{"id":12932,"date":"2020-08-11T14:59:44","date_gmt":"2020-08-11T21:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=12932"},"modified":"2020-08-12T09:47:14","modified_gmt":"2020-08-12T16:47:14","slug":"teep-and-peep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/11\/teep-and-peep\/","title":{"rendered":"Teep and Peep"},"content":{"rendered":"

My original notion for my novel-in-progress Juicy Ghosts<\/em> was that it would be a near-future Silicon Valley high-tech thriller. In my 2019 public talks in Miami <\/a>and Pisa, Italy<\/a>, I claimed that commercial telepathy isn\u2019t all that far off. And Juicy Ghosts <\/em>will, among other things, show a plausible path for this future tech. It\u2019s useful to distinguish between what we might call peep<\/em>, or lo-fi telepathy\u2014and teep<\/em> which is the h-fi telepathy of SF dreams.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nEmpty bulletin board near UC Berkeley Sather gate.<\/em><\/p>\n

The most accessible type of \u201cpeep\u201d\u009d is silent telephone calls. My device picks up my brain\u2019s subvocal speech signals, converts them into audio files, sends the files across the web to your device, which converts the audio files into signals in the auditory nerve of your brain. You experience the signals as sound. You hear my voice in their head. While I\u2019m at it, I can use my ear as a mic for you to eavesdrop through. And I can peep video to you as well. I tap the feed off my optic never and send it to your optic nerve. You\u2019re experiencing my life as if I\u2019m a remote.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\u201cPinchy\u2019s Big Date\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, July, 2020, 28\u201d\u009d x 22\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole history of the remote viewing trope. Living someone else\u2019s experiences. Like in that very cool at the start (but then over-long) movie. Strange Days<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"Santa Cruz. From his seat, the driver sings Frank Sinatra songs.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Juicy Ghosts<\/em>, I\u2019m talking about using a bio device called a psidot <\/em>for this. To say this is a new idea would be cryptoamnesia <\/a>, on my part, that is, a case of forgetfully thinking an old idea is fresh. I\u2019ve written for years about a soft, intelligent plastic device that you wear on your neck for silent online access. I call it an uvvy<\/em>. See, for instance, my 2004 blog post \u201cCyborgs, Future of Humanity<\/a>.\u201d\u009d And I write about uvvies in novels like Freeware <\/a><\/em>and Jim and the Flims.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
\nRoom in a room at Monkeybrains Oakland warehouse.<\/em><\/p>\n

By the way, I found that 2004 blog post I just mentioned by using my \u201cSearch Rudy\u2019s Lifebox<\/a>\u201d\u009d web page to searcah for places where I’ve mentioned “uvvy.” Kind of cool to have this prototype online lifebox actually help me in planning a novel like Juicy Ghosts<\/em>, which will include lifeboxes!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Anyway, the old uvvy is made of computational smart plastic, rather than being a living organism like the new psidot. The Juicy Ghosts <\/em>novel will have both uvvies and psidots. The psidots will be edging closer to full, deep, telepathy of teep. The uvvies are like cheap old-model smart-phones and the psidots are the way-cool new ones. Naturally a psidot has a little emulation of an uvvy inside it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Before going on to full teep, let\u2019s talk about how to achieve peep, or silent phone calls and remote presence—these being the somewhat conceivable near-future uvvy tech. I have a ground rule that none of my future teep devices should require sending wires or tendrils through your skull and into your brain. And we’ll have no brain-implanted sensors. Otherwise, well, otherwise it\u2019s not fun to think about.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This said, I do <\/i>in fact have a brain-invading teep-device protoype called “stumble” in my Big Echo<\/em> ezine tale, “The Mean Carrot,<\/a>” which is a draft of Chapter One of Juicy Ghosts<\/em>. Stumble is a shelf-mushroom-type fungus that sends tendrils or hyphae deep into the hapless users’ brains.\u00a0 But we’ll move on to sea slug psidots in Chapter Two!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Anyway, back to my original, earlier teep or peep devices: uvvies. These are soft lumps of intelligent computational piezoplastic. My uvvy on the back of my neck reads the faint ambient signals of my brainwaves, and it uses vortex signals to feed others\u2019 brainwaves into my head.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Not only can an uvvy do silent phone calls and remote viewing, there are uvvy apps for tingles and smells and tastes, too. And of course porn, spam, and ads\u2014and blockers, filters, and firewalls. But that low, grasping stuff isn\u2019t my bag. My eye is on the true teep. The hard part that uvvies can\u2019t do.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

