A crazy new SF adventure…with entitled realtors from the infinite subdimensions.

So  my last novel Juicy Ghosts is out there, and I’ve been idle for a few months, so now—what to do? Nescio. That’s Latin for “I don’t know, son.” Don’t know what I’ll write next, don’t know if I’ll ever write again. But I’ll start groping. As usual, most the photos in my post have no direct connections to the text.

In 2019 I did some work on a story that I called “Everything Is Everything.” I finished a draft of it, couldn’t sell it to any mainstream SF Zine, and a second draft appeared in the underground zine, Big Echo in October, 2020. I’ll be posting a third version on my blog soon. I’m opening it up a little so that it can lead to lead to a larger adventure. Mabye a novel. I’m on the verge of a Chapter Two.

It’s like the way that Juicy Ghosts started out as a single short story, and then I wrote a couple more related stories, and then they stuck together and grew out more material to make a novel. “Everything Is Everything” might be like that. I hope so.

So now, by way getting going on the next phase of “Everything Is Everything,” I’ll review some of the notes I made when I was working on the ideas back in 2019 and 2020.

Recurring Dreams

Sometimes, as I’m falling asleep, in a liminal state, bobbing up and down beneath the surface of sleep, I’ll feel myself sliding into a dream situation that seems familiar. A background is in place, with familiar scenery, and established characters, and a situation, and I have a sense of knowing a history of what’s going on. What would be the word for this. Not really dejà vu, as in “I saw this before.” More like dejà revé. “I dreamed this before.”

When I encounter a seemingly familiar dream, I may drift back towards the surface— and then sleepily wonder what’s the cause of my remembering the dream from before. I see two options.

Illusion. In one fell swoop my dream-mind has created a new stage setting, including a sense of having seen it before.

Recurrence. The setting is a fragment of a recent dream. The setting was latently present in my subconscious, and it seems familiar because it is familiar.

The “recurrence” option feels more accurate, as I do at these times have such a clear sense of the scenario having a history, and that I’ve been in the scene before, and it seems like wouldn’t “have time” to invent all of that background-prior-dreaming on the spot. This said, the “illusion” option is viable. Sometimes my busy mental dream machine might fill in fake histories along with its fake scenes. Why not?

This said, there are cases of repeated dreams, like portentous repeated nightmares as in a pulp novel, and this kind of dream is something that you remember and brood over when illusion you’re awake the next day, and then you go back to bed and have that same dream again.

But the maybe-maybe-not repeat dreams particularly important or epic dreams, and you don’t happen to remember them when you’re awake. Even if you have them night after night, each time with an increasingly dense sense of prior history.

Absolute Continuum

In a different vein, I want to write about my kick: we live in an Absolute Continuum. I sampled this rich vein of ore in my story “Jack and the Aktuals.” But in that story I didn’t go the whole hog, that is, in “Jack and the Aktuals” I didn’t fanatically insist that our actual, waking-life cosmos is an Absolute Continuum.

I do claim this in my new preface to the fifth edition of my best-selling non-fiction book, Infinity and the Mind. I’m old and respected (or ignored?) enough now that I can write prefaces that are close to being certifiably insane.

And now I want to put this idea into my “Everything Is Everything” story.

Dream Work

In a recent “repeat” dream, I’m living in a rooming-house and working as a salesman—and I know things about the other tenants.

I see a fantasy-SF-type story here. The guy (or woman) realizes that they’re doing work in their dreams, like as a spammer or telemarketer or focus group or image-recognizer.. It might be nice, if possible, to connect this to a commercial telepathy device, call it a teeper. The guy is . bewildered after his naps. Just like I was after my 45 minute nap on the Santa Cruz Beach the other day, a nap which, by the way, started with a familiar-feeling sensation of returning to a rooming house where I’ve been working long hours of late. I woke unrested. I was tired the rest of the day.

A teeper device that resembles one of those hearing aids—and my guy keeps forgetting to take it off when he sleeps. And then he’s doing dream work in that phantom rooming house visions. I in fact ended up putting a lot of this into my Juicy Ghosts novel, where people get “immortal souls” that are siloed in a big company’s cloud computer, and they are in fact working for the company.

What if my character Wick had has a consulting gig as a napper. And doing dream work.

“What are you doing in these dreams?” asked his wife Vi. “Programming?”

“It’s more like I’m inventing puzzles.” said Wick. “Those quizzes you see when you sign onto some websites? The quizzes are called captchas? They’re mining my thoughts for captcha puzzles.”

