Mushroom.Man

by Paulo Tullio

  What’s clever about the human code is its compactness. It describes a complex organism right down to the shape of the fingernails in very little space. How it does this seems to be iteration, which leads me to the fractal world.

  Some of the greatest discoveries come from people who have crossed inter-disciplinary boundaries. As our world becomes increasingly specialized there’s a risk of researchers being so far inside their own woods that they can’t see forests anywhere. Benoit Mandelbrot found his inspiration in the world of chaos theory as applied to the weather. Weather doesn’t lend itself to projection easily. You may know where a hurricane is now, and what direction and speed it’s been heading in for the last eight hours, but that gives little precision in predicting where it’ll be in four hours’ time. The more you project forward the more tiny influences grow, sometimes enough to change the whole pattern. There had to be a way of encoding this non-linear behaviour mathematically, a way that allowed for pattern and change simultaneously. Fractal geometry was the answer that Mandelbrot found. Here’s a bit of Greg’s letter from all those years ago.

  ‘I’m sending you a program that generates fractals on your VDU. You can print them out as well. The basic instruction set that creates the fractal gingerbread man is short; about thirty lines of code. Yet it produces a thing of extraordinary complexity. The fractal has amazing properties: any part can be magnified to disclose even more wonderful landscapes; and yet there is a coherence. Wherever you look, whatever the magnification, there is always a gingerbread man in the pattern somewhere. The fractal universe is self-similar and also infinitely varied. Yet what are these images other than mathematical limits portrayed on a screen? The algorithm that produces this is n=n2+c; it’s not complicated, but it produces complexity. By iterating the algorithm millions of times the strange fractal universe comes to life. You put in a seed number, run it through the algorithm, put the result back into the algorithm and run it again. Do this a hundred times and one of two things happen. Either the number gets increasingly larger or smaller, or it tends to a limit. All you do is check what’s happening. If it’s tending to a limit then paint a dot on the screen white, if not paint it blue. Increment the seed number and do the same for the next point on the screen. That’s the process that creates those wonderful images. Modifying the basic algorithm produces ferns of great delicacy, trees, mollusc shells and coastlines. The more you look, the more of our world appears to be made from fractal shapes.

  ‘Is this the secret? Iteration not only in the genetic construction, but also over generations. Every human generation is an iteration of the basic genetic code, another run of the program with a few tiny changes each time. Who knows how many iterations there have been? If we take hominid existence to be about five million years old then there’s been a quarter of a million iterations or more. Enough to turn even a small modification into a large effect. Even human history fits nicely into a fractal view of the world. History is both self-similar yet constantly changing: that’s a perfect description of a fractal. In this view each one of us is but a dot amongst billions that make the fractal pattern of human history.

  ‘It occurs to me that that’s the route I ought to take. Not to try and write some code that can produce self-reflection, but rather a piece of code that can make small modifications to itself depending on its relationship to the environment. Then just like human generations, I let the program write its own offspring, each offspring minutely different from its parent, and then that offspring becomes the parent of the next generation. You see, I don’t write anything except God’s code – the seed; the rest is iteration over generations. Something may or may not turn up this way, but I’ve decided that scattering seeds has to be the answer. I’m writing seed programs constantly now, setting them up to start their own program race, monitoring the old and the new for interesting changes. One died, which I find interesting. After two million iterations it had modified its own code so much that it couldn’t replicate any more. The last one of that line just sat there, unable to continue or generate new offspring. Isn’t that weird? I haven’t created life, but I’ve created programmable death.’

  The letter arrived four days after Greg’s own death, along with the program that generated fractals. He took his own life shortly after telling me in the letter about his search to create life. I still don’t understand why. The news came the day of particularly heavy rains. Jane and I were alone in the house, struggling with leaks. It was a bald message from a woman whose name meant nothing to me – she just said that Greg had committed suicide and that she had found my telephone number in his diary. The rain, the damp, the dull sky and Greg’s death. Jane took it badly: she left the next morning.

  I spent hours running the fractal program that Greg had sent. The source code was included, so I could alter it as I wished. The fractal gingerbread man gives up its secrets when magnified. You choose an area and magnify it, zooming in tighter and tighter. The area of interest is the boundary between the incremental numbers and those tending to limits. This is where the patterns are, this is where our interest is stimulated; the frontier between two infinities – the incremental one and the limited one. Only a computer could take this raw data and shape it into a visual representation that pleases the human eye. It’s a glimpse of a computer-generated world where apparent landscapes and biological forms are no more than numbers displayed on a screen in a shape that we can understand. Fractals are gateways that let us observe a numerical reality. It’s a universe in the sense that it has no limits; you can go on magnifying since numbers are infinite. Magnify the gingerbread man’s neck several million times and you’ll find the valley of the sea-horses, a strangely beautiful landscape made of shapes that resemble them. Wherever you look beauty abounds.

