The new issue of my SF webzine, Flurb #6 , is off to a good start. We got good mentions on BoingBoing and in io9, we scored ten thousand visits in week #1, and the contributors are happy.

Sept 17, 2008.

I recently read a novel, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, in which time has a branching quality, and the characters have an ability to sniff out the best universe for them to be moving forward into. Or, put differently, they have an ability to project themselves into the more favorable regions of the Hilbert space of all possible worlds. (Stephenson uses his own made-up name—something like “Hemm space”—for this manifold of polycosmic configurations.)

Logically, I’ve always felt there to be something fundamentally incoherent (not to mention story-killing) about the SFictional notion of picking an optimal world from many equally real possible worlds.

My sense is that if time really branches, then you wholeheartedly go into each branch; you’re conscious in each of them, and there’s no single “lit-up by the searchlight of the mind” that zigzags up through the time-tree to limn the path that you “really” take. The whole tree is lit. You really and truly think you’re in each branch that something like you is in.

Restating my logical feeling in terms of the more static Hilbert space view, I’m saying that a version of my mind should be psychologically present in each of the possible worlds that contains a copy of someone like me—and that there should not be any single narrative thread of bright points marking the privileged sequence of possible worlds which I “really and truly” inhabit. The whole block is lit and equally real, and, once again, I fully feel like I’m in each possible world that contains someone like me.

Turning however from logic to emotion, I do have an appreciation and a longing for the heroic concept that I really am selecting a best possible path. I mean, that’s of how a human life is fact lived. You consider the possible outcomes of possible actions, and you direct your actions so as to realize the more favorable results.

That is, after all, one of the big evolutionary values of human-type consciousness: the ability to mentally simulate possible futures. And so we adjust our actions to enter the better worlds. As a result, we have an emotional, experiential sense that the bad, unchosen paths are in fact shriveling away to the left and the right.

But if this human sense of things reflects a real phenomenon, as novels like Anathem suggest, then we’d have to suppose that our minds somehow co-create the universe with God, helping Her/Him craft the best possible cosmic novel from the welter of possible worlds, or, putting it differently, helping the Maker carve the most beautiful universe from the Hilbert-space-quarried block of possibility-stone.

Of course an atheist will bridle at this formulation. But we don’t really need to talk about God or the Maker—we can instead talk in terms of the cosmic state function converging on some particular Attractor. But simply as a manner of speaking, it’s often easier to talk about “God”.

Setting that issue aside, there’s a more important issue to mention in connection with the notion that we might be helping the Cosmic Attractor choose the universal history. The point that I want to stress is that, although some aspects of your worldline are determined by you, some are not.

Yes, when you drive carefully and avoid having an accident, then you can say that is your personal doing, your own guiding of the world’s narrative. But when you get on an airplane and your plane happens not to crash, that’s not your doing at all—unless you want to get into superstitious, synchronistic, or magical modes of belief.

In cartoon terms, when the falling safe lands on Elmer Fudd instead of you, that’s random luck, isn’t it? Or would you instead say that you moved the universe in a good direction or that Elmer Fudd at some level wanted to die? Better to say that the Cosmic Attractor or the Divine Author felt it makes for a better overall “narrative” to have you live on instead of Elmer.

So, okay, we’re supposing that we humans help determine a unique history of the world, and I’ve just made the point that we don’t do it entirely on our own, and that some external, cosmic considerations come into play as well. But if do have some influence, we can think of ourselves as somewhat heroic.

And if this heroic view of the world is true, then we really don’t live in a multiverse, or in a Hilbert space. There really is just one true history of the world—or, not to be too strict, maybe a pruned-down skeleton of only a few possible histories, with these few forming an elegantly branching frame of a limited number of possible paths—I visualize a beautifully a silvered old bare tree on a cliff. This would be a multiverse quite different from a dense and meaningless thicket in which every goddamn possible thing happens all of the goddamn time, with every piss-ant atom’s dither of a photon-beep splitting the world yet again in two.

Just now I was having a dream about selecting particular paths through the multiverse. I was standing before a painting on an easel, or maybe even in a whole studio room of unfinished paintings, touching up scene after scene. And as I painted, I could look out into the world, and I could see the realities changing as I altered my paintings of what had gone (or would go) down.

Near the end of the dream, I was working on an actual acrylic painting that is in my actual studio, that same painting called “The Wanderer,” in which the white-haired man resembling me is finding his way along a mountain path, glancing over his shoulder at his past, a cliff of odd-shaped rocks where perhaps some demonic figures lurk…and in my dream I was trying to finish the picture with the curve of the ongoing path.

And then I awoke in a sweat, came upstairs, and wrote this note, starting at 1:23 a.m. Strange.

