Merry Christmas, ya’ll! I’ll be posting on Charles Stross’s Charlie’s Diary for a week or two. I’ll probably put my first post on Charlie’s Diary today.
Where am I? Inside which reflection?
Before I go off into Christmas and Charlie’s Diary, here’s a Rudy’s Blog post with images of Bruges.
Cool wires on the electric train lines in Belgium. Ambient abstract art.
One of the big things in Bruges is the canals. At one time, the town was linked to the North Sea via a river which then silted up, leaving the town as a literal backwater. And, ah, that early winter sunset over a canal.
I lover pictures of reflections. Imagine walking down these old stone stairs into the wobbly mirrorworld inside the ancient canal.
The upside of being a backwater is that Bruges was spared the brutal and destructive waves of war and redevelopment that convulsed the second half of the 20th Century.
The have a local beer called the Zot, or the Fool. Love it. Zot is like sot.
Lace is still big there, although one suspects that these days a lot of the Belgian lace is made in China.
Cool old Gothic banister that looks like a dog.
I love the God’s eye icons you see. The eye in a triangle in a set of rays. I think I described one of these in Hylozoic. The point at infinity.
Great old fountains with lion’s mouths. I like the medieval notion of turning everything into an animal. It’s all alive. Our future form of computation. No chips, no biotech, just quantum computing things.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
I’ll be back on Rudy’s Blog in early January. Until then I’ll be posting on Charles Stross’s Charlie’s Diary . And if you want more Rudy, don’t forget about my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls.
All this fall, here in 2011, I’ve been busy editing some twenty years of electronic journal files which I’m planning to publish as an ebook called Journals, 1990 – 2011, from my emerging Transreal Press in the early months of 2012. This book, Journals, 1990 – 2011, will weigh in at about half a million words, really too long to appear as a print book. It’s maybe five times as long as my new autobiography,Nested Scrolls. Certainly the autobio is more of a shapely book, but I am finding some interesting stuff in the old journals.
At this point I have rather a lot of unused photos that I wanted to post anyway, so I’m going to mix a couple of them in with journal excerpts from time to time. Today we have an excerpt written in 1994. My last Ramones concert. Even though you’re dead, you’re still my friends.
It was the Ramones final tour, and on March 9, 1994, I went with my wife and children to see them at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. My son, Rudy, Jr. got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving, which seemed quite unfair, as he’d often stagedived at punk concerts before and everyone had thought it was fine.
I managed to stay in the pit till almost the end of the main set. Thanks to my fitness I could hang in there pretty long. Although today I like can’t lift my arms, they’re so tired from fending people off. Whenever it would be relatively quiet and I’d be near Joey, I’d yell “My Back Pages.”
The newest Ramone, C.J. the bass-player, is the one who sings that song, though I didn’t actually realize that when I was yelling to Joey. They were off key almost the whole time, but then Joey said, “Cheap acid, cheap show,” and, perhaps in reaction, their playing got better. They did about five more songs and left the stage and people are clapping, and C.J. and Johnny and Marky come out without Joey, and tear into yes “My Back Pages”.
I love the wall-of-sound quality to it. They’re like crucifying this old Dylan-folkie song on the wall of sound. And the words to the song are so great. “But I was so much older then,/ I’m younger than that now.” Too true!
For this encore, C.J. and Johnny had put on fresh dry t-shirts. C.J.’s T-shirt is like a circle with a picture of the Manhattan skyline. And over that is a big red SS in that lighting-stroke kind of jagged S. And Johnny is wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt, and draped on either side of Charlie are his crazy woman followers, like Sadie Glutz, and Squeaky Fromme, and the t-shirt says “Charlie’s Angels.” Squeaky once tried to shoot Jerry Ford with a .45 automatic pistol, she’s still locked up. Charlie Manson and SS, ripping the sweet thoughtful sixties folksong “My Back Pages” to frikkin’ shreds.