“I wouldn’t like that kind of work,” said Vi.

“Right,” said Wick. “My boss is in my head every night. I call him Pigling Bland. He knows this. It’s hard to cover up anything in brain-to-brain conversation. It just comes out. He’s Pigling Bland and he’s a rah-rah middle-management greed-head with no mind. He calls me Space Case.”

 

But I want something more fantastical for the dream work. Like talking to the dead, or to aliens, or to critters from alef-seven. Or Wick is opening the door to the Absolute Continuum. Like in a fairy tale.

Maybe the aliens are using his dreaming mind as some kind of amplifier.Or a scanner. They’re using us dreamers to “see” or notice stuff they can’t quite resolve. Like we’re electron microscopes or stethoscopes or infrared film or X-ray plates.

“Everything Is Everything”

I got my title for the story when I heard the hip-hop scripture by Lauryn Hill: her 1998 song “Everything Is Everything.” I’d forgotten about it, though it’s on an album I own The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I heard the in an Urban Outfitter store in Berkeley, and at the time I was kind of mentally dismissing it, as the line seemed kind of obvious, and wasn’t initially realizing how heavy it is. And then I realized this could be a good title for my story as, in the Absolute Continuum, everything really is everything. “After winter must come sprint,” says Lauren.

“Everything Is Everything” has a very cool video —you need to watch it at least twice, and I’ve actually watched it four or five times now, and will watch it more times. It shows a giant old turntable-type tone-arm dragging a needle along the streets of NYC, playing the track of the street. The record is rotating around the Empire State Building.

I dreamed that my weird physics friend Nick Herbert was giving me a new psychedelic drug, bit the tab or pill was mixed in with a batch of about twenty other pills, dumped on the sofa cushion next to me, and I was too thirsty to get them down, some of the pills nearly the size of pool-cue-chalk blocks, and pale blue. Like a daily dose of AIDS meds. Then inside the dream I saw, in a small pop-up screen in the corner of a news-show, I saw a sidebar type item on the drug I was supposed to be getting, it was called “Buddha Slime,” and it was a slick gel presented beneath a layer of transparent plastic, like on those old mood ring thingies. I woke up, drank a lot of water, laid down to go back to sleep and earnestly hoped I could return to the same dream and get my Buddha Slime, but didn’t get there.

The Smeel Egg

The Absolute Continuum as the end result that I want to get to. I can reason backwards to find out the nature of our man’s dream work. Wick and Vi meet a pair of entitled pricks in a Mercedes which is actually a UFO from the Absolute Continuum. They resemble a man and a woman with smooth skin instead of faces. The entitled prick woman unlocks her trunk, and Wick takes out an egg. It has a leathery shell like a turtle egg, or maybe a jellied covering like a frog egg.. Maybe the shell has galaxies in it? And it hatches after they get it home and set it on a nest in the chicken pen. Some stuff oozes out. I call it smeel. It looks like whiskey in water and breathing it gets you high. Ta da! Glorp.

The Absolute Continuum oozes out, yes. Upshot? Vi and Wick nullify some potential threat from the Absolute Continuum? And they normalize our relations to the One/Many civilizations of the transfinite cosmos?

“Five Eggs” acrylic on canvas, August, 2019, 24” x 30”. More info on my Paintings page.

I did a painting with five eggs in it. They are, I might now recklessly claim, an objective correlative for the object in my story. I could have my egg have a branching fractal Russian Doll sequence of smaller eggs in it. But that’s corny. Plain eggs. They contain, respectively an elephant, a snake, a gnome, sick yolky ylem, and a metaquark. Or, for the last two, how about an anthill, and a congeries of math symbols. Or a squawky bird instead of the symbols. I want a swirly Absolute Continuum. I can hardly wait to imagine and describe our world after the smeel comes out and gets Wick and Vi high. Also anxious that I won’t be able to do it.

Sylvia and I went to see Paul Simon at the huge 1920s Fox Theater in Oakland. Wonderful concert, very inspiring. “Angels in the architecture” Paul says in one song. The bright, highly saturated colored stage lights pointing at us some of the time, blinking on and off.

The entitled prick aliens, and the dream, and smeel egg are just a means to the end , which is to be flooding our reality with the Absolute Continuum—although the Absolute Continuum was, always already here. Because Everything is Everything. So, um, if the transfinite/infinitesimal visons were always here, why didn’t we notice? Well, maybe they’re always here, but it’s hard for the average person to notice . Until we get those good old whiskey-in-water smeel swirls from the leathery egg.

