I’m going light on hyperlinks today because my desktop machine is — the horror, the horror — back at ClickAway. Of course they can’t reproduce the problem. Of course they won’t listen to me. Going to ClickAway is like descending into a horrible, crippled, slow-motion world. My machine has to spend the weekend there, waiting for them to observe it’s inability to start on Monday morning. If they remember. Wheenk wheenk wheenk. I’m doing this blog entry with some difficulty on my laptop. A desperate voice from the front…

I’ve obsessively collated, edited, ordered, and responded to a bunch of your comments on PS2 Note #1 through #6. To find these notes, you can put put “PS2 Note” into the Search box at the upper right hand corner of the blog.

<<<<<=====rs on One Mind: I notice that in panpsychism or hylozoism you have many separate consciousnesses, a different mind in each thing. How does this relate to the mystical or Eastern-philosophy notion of the universe being filled by one cosmic mind? When a log burns, its silp consciousness might experience a great release into the freedom of being the air, merging into the consciousness of the air which previously in sensed not so clearly. One thing that seems to be consistently reported about awakening, as in enlightenment, is the realization that “I was always awake.” It’s not the personality that wakes up, but the connection to the All. <<<<<=====Steve H on One Mind: Why would each pebble have its own separate memory? Why not have all rocks share a big memory, and all fire, etc. Fires are transient; they’d see their inevitable entropic destruction as soon as they became sentient and panic, try to spread. I feel like a fire wouldn’t have much to say except “Feed me.” But maybe they have a shared racial memory, so you can light a match and talk to it; the next match remembers your question. =========>>>>>Rudy on One Mind

In any case, I do believe in the One Cosmic Mind. Monism. But that’s a wholly separate issue from whether or not rocks can think as individuals. The name “panpsychism” for the idea of objects being alive is a little misleading, as it sounds like it might mean that there is Cosmic Mind. Monism can be true or false independently of whether or not rocks have minds.

On enlightenment, the other day Terry Bisson said to me, “I figure that your existence is a huge circle, and everything is singing, and when you’re ”˜alive’ is the only time that you don’t hear the song.”

I think we could accept that a fire has a localized and rather short life. Maybe the fire accepts it too. Maybe they don’t care about dying. As I think I said before, the reason death is such a big deal to us is that we are genetically reproducing beings. We need to spread our genes while alive. An inorganic being doesn’t have that issue. There’s always more fire. The flame dances and enjoys with no fear of extinction.

This said, there’s something to the idea that the fire might pass its thoughts on to another one. Maybe fires’ souls cumulatively get smarter.

<<<<<=====alek on Living Organs: Do parts of a human body other than the brain become sentient as well? If so, then as well as your old brain, you’d have silp personalities inside you too, like etheric parasites. Maybe humans turn into something new. =========>>>>>Rudy on Living Organs

I do sometimes feel like my organs are alive. Richard Pryor had a routine about his heart choking him to repay him for all the cigarettes. But it would be really different to have the parts talk to you in voices in your head. But, you know, they already do. Sometimes you don’t listen and the pain gets worse.

In some ways, I think live in the hylozoic era won’t be all that different. I’m working all the time now to see objects around me as alive. It’s not that big a switch.

<<<<<=====rs on Ghosts: Maybe when a human dies, there is a real ghost, as the memory persists in the matter that made up the body? Could a body repair itself? =========>>>>>Rudy on Ghosts:

So you’re brain is mush, but the muscle slips and bone silps are still active. I can see some zombie scenes. This is a great idea. Zombies are cool.

<<<<<=====rs on Googling: Note that in our world, effective search in the style of Google requires massive indexing and massively distributed hierarchical computing. Does something analogous happen in the world of PS2? =========>>>>>Rudy on Googling:

That’s an interesting problem. It would be worth at least mentioning this though. About how the silps all have to work together to keep the index working. It’s like a tax they’re paying to Gaia, and Gaia is doing the indexing because it helps her think. Maybe some silps want to hold on her, but she won’t let them.