It was one of the most awesome multimedia presentations I’ve ever grokked. I went back in the pit, and the wave threw me up near C.J. I had my glasses off so they wouldn’t get clawed off, but then I wanted to put them on to be able to see him, and there was a crowd-surfer over my head, and I was thinking, “I’m busy with my glasses, so just this once I’m not going to reach up and push the guy,” so of course he falls on my head. But I don’t think it did any lasting damage.
[You can't really find a good video of the Ramones doing “My Back Pages,” although there is what looks to be an amateur video of it, with fairly weak sound, shot in Buenos Aires in 1996. Note again that Joey isn't on stage for this number and C.J. is singing. But you have to imagine it about ten thousand times louder.]
At the end of October, the historical novelist Celia Holland got Terry Bisson and me to accompany her and her son-in-law John to a Raiders game in Oakland.
In Celia’s wonderful novels, such as Varanger, we often read about Vikings and warriors. Not such a far stretch from the types we found at the Raiders’ stadium.
I’d been a little uneasy about going there. But I had enough sense to wear a black shirt. Just about everyone else was wearing a numbered Raiders football jersey, but they were all friendly enough to me. The very fact that I’d bought a ticket to the game meant that I was on the right side.
I was of course impressed by the Raiderette cheerleaders. They had a separate group for each side of the field, and now and then they’d come down near the endzones. I made a video of them too.
The area where Celia had gotten us tickets was in the bleachers near one of the endzones. It turned out this was in fact the most fan intense area of all—the so-called Black Hole. Guys were dressed like Death or like pirates. Two ladies in front of me were cheerfully sharing a plate of nachos, and when for some reason the public address announcer mentioned the Girl Scouts, one the women said to her friend, “Eff the Girl Scouts!” Her friend echoed the sentiment.
When the opposing team—the Minnesota Vikings—was on the point of scroing a touchdown against us, nearly everyone in the Black Hole stood up to scream curses and give our enemies the finger.
In the fourth quarter, security guards began coming down into the Black Hole to handcuff and lead away those of our company who were considered to be too drunk.
We lost the game, but at the end, there was a calm, mellow feeling of mutual empathy. Together we’d weathered the storm. Note that the “5150″ on this lady’s jersey is by way of being a Raiders code number—it stands for the number of the California legal statute for “involuntary psychiatric hold” under which people can be imprisoned if they’re considered to have a mental disorder that makes them be a danger to themselves or to others. That’s the Black Hole spirit!
Oddly enough, I happened to give two TEDx talks in the last couple of months. In my most recent post, I embedded a link for the talk on “Beyond Machines: The Year 3000,” which I gave in Brussels in November. Today I’m embedding a link for the TEDx talk, “Transreal in Los Gatos,” which I gave in October.
The “Transreal in Los Gatos” talk is a more autobiographical than the Brussels talk, and discusses some of the stories and events that are in my autobiography, Nested Scrolls.
So I decided that I’d better write my autobiography before it was too late. What with death and senility closing in!
I didn’t want my autobio to be overly long or dry. I wanted it to read something like a novel. Unlike an encyclopedia entry, a novel isn’t a list of dates and events. A novel is all about characterization and description and conversation, about action and vignettes. I wanted to structure my autobiography,Nested Scrolls , like that.
The U.S. edition of Nested Scrolls comes out from Tor Books this week. You can order the hardcover or ebook Tor edition from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or direct from Tor. The Tor site has links for independent booksellers and further ebook formats.
Note that a more expensive collector’s edition is available from PS Press in England.
There’s a fashion these days for making video trailers for books. The following isn’t precisely about Nested Scrolls, but it will do. It’s a recent TEDx talk that I gave in Brussels covering a lot of the ideas that I touch on in my autobio.
