More notes towards Postsingular #2, a.k.a. After Everything Awoke.

You can tune in on distant objects. The lazy eight link via the ubiquitous point at infinity is like the object in Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Aleph.” It’s like a crystal ball that displays whatever you want to see. Since the lazy eight link attaches to every possible location, the view is endlessly smooth and rich.

Quotes from Jorge-Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, (Viking 1998, pp. 280-285).

“An Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all points…all the places of the world are within the Aleph [which is] the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh!

“I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. … In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems: a bird that somehow is all birds; a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; an angel with four faces, facing east and west, north and south at once…Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but then the report would be polluted with literature, with falseness…

“In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive… Something of it, though, I will capture.

“I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing … was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, … [a wonderful page-long Borgesian list ensues] …, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has every truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

“I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.

“Out in the street…in the subway, all the faces seemed familiar. I feared there was nothing that had the power to surprise or astonish me anymore, I feared I would never again be without a sense of dj vu.

“Aleph … is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the little sphere of my tale would not appear to be accidental…that letter signifies the pure and unlimited godhead [and] its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher.”

I’m going to be printing some excerpts from my notes for my current novel in progress, the second in my postsingularity series, called PS2 for short with working title After Everything Awoke. Today's topic is what I call “lazy eight,” somethign I've posted about several times before. By cotinuing to jabber about it, I'm polishing my rap…

I use the portmanteau phrase “lazy eight” to speak of a change which combines: the eighth dimension, infinity as ∞, and the fact that infinity is “right here” in the eighth dimension as an ubiquitous lazy-man’s enlightenment.

(Lazy Eight 1) Unfurling.

We add an infinite extra dimension at every point. We suppose that the eighth dimension is normally curled around into a Planck-length circle, but that a superspace perturbation caused the magic harp’s Lost Chord unrolls the eighth dimension to infinite length.

There are two possible equilibria for any region of space, having to do with whether the eighth dimension is infinite or not. The eighth dimension is compactified in the neighborhood of Lobrane Earth, but is fully unwound in the vicinity of Hibrane Earth. The equilibria are like the two bottoms of a W. If nudged, a world might move from one equilibrium to the other. One equilibrium is our present mode, the other is the lazy eight mode.

The Hibrane has had lazy eight since Hieronymus Bosch’s time (say 1492 just for fun); our Lobrane achieves it at the end of PS1.

(Lazy Eight 2) Universal Infinite Memory Upgrade

The infinite expanse is accessible; you can reach any location along it in some fixed time. It’s psychically possible to overview the whole infinite expanse of the eighth dimension in a finite amount of time.

The infinite length is metricized so as to require only bounded finite access time for any location. (Ph. D. = Piled High and Deep, .) That is, a Zenonian duality makes the lazy eight point at infinity be both ∞ far away and quite close. It’s like squeezing an infinite number of meters into one vatometer via a Zenonian shrinking. You can view it dually, that is, the other end is both infinitely far away and within a Planck length away, accessible in one tick of Planck time due to the Zenonian access.

You can store info as bumps anywhere you like along the infinite expanse of eighth dimensional space. So the infinite accessible spike provides endless memory at every location, and thereby gives people endless eidetic memories and produces panpsychism.

By panpsychism, I meant that lazy eight adds an infinite amount of state to any physical system, even to an electron. Physics is no longer micro-reversible, for even if an electron is repeating it’s actions, it can “remember” that it did all this N times before. And thus everything awoke.

(Lazy Eight 3) Universal Entanglement

All the eighth-dimensional lines meet at a point at infinity, and due to the Zenonian metric this point is accessible. It’s like you took the vanishing point of a painting and made it be adjacent to every point in space. The point at infinity is ubiquitous. This accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity. A router, a switchboard, a nexus. This leads to omnividence and thence to teleportation, as well as to telepathy.

I taped my readings at Booksmith in the Haight in San Francisco and at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. Rather than podcasting the whole readings, I’m just putting up the question-and-answer sessions at the tail ends of the two readings. In some ways the Q&A, being a one-time event, is the most interesting part of a reading. Click on the icon below to access Rudy Rucker Podcasts. with these two Q&A sessions.