<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Atomic Silps: Is there a threshold of size or complexity for an object to wake up? Are your body’s cells awake? The molecules that comprise them? The atoms of the molecules? The quarks of the atoms? There could be disciplines devoted to communing overtly and directly with your cells or atoms. Mindful meditation to the max! =========>>>>>Rudy on Atomic Silps:

This is a traditional objection to panpsychism, the slippery slope that ends with quarks and electrons being alive. But why be stingy? Let the l’il gaahs have their tiny little lives. Fireflies of mind. Quantum mechanically, even a single electron is a gnarly computation, a vibrating state function field.

There was this stoner bible some forty years back, Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, I worshipped that book. And his big teaching was that there’s only one kind of thing in the universe. Monads kind of. “Nobody here but us chickens.” In his view, the mind of an atom was in fact just as rich and big as the mind of a human, a sun, or a rock. I can see running with this idea a little. If you push too hard, this turns into Monism. The ubiquitous and identical Many are in but multitudinous reflections of the One. I can see using this as a move at some point. But for most of the book, I want the rocks and so on to be nitty-gritty alive. And, yeah, the atoms are alive, but we don’t talk to them so much. They’re like a chorus in the background.

<<<<<=====Steve H on Time Scale: Silps might not be on our time scale at all. Rocks might think in geologic time, atoms in Planck time. =========>>>>>Rudy on Time Scale:

In principle a valid point. Atoms might think really fast, planets really slow. But for purposes of the story, I’m not gonna go there.

<<<<<=====Steve H on Silp Intelligence: Giving a rock the power to think might not be enough. With no instincts or desires, what would they reach for or wonder about? I’d say you need installed software along with the lazy-8 memory or you’d have a Zen rock garden that did its own meditating. You have it right when you say they’d be little gurus meditating, already in nirvana at birth. Maybe it takes a nudge to start them off thinking. Didn’t Treebeard say the elves wanted to wake everything up and talk to it? Perhaps a silp mind coalesces around fragments of legacy AI code. Would the new mind find life as a pebble tedious? I think talking silps would be rare, and silps with something to say even rarer. I suspect silps who spoke might inspire pilgrimages. =========>>>>>Rudy on Silp Intelligence:

When the lazy eight unfurls and the silps are born, they reflexively “eat” all the nants and orphids, absorbing their data. I’m not going to have the beezies per se survive, but some of that thinky code will be in the silps. It’s good legacy code, it comes to us from when Mars was a Dyson sphere of a jillion nants, the Nant Mind figured a lot of stuff out. So that gives our silps a kind of boost that they might not otherwise have. In fact other planets with unfurled lazy eight don’t have such smart silps as we do. Earth itself is worth a pilgrimage. “See the incredible talking rock!” But those talking rocks are all over the place on our weird wonderful world.

I’m just beginning to get a glimmer of how rocks think. They actually like being made into walls. They like being stuck together with mortar, and they think it’s cool to be raised up a few feet above the ground. Getting high!

<<<<<=====alek on Artistic Hylozoism: I saw a video kind of like yours on YouTube made by an autistic woman, who has her own language that she describes as ”˜being in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment’. Living in a panpsychic world would really, really change the way we are. =========Ira Madclaw on artistic hylozoism: The artist Andy Goldsworthy totally lives in the hylozoic world. =========>>>>>Rudy on Artistic Hylozoism:

rs compared my videos to the autistic video too. Thanks a lot, guys! I was just really happy in my video, don’t you understand? Seriously, I get what you’re saying. That’s a great video, too, by the way, I put a link to it up there, and I found it by seaching video.google.com.

I can really relate to where that woman is at. And her argument is that by kind of dancing with the world she’s speaking a kind of language with it — in addition to the regular language that we normals speak. Sometimes I go hiking with people and we end up talking the whole time and not adequately seeing the nature.

