{"id":359,"date":"2007-02-02T21:06:14","date_gmt":"2007-02-03T05:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=359"},"modified":"2007-02-24T10:27:27","modified_gmt":"2007-02-24T18:27:27","slug":"ps2-note-7-reflections-on-reader-comments-on-ps2-notes-1-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/02\/ps2-note-7-reflections-on-reader-comments-on-ps2-notes-1-6\/","title":{"rendered":"PS2 Note #7: Thoughts on Reader PS2 Comments Thus Far"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m going light on hyperlinks today because my desktop machine is \u2014 the horror, the horror \u2014 back at ClickAway. Of course they can\u2019t reproduce the problem. Of course they won\u2019t 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\u2019s 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…<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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 \u201cPS2 Note\u201d\u009d into the Search box at the upper right hand corner of the blog.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====rs on One Mind:\n\nI 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?\n\nWhen 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.\n\nOne thing that seems to be consistently reported about awakening, as in enlightenment, is the realization that \u201cI was always awake.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s not the personality that wakes up, but the connection to the All.\n\n<<<<<=====Steve H on One Mind: \n\nWhy would each pebble have its own separate memory? Why not have all rocks share a big memory, and all fire, etc.\n\nFires are transient; they\u2019d see their inevitable entropic destruction as soon as they became sentient and panic, try to spread. I feel like a fire wouldn\u2019t have much to say except \u201cFeed me.\u201d\u009d But maybe they have a shared racial memory, so you can light a match and talk to it; the next match remembers your question.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on One Mind<\/p>\n

In any case, I do believe in the One Cosmic Mind. Monism. But that\u2019s a wholly separate issue from whether or not rocks can think as individuals. The name \u201cpanpsychism\u201d\u009d 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.<\/p>\n

On enlightenment, the other day Terry Bisson said to me, \u201cI figure that your existence is a huge circle, and everything is singing, and when you\u2019re \u201d\u02dcalive\u2019 is the only time that you don\u2019t hear the song.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I think we could accept that a fire has a localized and rather short life. Maybe the fire accepts it too. Maybe they don\u2019t 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\u2019t have that issue. There\u2019s always more fire. The flame dances and enjoys with no fear of extinction.<\/p>\n

This said, there\u2019s something to the idea that the fire might pass its thoughts on to another one. Maybe fires\u2019 souls cumulatively get smarter.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====alek on Living Organs: \n\nDo parts of a human body other than the brain become sentient as well? If so, then as well as your old brain, you\u2019d have silp personalities inside you too, like etheric parasites. Maybe humans turn into something new.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Living Organs<\/p>\n

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\u2019t listen and the pain gets worse.<\/p>\n

In some ways, I think live in the hylozoic era won\u2019t be all that different. I\u2019m working all the time now to see objects around me as alive. It\u2019s not that big a switch.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====rs on Ghosts:\n\nMaybe 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?\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Ghosts:<\/p>\n

So you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====rs on Googling:\n\nNote 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?\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Googling:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s like a tax they\u2019re 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\u2019t let them.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Atomic Silps: \n\nIs there a threshold of size or complexity for an object to wake up? Are your body\u2019s 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!\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Atomic Silps:<\/p>\n

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\u2019il gaahs have their tiny little lives. Fireflies of mind. Quantum mechanically, even a single electron is a gnarly computation, a vibrating state function field.<\/p>\n

There was this stoner bible some forty years back, Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man\u2019s Guide to Enlightenment, I worshipped that book. And his big teaching was that there\u2019s only one kind of thing in the universe. Monads kind of. \u201cNobody here but us chickens.\u201d\u009d 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\u2019t talk to them so much. They\u2019re like a chorus in the background.<\/p>\n

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

In principle a valid point. Atoms might think really fast, planets really slow. But for purposes of the story, I\u2019m not gonna go there.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Steve H on Silp Intelligence: \n\nGiving a rock the power to think might not be enough. With no instincts or desires, what would they reach for or wonder about? I\u2019d say you need installed software along with the lazy-8 memory or you\u2019d have a Zen rock garden that did its own meditating. You have it right when you say they\u2019d be little gurus meditating, already in nirvana at birth. \n\nMaybe it takes a nudge to start them off thinking. Didn\u2019t Treebeard say the elves wanted to wake everything up and talk to it?\n\nPerhaps a silp mind coalesces around fragments of legacy AI code. Would the new mind find life as a pebble tedious?\n\nI think talking silps would be rare, and silps with something to say even rarer. I suspect silps who spoke might inspire pilgrimages.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Silp Intelligence:<\/p>\n

When the lazy eight unfurls and the silps are born, they reflexively \u201ceat\u201d\u009d all the nants and orphids, absorbing their data. I\u2019m not going to have the beezies per se survive, but some of that thinky code will be in the silps. It\u2019s 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\u2019t have such smart silps as we do. Earth itself is worth a pilgrimage. \u201cSee the incredible talking rock!\u201d\u009d But those talking rocks are all over the place on our weird wonderful world.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019s cool to be raised up a few feet above the ground. Getting high!<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====alek on Artistic Hylozoism: \n\nI saw a video kind of like yours on YouTube made by an autistic woman, who has her own language that she describes as \u201d\u02dcbeing in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment\u2019. Living in a panpsychic world would really, really change the way we are.\n\n=========Ira Madclaw on artistic hylozoism: \n\nThe artist Andy Goldsworthy totally lives in the hylozoic world.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Artistic Hylozoism:<\/p>\n

rs compared my videos to the autistic video too. Thanks a lot, guys! I was just really happy in my video, don\u2019t you understand? Seriously, I get what you\u2019re saying. That\u2019s a great video, too, by the way, I put a link to it up there, and I found it by seaching video.google.com.<\/p>\n

