more today. As synchronicity would have it, this morning before seeing Leander Watts I decided to call the (unwilling) Earthside Peng transmitter a “medium.” And I started calling the simulations “woogies” instead of “parasims.”
[Woogie? My old friend Bill Caren? Or “Fred” from Scanner Darkly? Camera trouble…]
So, okay, going over it again, the Peng have an emigration technology that they call woogiecasting. The planetary mind Panpenga is willing to disassemble a subject Peng’s body, extracting the full details of the quantum computation it contains, to clean up the data a bit, and then to transmit this pattern via quantum entanglement to a distant world. The patterns create matter-wave simulations on the distant worlds, and the simulations are physical and very real-seeming Peng called woogies.
The experience of becoming a woogie seems low-tech to the users—they just jump into a certain volcanic hole. And Panpenga does it for free, as she likes the notion of spreading woogies of her denizens across the cosmos. Access to the woogification treatment is, however, expensive. To become a woogie, the Peng in question slides into a certain fissure on planet Pengö. The fissure leads down to some lava. Some wealthy high priests own the hole, and they require all of a Peng’s resources as the price for the favor—and the resources have to be very high. The planetary overmind, Panpenga, converts the body into a vibration that goes out from her north pole. And then subject Peng appears in physical form, memory intact, body in perfect health on some distant world: a woogie.
In order to turn a body into a woogie, the planetary mind Panpenga decodes subject Peng’s wave function into very many terms of a Fourier series—I’ll specify the exact number of terms below. But let me already warn that the Fourier series representation is a very inefficient and computationally wasteful method to represent a body’s wave function. But Panpenga uses it as it’s a brute-force no-brainer approach that always works.
Once Panpenga has the Fourier series representing a subject Peng, she edits the terms of the Fourier series so as to remove any diseases that the subject Peng might have. (I take this notion from Charles Stross’s Glass House, where he describes a somewhat similar procedure being used—for security purposes!—in nanotechnological “assemblers” that arriving teleported immigrants have to pass through.)
And then the Fourier terms are transmitted to a 100 km by 100 km by 100 km volume of matter on another world. This block of slaved quantum-computing matter is called a Peng ranch. For dramatic effect I’m making the volume be big. Each individual atom in the Peng ranch carries out the emulation of one single component of the Fourier series.
The atoms hum together, and their beats converge onto a single vibration of matter waves that is a simulacrum of the woogified Peng. Keep in mind that woogies have mass and physical presence. They’re not just something like holograms or mental images. In imagining how a distributed quantum computation can cause a physical object to emerge, think of a parabolic mirror (or a lens) which focuses a bunch of light waves to a single burning point, or think of a bunch of lasers focusing light waves on a single spot to produce a tiny sun. And now suppose that it’s DeBroglie matter waves instead of light waves.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
Like most emulations, the woogie-generating computation is highly inefficient. A normal Peng’s cubic meter or so of matter computes the Peng in question, and that’s the end of it. But a Peng woogie requires all the mass in the 100 km by 100 km by 100 km volume of a Peng ranch. This is quadrillion cubic meters, so we’ve got a quadrillion-fold inefficiency here—in that we’re using a quadrillion cubic meters to emulate one cubic meter.
In visualizing how the initial woogie emulation can be so incredibly inefficient, think of an immense tangle of machinery that does something very simple like peeling an apple. Or an insanely complex cellular-automata-based construction that generates a tiny little regular pattern such as a binary counter or a listing of the primes. Or a Turing machine that flurbs and skitters up and down light-years of memory tape just too compute a few digits of pi.
I’ll allow one initial mitigation of the inefficiency. As Peng are, after all, somewhat similar to each other, you can piggyback the computations of a few Peng together into a single wave function, end have the Peng ranch support two or three Peng woogies—who are exceedingly tightly linked as they share a single wave function.
One of the threads of the story will involve the Peng trying to achieve greater efficiency in the woogie computation. Another thread involves way of trying to disable a Peng ranch, using a mind-virus called the love-bug. Jayjay knows the name, after all, of every one of those ten tridecillion atoms. (The names are each eight random English words, as I mentioned in the “octillion” post.)