<<<<<=====Steve H on Kiqqie Animals: Sentient dogs and cats might be very common and dangerous. As smart as we are and with less morals, they could become a new criminal class. Insects could be very dangerous - hordes of hyperlinked roaches might be a menace. =========>>>>>Rudy on Kiqqie Animals:

I haven’t thought much about animals with high IQ or at least perception increase. This is a good point, I’ll have to take it into account. But maybe not till PS3, I have enough issues already I think.

<<<<<=====Steve H on Scary Silps: I think you’ve had a key insight that some of them might be angry or cold, and not very good company. It would be a handy trick if, say, a garden gnome took over the planet or your kneecap went on strike; just erase them. Every doorway might have a silp-remover field to prevent your pocket change from screaming “don’t spend me, daddy,” or your rings and jewelry from demanding jewelry of their own. <<<<<=====Doctor Jabbir on Scary Silps: Redwoods are not intrinsically unfriendly. But remember our species clear-cut this entire valley about 100 years ago and trees have very long memories. I am wary of redwoods and give them my excess nitrogen whenever i can. =========>>>>>Rudy on Scary Silps:

I don’t think there’s any way to “stun” the mind out of a silp. Their mind is stored in the eighth dimension, and we can’t really touch that. I do see some limitations on the silps imposed by Gaia. It would just ruin things if objects could teleport, so I’m gonna decree that Gaia doesn’t let them.

I like the idea of cranky silps. That’s what animist religions are all about. Getting in good with the spirit that you annoyed by defiling a certain glade. In animism we have meta silps too, like a panther god that lives in all panthers, which was something Steve H was talking about. But I don’t want to go there. Gotta limit the options. As it is, I’m in more danger than ever in writing the Mathematician Godfather novel: “He makes you an offer you can’t understand.”

<<<<<=====Steve H on Telepathic Parasitism: In terms of being parasitized or used as a slave on a server farm, someone could come up with a bit of brain software to prevent someone leeching off your calculating ability by distorting the data as it was processed. Or maybe your brainware could give them viruses. If leeches couldn’t trust the data they cribbed, they’d give up. If we could block parasitic usage of our computation, then we could sell off computer time. Or band together for members-only brain sharing. =========>>>>>Rudy on Telepathic Parasitism:

I’ve already decided that in day to day life humans simply have the ability to close off our telepathy. Like you can close your eyes or put in ear plugs. We gotta have that or we’re screwed. Maybe rocks aren’t that skilled, maybe they can’t close themselves off, because they don’t need to anyway, as rocks aren’t mind gaming each other much.

The evil Kang are in fact going to parasitize our uncommonly rich silps and use them as a server farm. And they’ll be waiting like slobbering ghouls at the door to parasitize us every time we open our telepathy blinders. So it’s either be parasitized or don’t do telepathy.

The Rull and the Magic Harp will in fact help humanity figure out a way to stave off the Kang parasitism. I’m calling the firewall (obscure math joke) an Ultrafilter. I suppose it could work by warping the input/output enough to make it useless or by spreading viruses. But I’m thinking I’ll come up with some other means of its action.

As for the group mind-sharing, that’s a separate idea, and a good one. Thinking clubs. Well, that’s what this blog is an example of right now, isn’t it?

<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Telepathic Society: How is individuality preserved? Because of course, the gnarliest behaviors come from just that right mix of boundaries and merging. People are really anthologies as it is: our separate cognitive modules have really high-bandwidth interconnections inside our brains; a group of people is really just a single cognitive entity whose higher-level cognitive modules (whole brains) communicate via low-bandwidth channels (language and other expressive mechanisms). There’s probably an inverse relationship between level of cognitive ability and maximum speed of data transfer between peer-level modules, and that relationship has evolved over millennia for maximum gnarliness (and hence adaptability). The lazy eight telepathy seems like a way around that: a high-quality, high-speed channel between two or more really giant, sophisticated cognitive machines (brains). But maybe society works worse with high-bandwidth communication. A lot of effort might go into techniques for maintaining and defining inter-brain boundaries, much like the discipline of cultivating Zen non-attachment in the face of the overwhelming material richness the world provides. Increasing the data flow could easily degrade the gnarliness of the computation space, like a flash flood overwhelming a whirlpool in a stream. =========>>>>>Rudy on Telepathic Society:

This is a rich vein of thought. I’ve played a lot with dynamical systems and parallel systems like alife colonies or cellular automata. And indeed, these things can be very finely tuned for gnarl, and if you change essential parameters you spiral down into dead repetition or up into chaotic dog-barf seething. So maybe society doesn’t “work” when communication gets to be so high-bandwidth. Certainly it would change in ways hard to imagine—thus the need for the PS2 thought experiment.

