{"id":374,"date":"2007-02-24T12:35:42","date_gmt":"2007-02-24T20:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=374"},"modified":"2007-06-05T09:49:57","modified_gmt":"2007-06-05T17:49:57","slug":"teleportaion-via-fear-and-doubt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/24\/teleportaion-via-fear-and-doubt\/","title":{"rendered":"Teleportation Via Fear and Doubt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even though this post could have been called PS2 Notes #11: Hylozoic, I got tired of putting that tag into my entry titles. I guess I could flag these novel notes via a Category tag at the end of each entry, but I find that too much trouble, too. The blog’s internal Search box takes care of categorization actually. Search for Hylozoic or PS2, and you’ll find the entries about the novel.<\/p>\n

[Here, by way of segue, is an Art Sample from the Glorious Seventies<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I was set off on today’s line of thought by a comment on my blog from RedSlime: \u201cI think you need a good physics reason for limiting teleportation \u2014 suppose that, say, humans\u2019 Higgs particle interactions are unique, with the difference caused by some quality of human mentation.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Yes, what if the human ability to teleport is very rare among the intelligent beings of the cosmos? It would be cool if the Khan and need humanoids to drive the teleportation engines of their intergalactic spaceships. Maybe they\u2019ve enslaved a humanoid race in another galaxy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This puts me in mind of Robert Sheckley\u2019s 1953 story \u201d\u02dcSpecialist,\u2019 from his landmark anthology, Untouched By Human Hands. <\/em>In the story, humans are so-called Pushers, who can push starcraft to faster-than-light speeds. The starcraft is in fact a symbiotic organism composed of cooperating aliens: Walls, Engine, Thinker, Eye, Talker. Their Pusher has died, and they land on Earth to abduct a regular guy to help them.<\/p>\n

He Pushed. Nothing happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cTry again,\u201d\u009d Talker begged.<\/p>\n

Pusher searched his mind. He found a deep well of doubt and fear. Staring into it, he saw his own tortured face. Thinker illuminated it for him. Pushers had lived with this doubt and fear for centuries. Pushers had fought through fear, killed through doubt. That was where the Pusher organ was!<\/p>\n

Human\u2014specialist\u2014Pusher\u2014he entered fully into the Crew, merged with them, threw mental arms around the shoulders of Thinker and Talker.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

[Passage quoted above is from Robert Sheckley, \u201cSpecialist.” The image below is from Sheckley’s journals<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It occurs to me today that this is a transreal description of becoming a writer! Doubt and fear is why I write. Also, of course, the jonesin’ for \u201cthe narcotic moment of creative bliss.\u201d\u009d But in any case, it\u2019s the doubt and fear that make me need that rush so much.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Back to teleportation, yeah, it\u2019s gotta be what the Sheck-man says. Doubt and fear. That\u2019s what makes me write; that\u2019s what allows humans to teleport. And hardly any other beings have our levels of doubt and fear.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Certainly it seems as if animals don\u2019t have doubt and fear in the same way that we do. If a predator comes, an animal runs away, end of story. If cornered, a rat bares his teeth and fights. Animals don\u2019t worry about what might happen; they don\u2019t brood over what they did in the past; they don\u2019t mentally agonize\u2014or at least one can suppose <\/em>that they don\u2019t. [Maybe elephants do, though. Maybe elephants can teleport, too.]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s easy to suppose that the silps that inhabit natural processes don\u2019t have doubt and fear either. Silps don\u2019t much care if they die. A vortex of air forms and disperses, no problem.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And for the purposes of the story, we can suppose the aliens\u2014the Kang and Rull\u2014are also lacking in doubt and fear. They\u2019re like kiwis\/cockroaches and manta-rays\/rats. So they can\u2019t teleport either.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I still need to cook up some physics-like explanation for why the human qualities of doubt and fear entail the ability to teleport. <\/p>\n

As a first stab, I\u2019m thinking that having doubt and fear involves creating really good mental models of alternate realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternate realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. And this means that we can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can\u2019t. We carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I found a version of the kiwi-like Kang\u2019s starship in a photo supply store, it\u2019s a black natural-rubber dust-blower bulb called Giottos Q.ball. The tip tilts over and poof<\/em>, the kiwi Kang come tumbling out.<\/p>\n

And, dig this, the Kang have a pilot. A humanoid Pusher who allows them to teleport between the galaxies. He\u2019s black and stocky and he wears shades. He\u2019s modeled on the jazz hero Charlie Parker! Maybe he\u2019ll win Thuy away from Jayjay. Maybe he plays an alien instrument that\u2019s something like a saxophone.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been listening to Charlie Parker all day every day lately\u2014I\u2019m a born-again late-life convert to the Church of Bepop. I\u2019m reading this great biography, Bird Lives<\/em>, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse, New York 1973). Got this picture off a KC library site<\/a>. Not much video of Bird online, most of it seems to be excerpted from an unfinished movie of him <\/a>with Coleman Hawkins playing first, you gotta wait a minute for Charlie. <\/p>\n

Also there\u2019s a nice YouTube <\/a>clip of Bird playing “Hothouse” with Dizzy Gillespie at a DownBeat awards event where Charlie only gets \u201cAlto Sax of the Year 1951\u201d\u009d and Diz gets \u201cAll Time Jazz Great\u201d\u009d award, which I\u2019m sure bugged the Bird a certain amount.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not so into embedding YouTube video on the blog page as I was a couple of weeks ago, as I find the embeds really slow down the page load time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even though this post could have been called PS2 Notes #11: Hylozoic, I got tired of putting that tag into my entry titles. I guess I could flag these novel notes via a Category tag at the end of each entry, but I find that too much trouble, too. The blog’s internal Search box takes […]<\/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-374","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\/374","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=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}