And here’s a nice blurb from Regina Schroeder at Booklist :
This is a wild memoir, certainly as satisfying a read as any of Rucker’s novels… He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a beatnik writer, and in many ways, he has succeeded—in others, of course, he has surpassed his inspiration. It is, being the story of a life, not an easy road: there is trouble with his parents and with his wild-man lifestyle, and with work and sheer existence. By the end of the volume, though, the reader has a sense that it’s been an interesting and well-lived life, and it makes for a fascinating story, even the time he spends as a math teacher. This reads like Rucker’s novels, packed with adventures, filled with humor, and often quite surreal.
Here’s a photo of me in Jellyfish Lake in the South Pacific. Think of this as an image of me swimming around inside my mind—surrounded by ideas.
Another blurb, from Rick Kleffel, in his online site, The Agony Column :
What distinguishes Nested Scrolls is Rucker’s voice, which has this sort of steely, understated clarity. He writes in an almost flat, declarative style, which makes his rather amazing life all the more entertaining. He moves with equal ease through the halls of academia, science and science fiction. He effortlessly pushes the envelopes of math, technology, writing and art. He’s told us many stories chock full of verve and imagination, but his own story may be the most powerful he has to tell. … Perhaps, just perhaps, Nested Scrolls will change what people think, not just of Rucker but books.
This is a picture of me in the early 1980s, using my beloved IBM Selectric to write my novel Wetware, the cyberpunk classic that would win me my second Philp K. Dick award. At that time I was a freelance writer, i.e. unemployed. My family and I were living in Lynchburg, Virginia, of all places. I was the lone cyberpunk in evangelist Jerry Falwell’s home town.
The picture above shows me with a cone shell in 2004. I’m imagining that it’s sending alien thoughts into my head. For a more accurate description of how I wrote my autobio, see the free Notes for Nested Scrolls, a booklength PDF file of my writing notes, about 600 Meg.
And the plot for my autobiography? Well, okay, a real life doesn’t have a plot that’s as clear as a novel’s. But, as a writer, I can think about my life’s structure, about the story arc. And I’d like to know what it was all about. In writing my autobiography, I came up with a few ideas.
You might say that I searched for ultimate reality, and I found contentment in creativity. I tried to scale the heights of science, and I found my calling in mathematics and in science fiction. You don’t have to break the bank of the Absolute. Learning your craft can be enough.
As a youth, I was a loner. But then I found love and became a family man. I’ve spent a lot of time with my wife and our three children over the years. And now we have grandchildren. New saplings coming up as the old trees tumble down.
I’ve had a number of careers. Initially I was a math professor—math always came easy for me. Nothing to memorize! Then I took up writing, really that’s my core career. But, even with thirty-odd books out, writing doesn’t pay very much.
To make ends meet, I spent the last twenty years working as a computer science professor in Silicon Valley. Riding the wave. It was a blast. And eventually I even got good at teaching, mutating from a rebel to a somewhat helpful professor.
My autobiography’s title has to do with the notion of stories unfolding within stories—and the title also relates to a certain kind of computer graphic I did research on, cellular automata. An example appears above.
My book in a nutshell? Whatever I did, I never stopped seeing the world in my own special way, and I never stopped looking for new ways to share my thoughts.
I was in Brussels on November 22, 2011, to give a talk at TEDx Brussels at the Bozar building in Brussels.
Here’s a photo I took of the audience after the talk.
A video of my talk went online as of November 24, 2011. And I’ve embedded the video here.
***
The rest of this post consists of the slides and the outline of the fifteen-minute talk.
In this talk I speculate about the year 3000. A thousand years from now.
I first came to Brussels here in 2000 to do some research for my novel about Peter Bruegel’s life, As Above So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel. And in 2002, I was here as a guest of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.
The picture shown above is called The Beekeepers. It’s disturbing and surreal. Bruegel drew this image in 1568, shortly after the patriots, the Count of Egmont and the Count of Hoorne were beheaded at behest of the Spanish Inquisition. My sense is that those straw hives represent the baskets into which Count Egmont’s and Count Hoorne’s heads dropped after being lopped off by the executioner’s sword in the Grand Place.