Our normal waking state is a type of dream, as G. I. Gurdjieff would say. And if it’s only if we really wake up that we can perceive the AC. The scene of smeel wakes us. And the alien denizens of the Absolute Continuum, and they’re fully awake, they can handle the blaze of info and noise and transifnitude. We’re, like, on the nod most of the time, and then we go even deeper on the nod and sleep and have states that even we realize are dreams. But, even our waking states are dreams as well. But a nice big whiff of smeel wakes us up.

On the drive back from the beach after the entitled pricks give them a smeel egg, Wick can be like I was on Memorial Day, 1970, when I’d taken acid on the Livingston campus of Rutgers, and Sylvia was driving us a mile or two back to our apartment at 43 Adelaide Avenue in Highland Park, with ten-month-old daughter Georgia in my lap…and I thought I was the one driving. And I was telling this to Sylvia. So Wick will think he’s driving the car back to Los Gatos, even though Vi is driving.

Passage that makes me laugh, even though I’m not going to use it:

Vi and Wick scrambled into their car, with Vi at the wheel. She got the engine roaring, and squealed the tires on the way out. Wick was cradling his giant alien egg in his lap. He unzipped his fly to have sex with the alien egg. “Don’t, Wick,” said Vi.

Pushing it and pushing it, like a car stuck in the snow, not letting up, rocking it, pushing some more. And throwing in some weird crazy shit that seems like fun. Here’s an email note to my mad mathematician friend Nathaniel Hellerstein about where the story is right now.

I’m working on a story where this guy keeps dreaming of being at a math seminar on the top floor of the math building at Berkeley. The speaker is a large sea anemone with a head at the end of each tentacle. And they guy can never quite understand the talk, but finally he naps long enough to get it, after twenty tires. And then a man and woman with no faces (just smooth lumpy skin) show up and give him a gelatinous egg, said to be a bud off the anemone. He puts it into his chicken coop at home to hatch. Goes to sleep. When he awakes it’s the next morning, and two of the chickens have become real estate agents and are knocking at his door. Also…his space has become Absolutely Continuous. Waiting now to see what happens next.

 

The Chickens

Maybe the aliens are realtors. And they take on the form of extra chickens in Wick and Vi’s coop. I love the idea of chickens as realtors. Alien realtors is a move I’m lifting from a 1964 P. K. Dick tale called “The War With The Fnools.” Wanting to check PKD’s wording, which I could almost remember, I found the story on a Russian pirate site called “sickmyduck.”

“Good morning, sir,” the Fnool piped. “Care to look at some choice lots, all with unobstructed views? Can be subdivided into —”

“As long as you’re here,” the first of the remaining Fnools said to Lightfoot, “why don’t you put a small deposit down on some valuable unimproved land we’ve got a listing for? I’ll be glad to run you out to have a look at it. Water and electricity available at a slight additional cost.”

 

Here’s my photographer/cinematographer friend Eddie Marritz that we saw in SF over Xmas. He took the picture of me that’s higher up on the page, passing my new Leica Q2 back and forth.

And that’s it for Everything Is Everything for today. I’m working on a much improved new new draft that I might be posting soon, also more of my notes for it.

The physical world is not a cheapo simulation on some cruddy computer.

This is largely a repost of an earlier  entry on my blog, called “Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality.” That older post got a lot of hits and comments, and you can read my answers to some of the comments in a follow-up to the earlier post.

This new version has some fresh illos and links, and it appears on Medium as well.

Musings on whether a virtual reality or a computer generated reality could ever match our real reality.

I wrote my first version of this essay in 2008, while in Pinedale, Wyoming, visiting my daughter Isabel and doing some cross-country skiing among the aspen trees. The trees have great patterns like eyes on them. Nice examples of a RR “real reality” richer than any VR “virtual reality” we’re ever going to see.

In my novel Postsingular I argued that it’s bogus to talk about porting humanity into a complete virtual model of Earth. Call it “Vearth.” You’d lose a lot. So today I want to explain some of the reasoning behind my claim.

Arguments for Vearth are sometimes start by talking about an imaginary substance dubbed “computronium. The word was, I believe coined by two brilliant, eccentric, wild computer scientists Norman Margolis and Tommaso Toffoli who designed the so-called CAM boards for running rapid cellualar automata computations in the early 1990s.