<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Merging: It might be hard to restore the flame of an individual mind after too deep a merge. =========>>>>>Rudy on Merging:

Yeah, I’m all over this idea, I talked about it in my novel Saucer Wisdom already. I also think of the spacecases who took acid too many times. Too much merge. Can’t snap back. But with lazy eight we’ll be more robust. A complete system backup awaits in the eighth dimension.

<<<<<=====Doctor Jabbir on Quantum Mechanics: The most intriguing property of the quantum world is the notion of complementarity—that you can ask one question (momentum?) or another (position?) but not both and that somehow the world contains both but you can’t get at it. There is also the possibility of asking questions that were simply inconceivable in a classical. Maybe if we could find some classically nonsensical ways to address the macroscopic world we’d produce entirely novel and unexpected outcomes. I suspect that consciousness is one of these answers that the world gives to a weird-ass request and that there are more ways of being out/in there too that can be discovered by learning to ask to right questions. =========>>>>>Rudy on Quantum Mechanics:

I love this line of thought. Maybe consciousness consists of a weird-ass request. “Am I happy?” I always come back to Damasio’s idea that being consciousness means having a mental image of yourself watching your life. So your conscious mind is the thing watching the feelings of your self-image as it watches your life. That’s how rocks get conscious too, by the way. They become aware of themselves having feelings about things.

<<<<<=====rs on Quantum Computation: From the perspective of quantum computation as described in Set Lloyd’s “Programming the Universe” it seems easy to have memory and computation all over the place, there are lots of bits to go around. =========>>>>>Rudy on Quantum Computation:

Yes, I recently came to realize that, given quantum computation, a rock really is as rich a system as a fire or a waterfall. At the quantum scale it’s like a sun. Or like a ball and spring model with a trillion chaotic strings. I had some nice email from Seth Lloyd after I reviewed his book on my blog (use the Search window to find it…). He said something along the lines of, “even if you don’t LIKE the idea of a quantum reality, that’s what’s really TRUE.” I’m letting the quantum into my heart.

<<<<<=====rs on Silp Happiness: Consciousness centered in inorganic objects would have different motivations, different mental axes. For instance a rock might not mind if it never moved? Perhaps it’s only humans that are so often unhappy with their situations. Maybe silps don’t even have the unhappy/happy axis. =========>>>>>Rudy on Silp Happiness:

Maybe not, but I think it’s gonna be more fun to pretend that they do. The animist religions always have the spirits being happy or unhappy with what we’re doing.

Thanks for all the feedback, y’all. This is a big help to me.

I was really nervous about reading from Mathematicians in Love at City Lights last night. Like City Lights has always symbolized hip beatnikdom to me. I remember when I first walked in there in 1970, it was like entering a temple. And when I moved out here in 1986, I went straight to City Lights and saw my first issue of High Frontiers, which led to all the fun with Mondo 2000.

My wife and I went up a bit early to walk around North Beach. And then it was time to face the music.

They always have my SF novels in the basement room at City Lights, which is nice.

The reading was in the little upstairs room with the poetry and the beatnik books, with Jack Kerouac alley right outside the window. In the event, the reading wasn’t very intimdating after all. I forget that by now I’m a lot further along the road to Mount Parnassus than I was back in the day. By the way, the next picture is on Grant Street, and isn’t of City Lights. It shows, rather, a human soul leaping upward.

I rose the occasion and did a good, highly political reading. I forgot to photograph the audience, but I got a good tape.

Click on the icon above to access my podcast.