The image has some relevance to my talk, as a human head, is after all, a rather compact and intense information storage device, and I’ll be discussing the notion of a “lifebox” model of a human personality.
I got a Ph. D. in mathematics, and I’ve published popular science books about infinity and about the fourth dimension. I spent about twenty years as a computer science professor at San Jose State. And over the last ten years I’ve become something of a painter—and you’ll see some of my pictures here. But the the main thing I do is to to write science fiction novels. By now I’ve published twenty of them.
In 1982, I published my early cyberpunk novel, Software. The book introduced a theme I’ve been thinking about for my whole career. Is it possible to copy a person’s personality and essence into another medium? In Software, my notion was that some helpful robots were copying people’s brains by slicing them up—extracting the human software. And the software was being put onto robot bodies. That woman on the cover is an android, you understand. Software and three follow-up novels are available now as the Ware Tetralogy.
I do see this as being something that will happen in the next thousand years. In the very near term, we already have a simple way for mimicking the process, something that I call lifebox software. The idea behind a lifebox is get a large and rich data base with a person’s writings, videos of them, interviews, and so on. That’s the back end. The front end of a lifebox is an interactive search engine. This will be a huge commercial business soon. I’ve even made a preliminary attempt at a Rudy’s lifebox.
Back in the mid 1980s, I became fascinated with a new style of parallel programs called cellular automata or CAs. I learned about them from Stephen Wolfram. I was interested in his remarks that some cellular automata are universal computers.
I wrote this early CA in assembly language, and the display is made of ASCII characters. I call this particular CA Maxine Headroom after the then-popular animatronic TV character Max Headroom. You can get this program as part of the free Cellab software online.
Although I was getting my novels published I wasn’t earning enough money to support myself, my wife and our three children. I decided to get into computer science. Even though my Ph. D. was in mathematical logic, in 1986 I was able to get a job as a computer science professor at San Jose State University in California.
In principle any universal computer can emulate a human mind. And many natural systems behave like cellular automata. So I began wondering if there might be some way to have natural objects become programmable in an easy way.
Above is an image of me clowning with a South Pacific cone shell. The cone shells are beloved by fans of cellular automata, as it’s widely believed that the shells’ patterns are generated by a biological process very similar to a cellular automaton. Here I’m imagining that the cone shell will somehow connect to my brain.
In the years to come, I got ever more involved involved with CAs. The way they work is that, in a CA, you can think of the onscreen pixel as being a little computer, with all of them updating in parallel. One trick that I liked to use continuous values for the states of these pixels or cells, see my free software CAPOW, available online.
Perhaps my favorite CAs are the ones that spontaneously take on the appearance of ever-turning nested scrolls. These guys are called Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls, They’re are common in physics—as patterns of turbulent wakes. And they’re ubiquitous in biology—you find Zhabotinsky scrolls in mushroom caps, shells, beans and fetuses. Some have argued that everything in the world is a CA.
I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours staring at CAs. I was always looking for the gnarly ones, that is the CAs whose pattern is nicely positioned between order and randomness. I like using the more California word “gnarly” instead of “complex” or “chaotic.”
Working as a programmer, I learned the frustration of working with the brittle computing machines. If you omit a semi-colon in a novel, the novel doesn’t disappear—as can happen with a program.
Thinking as a science-fiction writer, I liked to imagine having a completely smooth interface between myself and the outer world—which I’ve painted as a torus here. I was still thinking in terms of a cable into my spine at this point. You can see all of my paintings online.
Where will end up in a century or two will be a device that sits on the back of your neck and communicates with other people via their devices. I call these things uvvies in my science fiction novels.
An uvvy link is very close to telepathy. I think we’ll get true telepathy when, instead of sending information to someone else, you simply send them a link to the location where that information is stored in your own brain. And they can access it there without copying it. Relative to you, other people are part of your data cloud.
This picture shows a pathological regress you might encounter with telepathy. Like pointing a video camera at its output screen. An infinite regress. But there’s nothing really wrong with that kind of experience. It might even be fun. This drawing and the ones to follow are taking from my novel, Saucer Wisdom.