I myself as drawn into the Margolis-Toffoli orbit, and I did a lot of work with cellular automata, as described in my autobio. See also the digital Cellab I worked on with John Walker, and the gnarlier analog CAPOW ware I developed with my students at San Jose State.

One of my favorite SF writers, Charles Stross, wrote a fab postsingular novel In Accelerando, where he says computronium is “matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing.”

It’s a fun idea to get really literal about it. But I think computronium is a fundamentally spurious concept, an unnecessary detour. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the maximum possible rate. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.

In an extreme vision — which is the one I dispatch in chapter one of Postsingular — Earth is turned into a cloud of computronium which is supposedly going to compute that Vearth or virtual Earth which is even better than the one we started with.

This would be like filling in wetlands to make a multiplex theater showing nature movies, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination eco-resort, or killing an elephant to whittle its teeth into religious icons of an elephant god.

Ultrageek advocates of the Vearth scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that’s a perfect match for the old Earth.

As I’ll explain below, this is factually incorrect and, even in priciple, impossible. Before getting into that, I might also ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There’s something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It’s a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old “work now, get rewarded in heaven” routine.

Anyway, let’s get back to my main point, which is that VR isn’t ever going to replace RR (real reality). We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that computer science provides strong evicence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts.

For details see The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, or Stephen Wolfram’s revolutionary tome, A New Kind of Science — note that Wolfram prefers to use the phrase “computational irreducibility” instead of “natural unpredictability”.

Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that’s smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments.

In Memory of Michael Blumlein (1948 – 2019)

But wait, answer the true-believer ultrageeks, if you do smash the whole planet into computronium, you have potentially as much memory and processing power as the intact planet possessed. It’s the same amount of mass, after all. So then we could make a fully realistic world-simulating Vearth with no compromises, right?

Wrong. Perhaps you can get the hardware in place, but there’s the vexing issue of software. Something important goes missing when you smash Earth into dust: you lose the information and the embodied software that was embedded in the world’s behaviors. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.

Ah, says the VR true believer, what if the nanomachines first copy all the patterns and behaviors embedded in Earth’s biosphere and geology? What if they copy the forms and processes in every blade of grass, in every bacterium, in every pebble, and so on?

But, come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

Just as she is, Nature embodies superhuman intelligence. She’s not some piece of crap to tear apart and use up.

But wait — if you do smash the whole planet into computronium, then you have potentially as much memory and processing power as the intact planet possessed. It’s the same amount of mass, after all. So then we could make a fully realistic world-simulating Vearth with no compromises, right?

Wrong. Maybe you can get the hardware in place, but there’s the vexing issue of software. Something important goes missing when you smash Earth into dust: you lose the information and the software that was embedded in the world’s behavior. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a potentially human-equivalent robot with no AI software, or, more simply, like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.

Ah, but what if the nanomachines first copy all the patterns and behaviors embedded in Earth’s biosphere and geology? What if they copy the forms and processes in every blade of grass, in every bacterium, in every pebble — like Citizen Kane bringing home a European castle that’s been dismantled into portable blocks, or like a foreign tourist taking digital photos of the components of a disassembled California cheeseburger?

And, like I already said, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. Nature embodies superhuman intelligence just as she is.

Why am I harping on this? It’s my way of leading up to one of the really wonderful events that I think our future holds: the withering away of digital machines and the coming of truly ubiquitous computation. I call it the Great Awakening.

I predict that eventually we’ll be able to tune in telepathically to nature’s computations. We’ll be able to commune with the souls of stones.

This “Great Awakening” will eliminate nanomachines and digital computers in favor of naturally computing objects. We can suppose that our newly intelligent world will, in fact, take it upon itself to crunch up the digital machines, frugally preserving or porting all of the digital data.

Instead of turning nature into chips, we’ll turn chips into nature.

Some of these ideas also appeared in an essay of mine “The Great Awakeining,” and you can read the essay free online. It appeared in Asimov’s SF magazine in August, 2008, and in the anthology Year Million, edited by Damien Broderick, from Atlas Books in August, 2008.

Here’s one of my favorite scenes from my cyberpunk novel Freeware. You can read all four Wares novels online. Or just buy the ebook. This post is illustrated by various covers of the novels.

In this scene, my character Willy is running across a spaeeport field, wearing an imipolex “moldie” creature like a pair of pants and boots. Moldies are a mixture of imipolex plastic and network of fungus and mold. They’re as smart as we are. People wear them, and call them Happy Cloaks.