One of the more colorful characters at the reading was Paul McEnery, a friend from the Mondo 2000 days, he stuck around to chat at the end.

And then Sylvia and I went to Cafe Greco and had some tiramisu. I’m a free man.

Well, not quite free. I’m still endlessly screwing around with plug-ins for the WordPress blogware. And, dammit, I thought I was done with computer programming. The only upside of the tedious labor is that, judging from the past, I’ll probably transrealize the pain into something interesting in the stefnal postsingular world of my current novel. As Gurdjieff said, “No effort is ever in vain.”

What is “stefnal”? My editor Dave Hartwell used it an email the other day, he was saying he liked my proposed book title Hylozoic as it’s so stefnal. So I went on Google and unearthed a definition in the context of an April 21, 2006, post in a Nightshade Books Discussion, the info from no less a man than Paul Di Filippo:

“Historically, within the genre, stef has been another long-standing term for science fiction. The derivation comes from the old scientifiction, which was always abbreviated stf. The vowel was interpolated so that one could actually pronounce the term. Stefnal has three fewer syllables than science-fictional, always a plus for economical writing. Additionally, it functions as a totally baffling shibboleth.”

Yaar.

Today’s post is the kind that gives bloggers a bad name… Yattering on about my frikkin’ computer.

The good news is that I switched to using WordPress to power my blog, and I think it looks a lot nicer.

Before I’d been using Simple PHP, which isn’t so well-maintained. Naturally I’ve had a lot of boring and or horrifying computer issues to deal with for the last couple of days. I couldn’t have done it without my son Rudy Rucker, Jr., of MonkeyBrains Inc.

Plus three weeks ago the fan on my motherboard died and the guys at ClickAway in Campbell erroneously (IMHO) thought I needed a $300 hard drive, which has now taken taken scores of hours to configure in the way I like. The drive-change didn’t fix the fan problem, of course, the motherboard was still beeping help help help, so I had to go back to ClickAway for the real problem (the $7 fan). And I scanned my old drive, which was still in the machine, and no, it really doesn’t have any bad sectors, the ClickAway guys found a false positive. But, okay, I’ll use the new drive anyway, it’s bigger, and this way I’m backed up.

So now everything works except that every morning my computer won’t start the first two or three times I turn it on. I tried disconnecting the old hard drive (just in case it wasn’t still perfectly good), the new hard drive, the CD ROM drive—but it’s always the same in the morning, no matter which drives are connected, the computer clicks a few times and turns itself off. The pushbutton on/off switch freezes up for a few seconds, I push-push-push it , eventually the machine makes it through a start cycle. Any ideas? I dread going back to ClickAway. Hoo boy.

City Lights tonight! I’m nervous as hell.

Soon I”ll get back to writing SF about a Hylozoic world that’s blessedly free of computers. LOL.

I have a really long and intricate post today, so I’m gonna leave it at the top for the most of the week so you can absorb it and comment. But first, I need to mention that I’ll be reading at City Lights in North Beach on Wednesday, January 31st at 7 pm. As their announcment puts it: “Legendary novelist, mathematician, computer scientist, and cyberpunk innovator visits City Lights for an evening of readings, conversation, and synchronicity in action.” I’ll try and podcast it.

[“California Artist” sculpture by Robert Arneson. This was one of the first works of art I saw when I moved out here 20 years ago. Note that the artist’s head is empty; those “mirrorshades” are black holes. It’s like the artist is saying, “Yeah, we’re flaky in California. You got a problem with that?”]

I recently turned in a novel called Postsingular, or PS1 for short, and now I’m working on a sequel called PS2. Last week I was calling the new novel After Everything Woke Up, but today my working title for the new novel is Hylozoic, which means “relating to hylozoism,” where hylozoism is the doctrine that every object is alive.