I’ve been thinking about going to Paris to take a commission to write the libretto for an electronic-music opera about the logician Kurt Gödel—whom I had the good fortune to meet with three times in 1972—and right before going to bed tonight, I was looking through my books on Gödel, and I found one that, at least for a moment, I couldn’t remember having seen before. I had this eerie feeling that Gödel’s spirit was meddling with this branch of reality, making sure that this particular book found its way into my hand. The book turned out to be a memoir by my old Institute for Advanced Study mentor, Gaisi Takeuti, with an essay about the end about the time when Gödel was “on narcotics” and thought the true power of the continuum was alef-two. And that’s in fact how I met Gödel, he became interested in me because I’d given a talk on that odd doodle of a paper, and Takeuti told him about me. Strange.

And now, upstairs, having woken from my dream of the multiverse, it strikes me that if it really were possible to surf one’s way among the alternate worlds, then that’s exactly what I (in concert with the Cosmic Attractor) did this summer. Instead of me dying, we dodged the coffin and, against the odds, I got well.

I’m liking this branch of the multiverse, this region of Hilbert space.

Sept 19, 2008.

I finished my painting “The Wanderer” this morning. Usual reminder: you can buy prints or notecards at rudy.imagekind.com, and “The Wanderer” is on this site as well.

I got the original background by means of a trick I’ve used before: I take the left-over paint still on the palette from the last painting, thin it down, and quickly paint the shadow shapes that I see on the fresh canvas—the shadows from the trees over my back yard (my usual studio). I don’t have to think about the shapes, I’m just filling in colors in the patterns of the shadows that are actually on the canvas. I like bringing in the natural gnarl this way. And then I looked at the patterns for a few days and eventually—with my wife’s help—I started seeing it as a mountain landscape.

The critters on the rocks on the left are doodles from my subconscious, but it could be that they’re memories from the Wanderer’s past.

And to bring it to life, I added a Wanderer, modeled on the figure in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Pedlar.”

I’ve always suspected “The Pedlar” to be a Bosch self-portrait, and by the same token, “The Wanderer” is my own self portrait.

“The Wanderer” represents my own life’s journey, with me currently at a somewhat confusing bend in the road, and the future entirely uncertain.

[Added Tuesday, September 16, 2008.]

I’ve been upgrading my paintings site, and I updated the painting notes, which you can read as a web page or as a printable PDF file.

Some of the originals are for sale, at prices newly marked-down as of today.

And you can buy prints or even notecards of my paintings at rudy.imagekind.com. The three newest pictures (but not “The Wanderer” yet) are on the site too.

“Sell it, Ed!” … to quote David Foster Wallace (from a 1980s story about some guys getting wasted while watching pitchman Ed McMahon on TV.)

[Added Monday, Sept 15, 2008:]

I’m working on yet another painting, called “The Wanderer,” which is loosely inspired by Jeroen Bosch’s “The Pedlar,” this is just today’s draft version above.

I got the background in an ab-ex fashion by simply painting shapes to match the shadows of leaves that happened to lie on my canvas, then fashioned it into the scene and added the Wanderer (me). I’m thinking I might put some creepy critters in those rocks (?) on the left, and maybe some cows in the field.

[Sept 12, 2008 entry follows:]

I’ve been painting a lot lately, and doing my best to stay relatively idle. Who knows, it may be awhile till I start another book.

This one is called “Alien Picnic,” and I started it en plein air on St. Joseph’s Hill in Los Gatos. I mentioned it before in the blog, but recently I finished it up, adding more colors and layers to the hillsides, and touching up those cute l’il eyeballs.

This is a picture of someone in a hospital and it’s called, uh, “Cerebral Hemorrhage.” It’s supposed to show how he feels. I like the 3D blob of blood and its shadow on the sheet, also the way the guy’s soul is flowing out through the soles of his feet…with the lobes of his brain piled up on the right like a compost heap, with a terrified, watchful eye on top, twinned with the eye of the soul in that starfish shape. Buy the notecard! Send a “Cerebral Hemorrhage” greeting today!

I’d rather be at the beach anytime.

The last few days I’ve been putting together issue #6 of my webzine Flurb , and should be able to serve it up to you next week, the line-up’s all set and I’m just waiting on a few author bios and so on.

I have one story by my friend Michael Blumlein, “The Big One,” a kind of magic fish story, rather than an orthodox SF story, and his magic fish got into my head to the point where I painted him just the other day.

A technical painting issue that interests me these days is getting transparency effects, that is, glazes and veils, when you’re using the somewhat dead and opaque medium of acrylic paint. I’ve been using Liquitex fluid gloss medium lately, though in past I’ve used Golden medium, and I’m thinking it might be interesting to try the gel medium.

I’ll let you know when the fresh platter of Flurb is ready to serve…

I’ve been reading an advance copy Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, preparing to introduce his reading at Moe’s on Wednesday, Sept 10, 2008. The book goes on sale nationwide on Tuesday, September 9, 2008.

Anathem is heavy in every good sense of the word, one of the best SF novels I’ve read in the last couple of years. I’d put it up right there with Charles Stross’s Accelerando and my own Postsingular, not to mention the esteemed recent works of my cyberpunk pals Gibson, Sterling, and Shirley. It’s truly twenty-first century SF, amazingly broad, deep, and well-informed with, at times, the flavor of a classic philosophical treatise.