“If you’re going to be a long-term symbiote with me, I ought to have a name for you,” Willy says to the moldie.

“Call me Ulam,” said the Happy Cloak. “It’s an abbreviated form of a dead bopper’s name: Ulalume. Most of my imipolex used to be Ulalume’s flickercladding–Stahn had a couple of hoppers’ worth on his back. Ulalume was female, but I think of myself as a male. Be still while I move the plug-in, and then we can go.”

So here’s shirtless Willy under the star-spangled Florida sky with eighty pounds of moldie for his shoes and pants, scuffing across the cracked concrete of the JFK spaceport pad. The great concrete apron was broken up by a widely spaced grid of drainage ditches, and the spaceport buildings were dark. It occurred to Willy that he was very hungry.

There was a roar and blaze in the sky above. The Selena was coming down. Close, too close. The nearest ditch was so far he wouldn’t make it in time, Willy thought, but once he started running, Ulam kicked in and superamplified his strides, cushioning on the landing and flexing on the takeoff s. They sprinted a quarter of a mile in under twenty seconds and threw themselves into the coolness of the ditch, lowering down into the funky brackish water. The juddering yellow flame of the great ship’s ion beams reflected off the ripples around them. A hot wind of noise blasted loud and louder; then all was still.

Ordinarily a fleet of trucks might have surrounded the Selena to unload her, but on this evening, the day after Spore Day, there were no vehicles that functioned. A small group of Gimmie officials walked out to the Selena and waited until its hatch was hand-winched open. Watching from his drainage ditch, Willy saw Stahn, Wendy, and the others being led away. He spotted the one who was probably Fern Beller, the tall willowy brunette who was doing all the talking.

“Looks like they left the Selena all alone,” Willy observed to his Happy Cloak.

“The Selena can act by herself if need be,” said Ulam. “Fear not.”

“I’m really hungry,” said Willy. “Let’s go into town and find some food.” As they walked the rest of the way across the spaceport field, they encountered a crowd of aggrieved Florida locals, many of them senior citizens.

“Y’all come from that ship?” demanded a lean man. His voice was tight and high.

“No no,” said Willy. “I work for the spaceport.”

“What the Sam Hill kinda pants do he got on?” demanded a woman.

“These are fireproof overalls,” said Willy. “I wear them in case there’s an explosion.”

“You stick around, vato, you’ll see somethin’ explode, all right,” said the lean man. “We gone wail on that ship, es verdad. Their loonie chipmold broke our machines forever.”

“You ain’t a-hankerin’ to try and stop us, is you?” rumbled a new voice from the crowd. ” ‘Cause effen you is, I’m gone have to take you out.”

“Oh no, no indeed,” said Willy. “I’m going on break for supper. In fact, I didn’t even see you.”

“Food’s free tonight,” whooped a white cracker woman. “Especially if you packin’ heat! Let’s see who can hit the ship from here!” There was a fusillade of gunshots and needler blasts, and then the mob surged toward the Selena, blazing away at the ship as they advanced.

Their bullets pinged off the titaniplast hull like pebbles off galvanized steel; the needlers’ laser rays kicked up harmless glow spots of zzzt. The Selena shifted uneasily on her hydraulic tripod legs.

“Her hold bears a rich cargo of moldie flesh,” said Ulam’s calm eldritch voice in Willy’s head. “Ten metric tons of chip-mold-infected imipolex, surely to be worth a king’s ransom once this substance’s virtues become known. This cargo is why Fern flew the Selena here for ISDN. I tell you, the flesher rabble attacks the Selena at their own peril. Although the imipolex is highly flammable, it has a low-grade default intelligence and will not hesitate to punish those who would harm it.”

When the first people tried to climb aboard the Selena, the ship unexpectedly rose up on her telescoping tripod legs and lumbered away. As the ship slowly lurched along, great gouts of imipolex streamed out of hatches in her bottom. The Selena looked like a defecating animal, like a threatened ungainly beast voiding its bowels in flight–like a frightened penguin leaving a splatter trail of krilly shit. Except that the Selena’s shit was dividing itself up into big slugs that were crawling away toward the mangroves and ditches as fast as they could hump, which was plenty fast.

Of course, someone in the mob quickly figured out that you could burn the imipolex shit slugs, and a lot of the slugs started going up in crazy flames and oily, unbelievably foul-smelling smoke. The smoke had a strange disorienting effect; as soon as Willy caught a whiff of it, his ears started buzzing and the objects around him took on a jellied peyote solidity.