At this point I was getting more and more interested in biocomputation. I think an uvvy might well be a biotech device—probably you want anything that interfaces that closely with your body to be alive.
A much easier biocomputation app we’re likely to see is a substance similar to the skin of a cuttlefish. Call it squidskin for short. We’ll be using squidskin as an inexpensive all-purpose display. This guy has a squidskin pillow so he can look at nice things in bed.
I like to use the word wetware when talking about hacking genomics. I’m taking wetware to mean the genomic information that generates a living organism. An acorn is the wetware for an oak tree, an egg is the wetware for a chicken, a person’s wetware is their DNA.
I don’t see nanotech as a separate discipline. It’s really about learning to work with the biotech already present in nature. To become a wetware engineer.
Looking towards the year 3000, I expect that we will have gotten very good at wetware engineering. This painting show a future city in which all of the buildings—except for that tree in front—have been grown.
Note also the Bosch-style little man in the lower corner. And the floating little figures might be taking the place of surveillance cameras. For some reason each of them shaped like the Virgin Mary. This painting was made for my novel Frek and the Elixir, which is set in the year 3003.
Naturally we’d like to grow our own houses. I think of a seed about the size of a pizza, and you shove it in the ground. I like the idea of a family living inside a kind of oak tree with squidskin on the inner walls.
I see the tree as being powered off photosynthesis. It has toilets in the walls that feed into the tree’s metabolism. It extracts metal from the ground and grows an electrical circuit, in case we’re still using electricity. The internal plumbing system extracts water from a tap-root that grows down to the water table.
The people have symbiotic wings they can strap on. I know there’s an energy problem in human flight—we’ll assume the wings are powered with, let us say, dark matter.
We can expect wetware engineered plants to grow any kinds of objects that we need. Here you see a plant like a corn stalk, except it extracts iron from the soil and forms a knife at its tip. A stub of the stalk makes a nice handle.
In the early 2000s, I became interested in the notion of moving beyond biocomputation as well If we take seriously the notion of quantum computation, anything at all can be a computer.
The notion that I’m leading up to is hylozoism. This is a real word, you can find it in Wikipedia. I got so enamored of this word that I even wrote a novel called Hylozoic, in which everything is alive—even the rocks.
A stone is, after all, like a jiggling mass of a septillion atoms, connected by spring-like bonds. There’s a lot happening inside a rock. Why shouldn’t it be as intelligent as I am?
In a hylozoic society of the year 3000, we don’t use manufactured tools anymore.
Instead we directly program the material objects around us. Every object is filled with quantum wave functions. Every object is programmable. Every object is alive. You only have to tell it what to do.
And how do you talk to the objects? Via our uvvies—that is, via something like telepathy.
Here’s a matching pair of images—just for fun.
This painting shows a weird scene in our biocomputational future. Think of it as a year 3000 disco.
And here’s a pattern of cellular automata that underlies the year 3000 disco. This is what our world is like a smooth field of quantum computation. That’s all that’s there. And we only interpret the patterns as being things like green potatoes and dancing ducks?
And after the year 3000? Perhaps we leave our bodies and turn into light. Or maybe into subdimensional jellyfish, as I discuss in my novelMathematicians in Love.
Today’s seemingly unrelated pictures stem from a three-day hiking trip that my wife and I did with some friends in the Point Reyes National Seashore earlier this week. Mainly we hit the Tomales Point trail and the Estero Trail. We stayed at a pleasant, inexpensive inn called the Tomales Point Resort.
I also posted some pictures of the Tomales Point trail back in 2008, in the context of a ruminative but not really despairing philosophical entry called “The Problem of Death.”
Today’s topic, however, has to do with a new angle on intelligence augmentation.