  Mandelbrot’s classic paper is ‘How long is the coast-line of Britain?’ The point is that the answer depends on the scale. If you measure a bay, what size inlet in that bay do you include? The smaller the inlets allowable the larger the measurement becomes, although it will tend to a limit. Coastlines are a good example of fractals. They, too, are self-similar. Small inlets look much like large bays; only the scale changes. Like fractals they are a combination of difference and self-similarity. It’s like standing on a strange and infinitely large carpet. There appears to be a pattern, but as you move over it the pattern changes, slowly, imperceptibly. When it has become very different, there, imbedded in the pattern, is a smaller-scale version of the original pattern. An eternally shifting design of difference and similarity.

  A fractal isn’t simply an oddity that provides a pretty picture on a screen, it has real uses. To create a virtual-reality world you have to generate backgrounds – that is, a universe in which to set the artificial reality. The easiest way to do this, keeping the instruction set small, is to create the backgrounds from fractal algorithms on the fly. Complex backgrounds can be built up from a short set of instructions. This more than anything else is the fractal lesson. Complexity can be generated from simplicity by iterating a simple formula. It’s a thought that haunts me every time I look at a fern; it’s so obviously fractal-generated. The secret to complex life forms is iteration of simple rules that allow for tiny changes on each iteration. Greg was right to scatter his program seeds and let them replicate themselves; it’s a way close in form to the life that surrounds us.

  Virtual reality is an interesting prospect. You’ve got the apparent reality without the intelligence. You provide the intelligence in a reality not of your making. The range of realities available are limited only by the programmer’s imagination. You move around in a reality of someone else’s making. When the world of virtual reality becomes interactive, then you have a reality not far removed from dreams. Every whim, every wanderlust, every fantasy becomes possible. It is also a sanitized world where danger doesn’t exist. No germs, no viruses, no sabre-toothed tigers – at least, not real ones. It’s conceivable that all the technology to create a virtual reality could be put into an exoskeleto
n that you could wear, like a suit of armour. Inside the shell you could inhabit the world of your choice and the time of your choice.

  For the moment the worlds of virtual reality are the product of human imagination. But suppose control of the artificial reality were to be handed over to a machine intelligence. What kind of reality would it create for us? Virtual reality then becomes a gateway that allows us access to worlds not of human imagining. What strange vistas might open up, surreal landscapes where nothing is familiar, where nothing has relevance to our baggage of experience. It’s possible that something so different, so alien, would cause us some kind of sensory overload. With nothing of our past experience to relate to we may find ourselves so adrift that we would simply switch off, unable to cope.

  I try to imagine parallels here with mushroom realities. In many ways these realities seem closer to the dream state than the reality of the everyday. The difference seems to be in the brain’s responses to stimuli. Psilocybin, like all the indole group of psychedelics, changes the nature of the chemical bath that surrounds our neurons, and hence the responses of the brain’s synapses. The neural networks and pathways are affected: new connections become possible, new paths through the nexus are created. Barriers that separate the visual from the auditory, the olfactory from the tactile, become permeable. New matrices of thought are possible and existent. In dreams space and linear time cease to exist. What we call logical thought stops. Possibly it is all a function of the loss of linearity. For most people the dream state is the only state of altered consciousness that they deal with. Yet despite its universality it remains largely unexplored, unmapped. Somewhere on our journey towards a silicon world the knowledge of the sorcerers has been lost. The dream maps are slowly fading away, buried beneath our technology.

  The universe of the sorcerer – the shaman world – has never disappeared, it’s only been eclipsed. In many parts of the globe it’s the dominant reality. Monotheism and technology are its antithesis. In the western world of high technology the myths that remain part of our heritage are no longer relevant to our lives. To us they are simply stories. But back then, in that pantheistic world, they described reality fully, exactly, and relevantly. Somewhere in our genetic inheritance these myths remain, or at least the dark shapes that created them do. On inward journeys these atavistic shades can be found; the ogres and the gods – banished by rationalism but surviving still, waiting like Pandora’s box to be opened and unleashed once more.