I’m working on a series of notes for ideas for my new book PS2. So far we’ve had

PS2 Note #1: Talking to Objects,

PS2 Note #2: Lazy Eight,

PS2 Note #3: Omnividence,

PS2 Note #4: Telepathy,

PS2 Note #5: Hostile Silps,

and today’s PS2 Note #6: The Noospheres of PS1 and PS1. Later, maybe this Friday, I’ll post PS2 Note #7: Teleportation. And then for PS2 Note #8, I’ll do a post which summarizes some of the comments you readers have made on PS2 Notes 1-7. This post will be similar in form to the Postsingular Comments post I did last February 14, 2006, when I was getting reader input for some of the ideas for PS1. So go ahead and post some comments on this long note today. The comments can relate to any of the earlier PS2 Notes as well.

In today’s entry’s title, I’m using the word “noosphere” to refer to a planet’s collective forms of mind. Just as the biosphere includes all living things, or the atmosphere includes all the air, the noosphere includes all the minds on the planet.

A Pyramid of Mind.

In both PS1 and PS2 I have three levels of intelligence in the natural world. The pattern is something like a pyramid with a broad base, a tapering hierarchy, and a single point at top.

(Base) A low level of ubiquitous entities which store data and carry out processing;

(Hierarchy) An extensive medium level containing a successive layers of AIs which first emerge as distributed processes based upon the low level but which then pile higher and higher upon each other.

(Top) A top level containing a single entity that stores its data in the base level and which incorporates all the mid-level agents that are in the AI hierarchy. An alternate model is that there are two or three of the highest level entities, and they compete for the allegiances of the mid-level agents and for the base data space.

The PS1 Pyramid of Nanotech Mind

In my recently completed SF novel PS1: Postsingular, I implemented the mind pyramid as follows

(PS1 Base) The lowest level base consists of uniform hardware units that are molecular computers or nanomachines called orphids, each of which has about a gigabyte of memory and a gigaflop of processor power and is roughly as smart as a dog.

(PS1 Hierarchy) Emergent lifelike AIs resembling the Belusouv-Zhabotinsky scrolls found in cellular automata. They’re called beezies. They act as helpful agents for people, carrying out things like complex and tedious searches for information or simulating and evaluating multiple alternate action scenarios. Some groups of smaller beezies coalesce into single higher-level beezies, and so on in an upward cascade.

(PS1 Top) The so-called Big Pig, a god-like mind that people enjoy tuning in on. Communing with the Big Pig is something like a mystical experience or a drug trip. People who become addicted to this are called pigheads.

The PS2 Pyramid of Natural Mind

Now I’ll outline how I plan to realize the mind pyramid in PS2. Some of my ideas about universal analog computation are “explained” in the 2005 video below. I love putting in these YouTube links! By the way, you want to click the big transparent arrow you see the video. If you click elsewhere in the preview image you go to a YouTube page. And to stop the video you click the pause button. I know the sound quality is terrible; it’s the Big sur wind blowing across my pocket-sized SONY digital camera.(PS2 Base) Every bit of matter is endowed with endless “lazy eight” memory, and the computational seething of the quantum states provides the processing power. Using a word made up by the philosopher Leibniz, I call the lowest low level natural minds monads. Most simply, I can regard a monad as the mind of an elementary particle. (Eventually, but not yet, I’ll need to consider the effect, if any, of lazy eight in Subdee, the subdimensional world below the Planck level.)

(PS2 Hierarchy) The monads support higher-level intelligent emergent minds that I will call silps. An extended large object has a fairly hefty silp mind. Groups of objects have silps minds as well, as do larger regions: cities, counties, continents. As with the beezies, we have an upward-mounting hierarchy of silps.

(PS2 Top) The top level mind is Gaia, the world-soul of planet Earth.

[Graffiti on former ticket kiosk of a closed movie theater on Mission Street. Is that a Mayan god, or what?]

The Transition From PS1 to PS2

(Eliminate the orphids.) At the end of PS1, lazy eight is unrolled, and the emerging silps immediately destroy some bad nanomachines called nants. The silps also destroy the orphids, even though the orphids were relatively benign. I eliminate the orphids because, applying Occam’s Razor, I don’t want to have two distinct low level ubiquitous computation networks in PS2. If I have monads, I don’t need orphids. A second reason to kill off the orphids is that I want to cleanse the world of digital machines.