The burning slugs turned on their tormentors, engulfing them like psychedelic kamikaze napalm. There was great screaming from the victims, screams that were weirdly, hideously ecstatic. And then the mob’s few survivors had fled, and the rest of the slugs had wormed off into the flickering night. Willy and Ulam split the scene as well.
Beyond the light of the flames and past the pitch-black spaceport, all the roads and buildings were dark. There was, in fact, no glow anywhere on the horizon. The power grid was dead.

Willy picked his way through a field of inert sun collectors and came upon a small shopping center. The most obvious looting target there would have been the Red Ball liquor/drugstore, but someone had walled up its doors and windows with thick sheets of titaniplast. From the whoops and yee-haws within, it sounded like there were some crazed lowlifes sealed up inside there getting wasted. Nobody was trying to get in. Going in there would have been like jumping into a cage of hungry hyenas.

The dark Winn-Dixie supermarket, on the other hand, was wide open, with a hand-lettered sign saying TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. GOD BLESS YOU. THE LITTLE KIDDERS.

There were an inordinate number of extremely old people filling up their Winn-Dixie shopping carts as high as they would go–Florida pheezers trundling off into the night with their booty. Willy went into the Winn-Dixie and found himself a bottle of Gatorade and a premade deli sandwich: a doughy bun with yellow mustard and vat cheese. The sandwich was mashed and wadded; it was the very last item in the deli case. All the good stuff was long gone.

As Willy left the store, he noticed a tiny old woman struggling to push a grocery cart mountainously piled with fruits, vegetables, and cleaning supplies. One of the cart’s front wheels had gotten stuck in a pothole in the parking lot.

“Can I help you with that, ma’am?” asked Willy in his politest tone.

“You’re not going to try and steal from me, are you?” demanded the silver-haired old woman, staring up at Willy through the thick smudged lenses of her glasses. “I could use help, but not if you’re a robber.”

“How far from here do you live?”

“Forever. Over a mile.”

“Look, one reason I want to help you is that I need a place to sleep.”

“I’m not letting any strange men in my house.”

“Do you have a garage?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. But my dog Arf lives in there.”

“I’ll share with him. I need a place to sleep for a few days. You’ll never get all this stuff home if I don’t help you.”

“If you’re going to help me, then I can get more food. Wait right here and don’t let anyone touch my cart.”

“I don’t think it’s very safe to stay around here,” protested Willy. A fight between two old couples had broken out nearby. One of the men was threatening the other with his aluminum cane.

“Don’t worry about those drunk pheezers,” said the old woman. “A strong young man like you. I’ll be right back out.”

Willy opened his Gatorade and started in on his sandwich. The old woman darted back into Winn-Dixie and emerged fifteen minutes later with another laden cart, this one mostly filled with pots, pans, shampoos, dog biscuits, and ice cream. Pushing at one cart and then the other, Willy headed down the road with her.

[At a transreal level, this is me and my Mom.]

What is Reality?

Is reality just one kind of thing, or is it many kinds of things? That is, do we believe in “monism” or in pluralism?

If we go for monism, can we really suppose that everything in our world is a type of computation? It doesn’t always feel as if such a “universal automatism” is the whole answer. That is, I don’t always believe that everything is a computation.

Pool at the Mouth of the Big Sur River

I had a moment of disbelief while finishing the first draft of my tome on the meaning of computation: The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. This was in 2014. I went camping in Big Sur with my wife, Sylvia; it was a hot day, and I had the chance to stand in the cool clear flow of the Big Sur River, up to my neck in a big pool that accumulates right before the river flows across a sand bar into the Pacific.

Standing there, I closed my eyes to savor the sensation of water and air. My arms were weightless at my sides, my knees were slightly bent, I was at perfect equilibrium. Each time I exhaled, my breath would ripple the water, and reflections of the noon sun would flicker on my eyelids. Exquisite—and, no, I wasn’t high; I haven’t been high since I was fifty.

I was all there, fully conscious, immersed in the river. And I became powerfully aware of a commonsense fact that most readers will have known all along.

“This isn’t a computation. This is water.”

So is monism wrong? It’s not that I think it’s a waste of time expending energy in trying to believe everything is a computation. It’s not that universal automatism is necessarily wrong. It’s more that, at times, it becomes too cumbersome a way to try to think of things. Like any scientific monism.

Why pretend that reality is any less rich than you know it to be? I’d still include computation as one of types of things that exist. But I’d want to include the sense of the All, and love, and the body. And water. And the reflections in my brass desk lamp. And crows. And…
Once you move past monism, the next logical stopping point is the most comprehensive possible pluralism.