I’m still getting my taping skills back together, and there’s some noise from the lavolier mike bumping my sweater. The sound quality is slightly better in the Black Oak reading than in the Booksmith reading .

Before the talk, I hung out with fellow SF writer Terry Bisson; we walked out on this really long pier off the Berkeley Marina — into the setting sun. Terry said this was a symbol of our current status in life.

I got to hang out with my son Rudy and his wife Penny a little bit, too. More upbeat than Terry! And Queen Mu of the Mondo 2000 days turned up at the reading.

[Mustard spoons.]

Lately I’ve been reading Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, by Jos Koldeweij, Paul Vandenbroeck, Bernard Vermet, (Abrams, 2001). I plan to put him into my PS2 novel. The quotes I post today are all from this Bosch monograph.

Bosch as panpsychist: “Bosch painted all kinds of objects from the life with great precision, as can be seen in the musical instruments [including a harp] that appear in the Hell scene from the Garden of Earthly Delights. He also produced detailed ”˜portraits’ of jugs, plates, knives and other utensils. It is in this degree of realism that the difference lies between copies of Bosch and his own work. The imitators cannot match his quality, reducing real objects to tokens.”

“Bosch’s work is… simultaneously cryptic and inaccessible, yet totally open, with the lowest of thresholds. This is painting for both the most serious art-lovers and for those who virtually never visit a museum…”

Bosch was born around 1450, on the market square in a house of his father Anthonius van Aken, son of Jan, who was son of Thomas — all three previous generations were artists. His brothers Goossen and Jan were artists as well. By 1481 he was married to Aleid van de Meervenne, daughter of a wealthy merchant’s family. He joined the upper crust Confraternity of Our Lady in 1488, and hosted a swan dinner of the Confraternity of Our Lady in July, 1488, in July 1498, and again on March 10, 1510, when he served fish. His funeral ceremony took place in on August 9, 1516. He might have died from a deadly cough that swept the town around then.

[Terry Bisson in the waning light.]

“The donor’s portraits in original Bosch paintings like the Last Judgment in Vienna have been overpainted, probably by the artist himself… Relations with his customers were evidently strained at times…”

Reminder: I'm reading in Berkeley tonight at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, 7:30 PM Thu, Jan 18.

This is a spirit board; I saw a bunch of them from Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art on the second floor of the DeYoung museum in SF the other day. I got a book about it, the catalog of a show called “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance,” which is at the Met in NYC untl next fall, and includes a lot of stuff from the Hood Museum of Dartmouth.

[Irrelevantly, this is a door from Borneo. Love those BZ scrolls! This is clearly a teleporation portal.]

Used to be that everyone in PNG had a dugout canoe, and when the canoe wore out, they’d salvage some flat wood and carve a spirit representation on it, usually with a face and a navel. The idea was that the spirit could get into the board via the navel. The images are NOT of ancestor spirits, they’re spirits of place like, hmmm, genii loci, or beezies who’ve moved out of the orphidnet into natural computations, inhabiting gnarly spots of the physical world.

Georgia sent me an email about the year’s best fonts, and I went to MyFonts site

to look at some of the grungy or hand-made looking fonts.

You see hand-made-looking fonts on store signs, and it’ll look cute and human, but then of course you notice that, say, two 'e' s are exactly the same.

A few of the fonts, like BOYCOTT come with two versions of each letter so you can avoid the really obvious side-by-side repeats.

As a computer scientist, I’m thinking what is really needed for grunge and handwriting fonts is fonts that produces letters that vary slightly each time an instance is invoked. That is, a letter would have three or four slider parameters with lower and upper bounds so that within this letter-space each version would look reasonably good. And when you called for that letter, a random number would be picked as seed, and attached to that letter-instance in the background, and letter would use that random number to pick the instance in letter space, and when you saved it, you'd be saving the seed number, so if someone viewed it again it would look the same. And if you didn't like a letter's look when you were desigining, you could keep clicking on it and with each click the seed number would change and the letter would change a little.