(The Big Pig survives.) The Big Pig of PS1 manages to port herself or embed herself or somehow come into being within the Gaian mind of PS2. I require this due to the following considerations. The Big Pig is very smart and powerful, and if she had wanted to, she would have been able to prevent the lazy eight from coming about. She could, for instance, have killed Jayjay or the magic harp alien before Jayjay and the harp teamed up to unfurl lazy eight. But, to the contrary, the Big Pig repeatedly said she would be okay with the change, and that it might be a good idea, so evidently she believes she will in some form survive the transition. Given that she is smart enough to work out very deep consequences, we can assume that she’s correct in her belief that she will survive Therefore it must be that the Big Pig does indeed survive in some form or another.

(Preserve the data from the orphids.) In order for the Big Pig to survive, at the very least we have to assume that the data that was in the orphids survives. I believe that, given the data and enough computational ability, the Big Pig can regenerate herself. Like a Unix system recompiling itself. Like a simulated mind called PIG from a Windows machine coming into being on a Mac that’s been fed a PIG data disk. We’ll suppose that the silps read and store the data that was in the orphid nanomachines.

(Wipe out the beezies.) In PS1, the Pig sits at the top of the pyramid of the beezie hierarchy, but we can have her sitting upon a silp hierarchy just as well. Occam’s Razor tells me to wipe out the beezies so as not to have two hierarchies of mid-level minds.

Having absorbed the beezie data and beezie code that was stored in the orphid memories, the silps can in fact emulate beezies. But they are richer and quirkier than the emulations. I don’t want the silps to be exactly like the beezies. I don’t want to flinch away from the juicy problem of figuring out how it will feel to do telepathy with brute natural objects and with spirits of place. I want to teep into objects and locales that are just being themselves. I don’t want to devalue nature by having it taken over by the beezies, which are more like computer-science agents. I don’t want my awakened objects to be co-opted immediately. Perhaps later some evil aliens try to co-opt objects, but we don’t want it to happen by default right away.

This said, the beezies were quite human friendly, much more so than we can expect the silps to be. So if we lose the beezies then we lose some mental power. Unless the silps are more helpful than I expect them to be, humans lose much of the intelligence amplification (IA) that they had enjoyed by using beezies as virtual agents. In any case, humans do still have considerable IA in that they have omnividence, telepathy, and “mental Google.” All that’s now missing is the ability to effortlessly conscript beezie mind agents.

Comparing the Noospheres of the Lobrane and the Hibrane

In my postsingularity series, I have two parallel worlds, our Lobrane and the another world called the Hibrane. The Hibrane’s lazy eight unfurled five hundred years earlier than ours. They never had a need to develop our type of high-tech digital science; in particular, they never had nanomachines. And their local silps were careful to exterminate any nanomachines that we might have brought in when we began traveling there during our relatively brief nanotech era preceding our own lazy eight.

As kind of legacy from our nanotech era, our Gaian mind is somewhat Internet- like. She inherited the base-level data of the Big Pig, and reconstructed the Big Pig as a kind of interface. Having absorbed the data and the beezie program routines stored in the former orphids, our silps are fairly personable and adept at communication

The Hibrane’s native computations are relatively unsophisticated, as is the Hibrane’s planetary mind. The Hibraners can’t “Google” their objects. Some of our silps will emigrate to the Hibrane by riding upon humans who travel to there and by then hopping over to Hibrane matter. But the few silps that we transfer will not be able to carry across the planet-sized data base and code legacy that our orphids and nants created during our nanotech era.

Given that the contemporary Hibraners’ silps are unsophisticated, it has to be that our silps can’t easily upgrade them. For, due to a bend in the direction of our Lobrane timeline, some of our silps will in fact emigrate to the Hibrane’s past. If they could upgrade those past Hibrane silps, we’d have a time-paradox, given that the Hibrane silps we saw in PS1 were relatively primitive.