I can really relate to where that woman is at. And her argument is that by kind of dancing with the world she\u2019s speaking a kind of language with it \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Steve H on Kiqqie Animals: \n\nSentient 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. \n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Kiqqie Animals:<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t thought much about animals with high IQ or at least perception increase. This is a good point, I\u2019ll have to take it into account. But maybe not till PS3, I have enough issues already I think.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Steve H on Scary Silps: \n\nI think you\u2019ve had a key insight that some of them might be angry or cold, and not very good company. \n\nIt 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 \u201cdon\u2019t spend me, daddy,\u201d\u009d or your rings and jewelry from demanding jewelry of their own. \n\n<<<<<=====Doctor Jabbir on Scary Silps:\n\nRedwoods 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.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Scary Silps:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any way to \u201cstun\u201d\u009d the mind out of a silp. Their mind is stored in the eighth dimension, and we can\u2019t 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\u2019m gonna decree that Gaia doesn\u2019t let them.<\/p>\n

I like the idea of cranky silps. That\u2019s 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\u2019t want to go there. Gotta limit the options. As it is, I\u2019m in more danger than ever in writing the Mathematician Godfather novel: \u201cHe makes you an offer you can\u2019t understand.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Steve H on Telepathic Parasitism: \n\nIn 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\u2019t trust the data they cribbed, they\u2019d give up.\n\nIf we could block parasitic usage of our computation, then we could sell off computer time. Or band together for members-only brain sharing.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Telepathic Parasitism:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019re screwed. Maybe rocks aren\u2019t that skilled, maybe they can\u2019t close themselves off, because they don\u2019t need to anyway, as rocks aren\u2019t mind gaming each other much.<\/p>\n

The evil Kang are in fact going to parasitize our uncommonly rich silps and use them as a server farm. And they\u2019ll be waiting like slobbering ghouls at the door to parasitize us every time we open our telepathy blinders. So it\u2019s either be parasitized or don\u2019t do telepathy.<\/p>\n

The Rull and the Magic Harp will in fact help humanity figure out a way to stave off the Kang parasitism. I\u2019m 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\u2019m thinking I\u2019ll come up with some other means of its action.<\/p>\n

As for the group mind-sharing, that\u2019s a separate idea, and a good one. Thinking clubs. Well, that\u2019s what this blog is an example of right now, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Joe Ardent on Telepathic Society: \n\nHow 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\u2019s 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).\n\nBut 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.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Telepathic Society:<\/p>\n

This is a rich vein of thought. I\u2019ve 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\u2019t \u201cwork\u201d\u009d 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.<\/p>\n

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

Yeah, I\u2019m 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\u2019t snap back. But with lazy eight we\u2019ll be more robust. A complete system backup awaits in the eighth dimension.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====Doctor Jabbir on Quantum Mechanics:\n\nThe most intriguing property of the quantum world is the notion of complementarity\u2014that you can ask one question (momentum?) or another (position?) but not both and that somehow the world contains both but you can\u2019t 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\u2019d 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.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Quantum Mechanics:<\/p>\n

I love this line of thought. Maybe consciousness consists of a weird-ass request. \u201cAm I happy?\u201d\u009d I always come back to Damasio\u2019s 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\u2019s how rocks get conscious too, by the way. They become aware of themselves having feelings about things.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====rs on Quantum Computation:\n\nFrom the perspective of quantum computation as described in Set Lloyd\u2019s \u201cProgramming the Universe\u201d\u009d it seems easy to have memory and computation all over the place, there are lots of bits to go around.\n\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Quantum Computation:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2026). He said something along the lines of, \u201ceven if you don\u2019t LIKE the idea of a quantum reality, that\u2019s what\u2019s really TRUE.\u201d\u009d I\u2019m letting the quantum into my heart.<\/p>\n

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<<<<<=====rs on Silp Happiness:\n\nConsciousness centered in inorganic objects would have different motivations, different mental axes. For instance a rock might not mind if it never moved? Perhaps it\u2019s only humans that are so often unhappy with their situations. Maybe silps don\u2019t even have the unhappy\/happy axis.\n\n=========>>>>>Rudy on Silp Happiness:<\/p>\n

Maybe not, but I think it\u2019s gonna be more fun to pretend that they do. The animist religions always have the spirits being happy or unhappy with what we\u2019re doing. <\/p>\n

Thanks for all the feedback, y’all. This is a big help to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m going light on hyperlinks today because my desktop machine is \u2014 the horror, the horror \u2014 back at ClickAway. Of course they can\u2019t reproduce the problem. Of course they won\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","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\/359","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=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}