True hi-res teep would be where you\u2019re sharing your inner visions, and your emotions, and your body sensations, and your rich thoughts. As I like to say, true teep would mean. for once in your life, being understood<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nRudy at 17, by Rob Lewine,\u00a0 at Swarthmore College, 1963.<\/em><\/p>\n

Part of the full teep thing, or even the more light-weight peep, is that it helps to have a lot of context on the person you\u2019re trying to communicate with. That is, a possible problem with full brain-link teep is that you might have trouble deciphering the intricate structures of someone else\u2019s thoughts. Like you need to know something about a country\u2019s culture to understand the language.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m always talking about these things called lifeboxes, a lifebox being an online model or database of you\u2014like maybe everything you wrote, or interviews with you, or recordings. Sharing lifeboxes could help make sense of another person\u2019s internal brain patterns. So when receiving the audio, video, and other signals from someone, it would help if the bits were annotated with hyperlinks into the other user\u2019s lifebox. Have the notes be realtime and interactive.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nBismuth crystal from Isabel.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a variety of ways to segue from peep towards teep. Another angle is to send multi-track audio. A choir of the sender\u2019s internal voices. The receiver hears a fugue of several tracks talking at once. It\u2019s an effect I recall from, for instance, the supernal Firesign Theater album, We\u2019re All Bozos on This Bus<\/em>. And, again you\u2019ve got interactive lifebox context whispering tips on how to understand the fugue.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another approach to teep is say, to hell with it, we need some woo-woo quantum action. That\u2019s what I did in my telepathy novel, The Big Aha<\/a>. But maybe multiple tracks and multiple sensory modes can be enough. And the deep core thing, the \u201cI am\u201d\u009d\u2014well, as I\u2019ve always aid, that\u2019s bascially the same for everyone, modulo emotional coloring<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Oh, one more angle. I can chip away at sharing emotions via teep by using something like P. K. Dick\u2019s notion of a \u201cPenfield mood organ,\u201d\u009d A device that plays your feelings. The \u201corgan stops\u201d\u009d could be emotion-generating hormones or, more indirectly, stimuli to regions like the adrenal gland, the thymus, and whatever else.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll open to teeping via quantum states. Many overlapping classical states in one. A vibe. Biotech ought to be good at that. I talked about this in my story \u201cJuicy Ghost<\/a>,\u201d\u009d which is eventually going to be a chapter of Juicy Ghosts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I\u2019m seriously trying to imagine telepathy, and to get, yet again, some kind of handle on what\u2019s going on in my mind. Focusing on my flow of consciousness, thinking about how it would be to share that via true, deep telepathy. What\u2019s in my mind? Well, this morning I typed this:<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\u201cTwo Lizards\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, July, 2020, 49\u201d\u009d x 39\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I hear Sylvia doing dishes upstairs, and her footsteps. Machines in the distance outside. Uneasy about having cleared brush off our hillside last week. I liked the brush. Tightness in my chest? The raspberry red of the quilt Sylvia made. Faint ringing in my ears. Memories of cicadas in Lynchburg and Louisville. The stacking of the dishes makes a two-step sound like walking. I see the shape of our house in three dimensions, the room with Sylvia is illuminated. The frames of my glasses constrict my vision. Take them off. Physical sense of myself typing, and the flesh of my body, and my crossed shinbones, and the sea-swell of my breaths. Some trivial device beeps nearby. I visualize my mind as a dark velvety zone inside my skull. Make a painting? With an R. Crumb oaf profile outline. What are the icons inside? A dog barking, a motor scooter, more footsteps. My skull is small. My tingling brain, and in the heart of it is my awareness, always there. Does yours feel the same? Itch, scratch, hair. Phosphenes in my visual field. Get into the shower. Glorious symphony of tunable water sounds. Daily the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My original notion for my novel-in-progress Juicy Ghosts was that it would be a near-future Silicon Valley high-tech thriller. In my 2019 public talks in Miami and Pisa, Italy, I claimed that commercial telepathy isn\u2019t all that far off. And Juicy Ghosts will, among other things, show a plausible path for this future tech. It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12932"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12952,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12932\/revisions\/12952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}