About Silps

To the human eye, a rock appears not to be doing much. But viewed as a quantum computation, the rock is as lively and seething as, say, a small sun. Up till now I’ve been placing a high premium on visible and human-scale forms of gnarl: wobbling leaves, flowing water and flickering flames. But now I realize that, if I look at the atomic level, there’s all kinds of stuff going on in a rock. For instance, in a crude molecular model, a rock is like a zillion atom-balls connected by van-der-Waals-force springs, and we know this kind of compound oscillatory system behaves chaotically. My point is that even a dull-looking object constraints enough gnarly natural computation to support a sophisticated silp.

We’ll also have the higher-level silps that are genii loci of spirits of place. Maybe I need a better word for these. Local silps?

When I decided to have all objects come alive in this novel, I was thinking of, like, Disney or Crumb-style teapots and clocks and spoons and hamburgers and salt shakers, each object an eager little pal. But we can also have surly silps. The silps might sometimes be like the peyote-trip vision I had in 1964, of tree branches like evil claws. (Disney shows this kind of animistic vision too, come to think of it, in scary lost-in-the-forest scenes.) Certainly those spirits of place I saw in the creek bed when I was lost in Big Basin weren’t friendly beezies. They were, at best, indifferent.

Self-Teleporting Objects?

I definitely don’t want objects to be teleporting, at least not for now. But mightn’t an object want to hop around to improve its situation? Naw, an object computes the same wherever it is. I want objects to be disinclined to move around. They’re, like, fully enlightened, each object like a tiny guru on a tiny mat, with no thought of doing anything other than going with the flow. The higher-level silps can move around, but in the style of programs in the web; the high level silps could move simply as information patterns, and wouldn’t need to move the hardware around.

I’m worried about smart fire, though. If flames teleport, maybe the planet goes up in a firestorm. Or maybe the smart trees know to bend away from the flames. Fire and trees chasing each other around…

If I start out with the objects being mellow and inactive, then this is something that the Kang’s enslavement might interrupt, making objects restless, to very bad effect. So by making the restriction now, I gain a plot point later on.

The flow could be that (a) the silps start out just as themselves, natural, some of them slightly hostile or at least selfish, some of them friendly, then (b) the Kang can’t get to the high-level silps or to the Big Pig/Gaia, but they are able to exploit our monads and low-level silps and in this makes silps a bit more awake and discontent, and then (c) after we block the Kang, there is some residual revolutionary fervor in objects and maybe they are teleporting and making trouble. Maybe the objects march en masse against the Kang. Try finding my glasses then!

What About Animals and Plants?

It’s natural to think in terms of a great chain of being:

Monads, Silps, Plants and animals, People, Society, Gaia.

How does a human’s or an animal’s old-school mind relate to the silp mind of their enhanced body? I’d want to see these as merging; wouldn’t like to have the mind-body problem turn into an ongoing debate, with two voices in your head.

I feel like plants should have somewhat richer silp minds than mere stones, but maybe that’s a prejudice. Might a stone be as heavy a thinker as man?

Will society actually have a group mind now?

[I took two photos of a painting by Robert Bechtle at SF MOMA the other day. It’s bizarre what the perspective does to your perceptions; from one side the car looks too long, from the other it looks too short.]

Googling the Silps.

Thanks to the legacy ware from the orphids and beezies—the data and beezie-code—the silps have the concept of URL addresses and networking, which is convenient if you lose something. Finally you can “Google” for missing objects. Certainly I was thinking of this the other day, looking for my lost glasses in the forest floor duff. In PS2, I’d be able to telepathically find my glasses. For I know the vibe of my glasses, I can feel them out. This doesn’t have much to do with the fact the glasses have a memory.

Direct Contact with Silps.

What kind of mental contact do I have with silps?

Talking to objects is at the core of what’s important to me. I had a stab at it in my story, “Panpsychism Proved.”: “the mind she’d linked to was inhuman: dense, taciturn, crystalline, serene, beautiful—”

Whaddaya say?