• Reality is endlessly diverse.

But wait. Did I just say that I don’t believe everything’s a computation? I’m abandoning one the main points that I was arguing for during the whole length of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul? Come on, Rudy!

Snapshots from Micronesia, Left to right and top to bottom: a rock island near Palau, kayaking along the edge of a rock island, a soft coral whose shape is a disk with a fractally folded edge, Zhabotinsky-scroll hard coral.

Well, okay, maybe I don’t want to pull back too far from universal automatism. Even though it’s wearisome to continually view the world as being made of computations, this particular monism could really be true.

There was in fact one specific moment a year later, in 2015, when I came back into the fold of monistic universal automatism. Itw during a kayak excursion in Micronesia. I’ll quote from my journals.

Yesterday I went on a kayak tour in the rock islands of Palau. It was one of the best days of my life.

Our guides were three Palauans: Jake, Ding, and Rayna. They were great: wild lively locals, talking rapid-fire Palauan to each other all day. Jake was the very image of the old-style Micronesian chief, although later I found out he’d gone to college, started a career as an accountant, and had thrown that over to be a tour guide.

There were five of us tourists. The guides loaded five single-seat hard kayaks on a boat and motored out to our starting point. For the rest of the day, we kayaked in stages: we’d get to a location and the motor boat would be waiting there, we’d tie our kayaks to the boat, go snorkeling, climb up the ladder to the motor boat, replenish our supplies, and then remount our kayaks. Jake had six waypoints for us: a hidden underwater tunnel leading to a tree-lined lagoon filled with giant clams, a sunken ship from the 1930s, a little point where he speared a fish, a large lagoon with a beach where we had lunch, an underwater tunnel leading to a cave filled with blue light coming up from the water, and an arch connecting two bays with soft corals growing on the sandy bottom of the arch.

Coming into the lagoon for lunch I felt quite weightless; the water was so clear and unrippled, and the sand below it so white. It was as if my kayak were gliding through empty space. And quiet, quiet, quiet all around. Not a whisper of wind in the trees, only the gentle lapping of the waves, the occasional calls of birds and, of course, the sporadic whooping of the Palauans. I had such a wave of joy, wading around that lagoon, and a profound sense of gratefulness, both to the world for being so beautiful and to God for letting me reach this spot. I had another wave of these feelings a bit later when we were kayaking through a maze of small islands in shallow water, bays that no motor boat could reach. Peaceful, peaceful. Eden. The world as it truly is meant to be. I’m glad I lived long enough to get here.

High in the air above one of these sunny backwaters, I see a large dark—bird? It’s the size of an eagle, and, no, it’s a fruit bat, the sun shining through the membranes of its wings. The islands look like green clouds come to earth; mirroring their fluffy white brethren above.

In the last snorkel spot there are lovely pale blue and pink soft corals, branching alveolar broccolis on the sandy bottom of the archway connecting two bays. Fractals, in short. Swimming through the arch, I encounter a shoal of maybe ten thousand tiny tropical fish, like the fish you’d see in someone’s home aquarium, little zebras or tetras. With my snorkel on, I marvel at their schooling motions, their bodies moving in a unison like iron filings in a field, their ropes and scarves of density emerging from the parallel computation of their individual anxieties. The turbulent water currents compute, as do the clouds in the sky, the cellular automaton reaction-diffusion patterns on the mantles of the giant clams, the Zhabotinsky scrolls of the shelf corals, the gnarly roots of plants on the land.

And I’m thinking that maybe, yes, maybe after all everything is a computation. Universal automatism gives me a point of view from which I can make sense of all these diverse forms I’m seeing here. Maybe I was wrong to want to “take it all back” in September. But what about my thoughts, can I see those as computations, too? Well, why can’t they just be fractal broccoli, flocking algorithms, class four turbulence, cellular automaton scrolls. I ascribe higher significance to them, but why make so much of them. Are my thoughts really so vastly different from the life forms all around me in these lagoons? Why not relax and merge. All is One.

And if I find it useful to understand the One’s workings in terms of computation, don’t think that this reduces the lagoon to a buzzing beige box. The lagoon is not reduced, the lagoon is computing just as it is. “Computing” is simply a way to speak of the dance of natural law.

So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?”

• Reality is made of gnarly computations.

Now to the next question.