One particular SFictional/philosophical theme that Stephenson takes on in Anathem is the question of whether our consciousness might span multiple universes, as well as wider questions about ways in which alternate universes might influence each other.

Stephenson advocates a radical notion under which some possible physical universes might in fact be something like a Platonic world of forms relative to some other universes—he calls this Complex Protism, although we Earthlings might call it Complex Platonism.

The MIT physicist Max Tegmark actually has written some papers discussing a somewhat similar notion—see, for instance his online paper (PDF format) “The Mathematical Universe.”

Here’s Neal’s official website (updated as of yesterday), and a casual personal website that he sporadically maintains.

Neal likes to write long books, and I’d estimate Anathem to be some 370,000 words long, that is, three or four times the length of a typical novel such as we lesser mortals might pen. He liberally uses many made-up words, so at first you’re continually flipping back to the Glossary at the book’s end. A bit of a learning-curve, but after a few hundred pages I was totally into the book.

Rather than going into full plot-spoiling detail about the book, I’ll just paste in some passages that for one reason or another particularly pleased me, marking the quotes by indenting them with a line in the margin. Think of this as a preview reel. Most of the photos were taken in Santa Cruz, CA, this weekend.

The main characters in Anathem are a bit like cloistered academics, and often get into dialogs not unlike what you’d find in Plato’s writings. At one point, our hero and a friend are watching two colonies of ants fighting each other.

”…You look down on it from above, and say, ”˜Oh, that looked like flanking.’ But if there’s no commander to see the field and direct their movements, can they really perform coordinated maneuvers?”

“That’s a little like Saunt Taunga’s Question,” I pointed out. “Can a sufficiently large field of cellular automata think?”

Describing a revered philosopher/mathematician, Saunt Bly, who’d been expelled from his enclave:

…to live out the remainder of his days on top of a butte surrounded by slines who worshipped him as a god. He even inspired them to stop consuming blithe, whereupon they became surly, killed him, and ate his liver out of a misconception that this was where he did his thinking.

Note that “slines” are common people, and their name is derived from the central letters of “baseline.” “Blithe” is a tweaked plant that’s rich in the psychoactive agent called allswell.

Discussing how the outer word of “Saeculars” views the enclosed world of the philosophical orders:

“The Saeculars know that we exist. They don’t know quite what to make of us. The truth is too complicated for them to keep in their heads. Instead of the truth, they have simplified representations—caricatures—of us. Those come and go… But if you stand back and look at them, you see certain patterns that recur again and again, like, like—attractors in a chaotic system.”

Our hero’s mentor teaches him about the importance of seeking the gnarl in your everyday surroundings:

“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Our hero is talking to his sister about how they’re going to face a possible alien invasion. He’s recently been in a stationery store. His sister is asking what other supplies they might use to try and defend Earth. They joke like mathematicians…

“Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

“Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

“That’d be great.”

Discussing what it is that our ruling class really wants to take from the common people.

The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People … had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were a part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?

One of the book’s numerous definitions.

Dialog: A discourse, usually in formal style, between Theors. … In the classic format, a Dialog involves two principals … Another common format is the Triangular, featuring a savant, and ordinary person who seeks knowledge, and an imbecile.

A discussion between our hero and his mentor Orolo about what we’d call the Multiple Universes hypothesis.

“You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.”

“I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”

By the way, my friend Nick Herbert has written a really good essay on the slippery topic multiversal consciousness: “Quantum Tantra.”

David Deutsch has also written some good stuff on multiversal computation, see my It from Qubit post on this.

A mention of my favorite mathematician, the philosopher-king Kurt Gödel, in a discussion about Gödel’s rotating universe model, in which a sufficiently long round trip can lead back into your past!

“On Laterre, the result was discovered by a kind of Saunt named Gödel: a friend of the Saunt who had earlier discovered geometrodynamics. The two of them were, you might say, fraas in the same math.”

“Saunt,” similar to our word Saint, is a shortening of “savant.” A “math” is an enclave where dedicated scholars live, and a male scholar of this type is a fraa.

Re. Gödel’s model of the universe, see a nice essay by John Bell summarizing how it can lead to multiple universes. The cool image here is from a Japanese essay about Gödel’s universe.

The people in Anathem have something like our Internet, which is called the Reticulum.

“The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists … for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons as we call them.”

Two miles away—directly across the facet—was a hydrogen bomb the size of a six-story office building. It was essentially egg-shaped. But like a beetle caught in spider’s webbing, its form was blurred by a fantastic tangle of strut-work and plumbing…

Yaaar! We’re talking real SF!

I just finished the book, and I’m sorry to be done. Looking up into the sky, I notice a shiny…metal flying machine. My God! I live on a planet with flying machines! Oh, wait, I knew that already. Anathem makes everything seems surprising.