What are some ways in which people might become noticeably smarter? I’m not interested in brute-force approaches like shoving in more memory tissues or internalizing direct links to world wide web. The cool, SFictional thing would be if there were some in-retrospect-rather-obvious mental trick that we haven’t yet exploited.
In this context I’m also thinking of my friend Nathaniel Hellerstein’s notion that there could be some as yet undiscovered physical tool as simple as the wheel, screw, or lever. I think he used to call his thing the flippit.
Mind amplification tricks do exist. Think of how our effective intelligence improved with the advent of speech and of writing. In the mathematical realm, our ability to calculate got exponentially better when we started using positional notation. And the computer and the internet give us another big boost: rapid computation, stable external memory (like my notion of a lifebox), and the universal library of web search. It would be cool if there some non-technical mental trick that would make us much brighter.
One of the dreams of AI is that there may yet be some conceptual trick that we can use to make our machines really smart. The only path towards AI at present is to beat the problems to death with neural nets working on data-bases. Progress involves making the computers faster, the neural nets more complex, and the data bases larger. But what if there were some clear and simple insight, some big aha?
And—the kicker—the aha would work for human brains as well as for machines. We’d get IA (intelligence amplification) as well as AI (artificial intelligence).
Inkling of the aha: My thoughts aren’t at all like a page of symbols—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations. Is there any communicable way to truly describe one’s real mental life?
And this is where I can use the mind-as-quantum-system notion of Nick Herbert’s quantum tantra! So we get a lot smarter by using a form of mental quantum computation.
Seemingly irrelevant topic: The other day night we saw the Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters movie, Magic Trip. The material was quite familiar to me from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and from Kesey’s Garage Sale anthology.
Unsettling to see some snippets of Neal Cassady doing motor-mouth speed rapping. “We’re 4D minds in 3D bodies in a 2D world.”
The whole cultural change thing being depicted is exciting—the flow from early Sixties with the Beats, to Tim Leary’s high-minded proselytizing, to the Pranksters’ street psychedelia, and thence to the mass fad for acid, including the birth of light shows and the Grateful Dead. I like the notion of the Dead noodling along to the trippers at the 1964-1965 acid tests.
I liked the scenes where Kesey meets Kerouac and then meets Leary, and the meetings don’t click. The street surrealists meet the resentful alkie sentimentalist and the mandarin. Later in the film, apropos of his reduced role as a writer, Kesey says—with touches of sadness, shyness, embarrassment, and acceptance: “Maybe I fried my marbles.”
And now—here’s the point—I’m thinking that I could transmute the historical birth of the psychedelic movement into a theme for my next SF novel. It could all happen again—something I’ve always longed for. The so-called Sixties were way too short.
But this time we do it not via a drug, but via quantum tantra in Nick Herbert’s sense, that is, via a new technique of mind-alteration that’s not exactly meditation, but rather something more literally physics-based. At least initially, I’ll take the physics route rather than any, like, Sufi or Zen mystic route.
Like Nick says, it would be so cool to see some laboratory physics break-through for QT (quantum tantra). This makes it interesting, dramatic, SFictional, and Silicon Valley. It’s the angle that Nick’s always hoped for. But then, later on in the novel, some visionary can see that the laboratory equipment isn’t necessary, and that one really can enter a QT state on one’s own—and now it can be some kind of mystic meditator that gets to this point, I’m thinking of a Japanese woman speaking odd English.
The QT movement hits with force of the psychedelic revolution—the excitement, the liberation, the public ignorance, the denunciations politicians, and the ensuing international fad.
It’s worth recalling that in that historical period of the advent of acid, the atomic bomb was on people’s minds, also the recent assassination of JFK. A heavy time. And—at least according to Magic Trip—the CIA were the ones who first started disseminating acid to the American public—under the guise of scientific tests.
So I might have a kicker where quantum tantra is a government invention of some kind. We might suppose that our leaders see QT as a kind weapon. They plan to send QT-heads into enemy cities, prepared to rip holes in space like psychedelic suicide-bombers. And naturally this goes wildly wrong…
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