The Meaning of Life

One appeal of monistic philosophies is that if we can reduce reality to one substance, there’s some hope of finding a rule of behavior for that substance, and that rule may suggest a meaning for the world.

Let’s see how this works if we believe in universal automatism. If I say that everything is a computation, I’m saying that everything is a deterministic process. And that means that reality is a weave of logical if-then statements, with each phenomenon linked to a cause. As an extreme example of universal automatism, there might be some underlying supercomputation that generates not only the entire cosmos but also the underlying fabric of space and time. But then, of course, we’d have to ask why that particular supercomputation exists.

The point here is that even if the world is the result of a supercomputation, knowing this isn’t much use to us. We still wouldn’t know where the supercomputation came from. And—perhaps even more important, we still wouldn’t know what it’s for.

And that, after all, is really what we’re after when we ask about the meaning of life. It’s not so much the cause that’s puzzles us as does the purpose.

Does a person’s life have a purpose?

Again we can turn to Stephen Wolfram’s classification of computations into four classes. Class one processes do nothing, and stay at one fixed point. Class two processes repeat themselves in a loop. Class three processes are random, patternless scuzz. Class four processes are richly, chaotically patterned. I call them gnarly.

So in terms of the meaning of a life, universal automatism suggests a possible answer. Computationally rich “class four” or “chaotic” or “gnarly” behaviors are in an objective sense more interesting than those that die out, repeat, or have no discernible structure. So a universal automatist might say that the meaning/purpose of a human life is to produce a gnarly class computation!

The human artifacts we admire are computationally rich. An empty canvas is class one. Hack artwork is class two copying of existing artifacts. Ugly scuzz is class three. Great art is class four: gnarly.

The nobler emotions are computationally rich as well. Murderous rage forces some victim’s computation into class one termination. Hatred throws the hater into a class two loop. Too needy a desire to please puts a person at the mercy of capricious class three inputs. Compassion is an ever-evolving class four process.

Get the picture?

• The meaning of life is beauty and love.

One more question.

How to Be Happy

I’ll offer a bouquet of six answers—one for each of the six levels of reality I discuss in The Lifebox, the Seashell and Soul..

Drawing by Isabel Rucker.

After slong and complex mental computations, I’ve compressed my six answers to a couple of words apiece. A to-do list.

• Turn off the machine. Universal automatism teaches us that there’s a common ground upon which to compare nature to PCs. But this doesn’t mean that that PCs are as good as reality. Far from it. On the common ground, we can readily see that the natural world is incalculably more powerful and interesting than the odd flickering boxes we’re wedded to in the Y2K era. I try not to let them run my life.

• See the gnarl. The air is a gnarly ocean; the leaves dance on the trees. I’ve always enjoyed watching clouds and water; and now I realize that the computations they’re carrying out are fully as complex as anything in any book I might read. Each flickering shadow is a reminder of the world’s unsolvable and unpredictable richness.

• Feel your body. There’s always something interesting to feel in this wonderful meat computation that I’m privileged to inhabit. It’s fun sometimes to think of my body as being very large—like an immense starship that I’m inside. I can focus on the inputs from all the different parts. Meanwhile my breath and heartbeat are gently chaotic. As a heavy computer user, I need to remember not spend more time upgrading my machine than I do in exercising my bod.

• Release your thoughts. Underneath the wanting and worrying is the great river of thought. I don’t control much of the world, and things rarely turn out as I predict, so why waste my time in focusing on fears, desires, and expectations? And why invest all my energy in logic which, as we now know, only goes so far? Released from the class two channels of attachment, I can watch my mind like fireworks above a wavy sea.

• Open your heart. People are the most interesting and beautiful entities I’ll ever see. Society isn’t about the news and the leaders. It’s about the people I run into every day. Recently I saw a show of photographs by Diane Arbus. Diane must have been such a character. She had a way of getting to the essential humanity of her subjects—ordinary people lovingly depicted and made fully human in all individuality. They always seem to be as interested in Diane as she is in them. People sense when you look at them with utter interest and compassion; they look back and smile.

• Be amazed. Our studies of computation teach us that none of our theories will ever get very far. Not everything can be explained, nor even expressed in words. We’re fully immersed in the incomprehensible. Life is a mystery; it’s good to savor this.

Lest this list seem preachy, let’s say the advice is actually aimed at me. I need it. I forget the simplest things.

And I’m glad to see these slogans emerge from my long and gnarly chains of reasoning. They’re a nice place to end up.

One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect.

[Check out the whole book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.]