My character Joey Moon says he’s an artist. He wanted his friend Morton Plant to show his work in an art gallery, but Joey wouldn’t tell Morton the gallery-owner what his work looks like. So at this point, I need to decide what Joey’s work does look like, so I can be prefiguring it, and so I can set it up for a role in the story of The Big Aha.

I’m thinking Joeys work should be nurb-related—where nurbs are the wetware tweaked biocomputational “devices” that we’ll be using in a hundred years. Simple idea: Joey’s works are squidskin displays that mirror the viewer’s face, but with some processing tweaks added.

Call it a magic mirror.

[Here’s a draft of a painting of Joey Moon and Loulou Sabado, characters in “The Big Aha.” The painting is called “Night of Telepathy.” An earlier painting of these two people appears below. Joey doesn’t really look like this, but it’s how he visualizes himself. Actually this might be Joey’s friend Morton Plant, and not Joey himself in the picture. Doing these paintings is helping me a lot with the novel.]

But I need more, something to kick it up a level. Another person’s face can kind of hypnotize you, and you sometimes feel compelled to mimic it. Speaking of fascination, think of the way that you can become enthralled with your own mirror-image, especially if you’re a teenager, or bored, or vain. So the magic mirror’s is showing you your own face slightly tweaked, and you start reacting to the image, and you get into a feedback loop that drives you toward some extreme emotional state.

The extreme state you reach varies according to the viewer’s emotional make-up. The magic mirror simply feels around interactively for the biggest reaction on your part.

Some viewers fully freak out—raging in anger, weeping hysterically, frantically apologizing, roaring in rage, getting lost in grimaces. Their faces get so distorted that they look like Francis Bacon paintings. And the magic mirror might then freeze on a little blither-loop of that peak intensity image.

Later, if you want, you store that clip into memory and reset the magic mirror and collect another image. Or maybe not—maybe Joey freezes all images of himself or of those around him and those are the finished works he sells. If you can do-it-yourself it has more the feeling of a toy than of an artwork, so you ask as high a price.

I saw something a little like this at the San Jose ZeroOne festival in fall, 2012. You’d lie on your back and right over your face you’d see an interactive video image of your face that was tweaked to show your face decaying like a corpse, and with flies, and with fungi growing on it.

Joey doesn’t want to show his magic mirror works to anyone until they go on sale, as the idea could be relatively easy to pirate.

Re. the software in the magic mirror, we can suppose that Joey has some nurb-hacking abilities. It’s fairly non-technical, in that you don’t use a formal computer language. You just need to learn to nurbs in a certain way—perhaps it’s like how the Unipuskers speak in my novel Frek and the Elixir, that is, every sentence is an imperative.

The same two people in a painting called “Louisville Artist,” oil on canvas, October, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

I’ve been circling around and around some ideas that I want to use in my next novel, The Big Aha. In today’s post, I’ll expand on some of the remarks in my October 15, 2012, post, “SF Religion 3: Qwet.” But my focus isn’t on religion in today’s post, it’s on the nature of mind and the possibility of telepathy.

Open your (inner) eyes to your true mental life. Your state of mind can evolve in two kinds of ways that I’ll fancifully call—“robotic” and “cosmic”. The “robotic” mental processes proceed step-by-step—via reasoning and analysis, by reading or hearing words, by forming specific opinions. Every opinion diminishes you.

The “cosmic” changes are preverbal flows. If you turn off your endlessly-narrating inner voice, your consciousness becomes analog, like waves on a pond. You’re merged with the world. You’re with the One. It can be a simple as the everyday activity of being alert—without consciously thinking much of anything. In the cosmic mode you aren’t standing outside yourself and evaluating your thoughts.

The cosmic mode is what’s happening between/behind/around your precise robotic communicable thoughts. The idea is to notice the spaces between your thoughts, or to avoid being caught up in your thoughts. This is a fairly common meditation exercise.

We might have some specific brain sites that control when our state of consciousness flips from being with the One, that is, in a smooth, mixed, continuous or “cosmic” state—of being with the Many, that is, down to the “robotic,” specific-opinion state. If you’re a dreamy sort of person, your natural trend is to drift out to unspecificity, out the One. But other personality types tend always to be pushing down into the robotic, studying the details of the Many.

I’m imagining a qwet treatment that helps you can get into—and remain within—a smooth state for a longish period of time.

As I’ve often said, I have the experiential sensation that my mind oscillates between One/Many about sixty times per second. Between the “cosmic”/”robotic” consciousness modes. You do need both modes to get buy. The One state is like a radar ping you reach out into the world around you, and the Many state is when you say, “Okay, I’m alone here, it’s me against the world, what do I do next to stay alive?”

Breaking away from the cosmic mode can be thought as involving a quantum collapse. You go from a broader, more ambiguous state to a more specific state. How does the collapser work? It affects not just you, but the things that you’re looking at and coupled to. Everything around you becomes overly precise, that is, robotic instead of cosmic. Less interesting. Like—think of they way that some people can make a whole scene dull just by the way they start talking about it. “How much did that cost? Is that safe to have around? Did you notice the scratch on it?”

Do animals have collapsers? Do physical objects? Let’s say “not usually.” Might the ability to collapse be connected to having consciousness? Let’s say “yes.”

What if I use the Antonio Damasio’s definition of consciousness as “the ability to visualize yourself visualizing yourself.” You can watch a model of yourself watching yourself. It’s a three-level map. Actor, strategist, analyst. The actor just does things, like an animal. The strategist observes the actor and makes corrections. The analyst observes the strategist’s decisions and improves on them.

Suppose that this is a kind of physical map, a three-tier flow of quantum information, and that for a fixed-point theorem type reason, these flows cause quantum collapse—they throw a system into an eigenstate, that is, into a robotic, non-cosmic, fixed point. Humans are the main things that are three-tier collapsers, but such collapsers do occur naturally in certain places, just as certain types of crystals or mirrors might be found in nature. The spots with collapsers seem to have bad juju, that is, they’re inherently boring.

I see the collapsers as being like snags in a rushing muddy river of quantum flow. And the snags leave precise ripple wakes. And there can be a kind of beauty to the moiré patterns of the overlaid wakes—this is what we call our human culture.

In my novel, I want to work with the idea that managing to stay in the uncollapsed cosmic state, they can achieve a kind of telepathy. You can couple your “cosmic” mental state to the “cosmic” state of another person. I won’t be like a phone conversation. Your thoughts aren’t at all like a page of symbols—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations.

Key Plot Point: For quantum theoretic reasons, a quantum link between the two systems isn’t of a kind that can leave memory traces, otherwise the link is functioning as an observation that drags consciousness back down to the robotic mode. So you can’t directly exchange specific, usable info via quantum teep. In my novel this will be a disappointment to the government backers of the qwet experiments.

But your mind state will be changed by your teep interactions. But not in the obvious way of “remembering what they ‘said’.” After teeping with someone, when you later drop back down into your chatty “robotic” state, you’ll find that you are saying things you wouldn’t have said before the merge. But maybe you’re not sure why.

This isn’t so different from a memory of a very deep, close, intense conversation with someone—a talk where you really got onto the same wavelength. Like a talk in bed with a lover, or chatting happy with a pal, or, getting into deep concepts with an admired mentor—telepathy happens.