  I don’t find that a worry. On an evolutionary scale our rational, technological world is a blink of the eye. More of our genetic code exists to deal with the shaman’s world than with the world of developed economies. The sense of wonder, of belonging, that the mushroom engenders is not accidental. The mushroom is only a trigger; unleashing the suppressed racial memories, letting us into the dream-time once more. It is feared more than anything else, more than nuclear war. The whole controlling thrust of western society is geared toward keeping the dream-time at bay. I can only speculate why this should be so. Maybe because self-exploration rather than watching television makes society harder to control. Perhaps. The fear of toadstools, too, must have its roots in the witch-hunts of the fifteenth century. What is witchcraft if not the return to pre-monotheistic earth-worship? Witchcraft was never the antithesis to Christianity: it existed in its own right and predated monotheism. It’s the tail end of the Gaia tradition; the communion with nature. Thrusting, aggressive, male monotheism has never completely replaced the female, pantheistic earth-worship of the dream-time.

  I’m not a proselyte, never was. I have no urge to knock on doors and say ‘you’re wrong, I’m right, listen to me’. But I do want to say that although I tread a different path, I’m not a threat. I ask for no one to follow me. I’m happy to travel alone on the less trodden path. Why should I and my fellow-travellers be feared and even persecuted? Is my madness any less coherent than anyone else’s? Is it infectious? I can start no wars, create no economic chaos; I move in an internal world, in a matrix far from society’s hub.

  Even so, our worlds appear to be approaching one another. The global village is growing, the information superhighway has more and more connections. This is a reality based on a network; you don’t touch, see or feel, but you communicate. Soon even this will change. You’ll be able to virtually see, touch and smell on the Internet. When I plug into my exoskeleton I’ll be able to touch you in yours through the ether. Technology will bring us to where I am now. I can do that: reach out and touch through the ether, fly where the imagination soars. Yet my route there is feared and proscribed – while the other route is backed by stocks and shares. It makes no sense to me.

  Psilocybe Cyanescens.

  Small to medium size. Cap 1–2 inches. In clusters.

  Russet drying to dull cream.

  Quite rare, grows on rotting debris. Late autumn to early winter. Hallucinogenic.

  seven

  It occurred to me that even computers ended up relating to mushrooms in the mushroom.man’s world. I’d followed the instructions he’d sent me and downloaded the program for generating fractals from the net. It was fascinating, and absorbed me totally for hours at a time. The fractal universe is astounding in its complexity and beauty, but the practical result of using it was that I replaced my monochrome monitor with a large colour one capable of high-definition graphics. What was already a visual delight in black and white became mind-boggling in 64k colour. It became the first practical result of my interaction with the mushroom.man, and I was intensely grateful for it.

  I became once more determined to find out from him all that I could about his actual experiences with mushrooms. I put aside whatever reservations I had had about being drawn unwillingly into his world. After all, my contact with the mushroom.man was not physical so there was no possibility of coercion. All we could exchange were ideas, and even they were not part of a contemporaneous dialogue. There was always time to analyse whatever he’d sent me before there was a need to reply. That was an aspect of this kind of electronic communication that I liked: it suited my temperament. There was never a need to answer or react at once as there is in a face-to-face conversation. Like a game of postal chess you could sit and think, formulate a response and then communicate it.

  Even though I occasionally felt a frisson of danger in the contact with some of his ideas, the method of communication seemed to hold some defence for me by virtue of its inherent properties – the time-lag, the distance, the anonymity. It offered me protection. And I took heart from his declaration that he was no proselyte – he was not looking for disciples.

  I sent him this e-mail:

  Attn. mushroom.man.

  Subject: the usual.

  26 July.

  You’ve given me glimpses of your world and how you see it. But what I still haven’t grasped is how mushrooms change your perceptions. Maybe what I should be asking is ‘what’s it like to go tripping?’ I do understand the physiological processes, but as you say, that’s understanding form but not content. It’s something I’d like to understand a little better; I can’t help feeling that if I were to have a better grasp of it, much of what you have written would make more sense to me. Forgive me for making the same plea over and over again, but tell me more.

  Along with his reply, which came a few days later, came instructions as to where to find an updated version of the fractal program and how to download it into my own computer.

  Attn. mushroom.seeker.

  Subject: alternate realities.

  1 August.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it again; you can’t use words to describe the non-verbal. Still, you keep asking so I’m sending you a description of alternate realities. Who knows? It may even make sense to you:

  I felt tired. I sat down in my armchair and fell asleep. When I woke up I was lying by the river bank, which was bathed in a pinkish light. I looked at the sky. It was a uniform light green, which contrasted oddly with the suffused light around me.
It felt warm and comfortable; a gentle breeze rustled the leaves and ruffled the surface of the river, which appeared to be hardly flowing. I was surprised to notice that I had no shoes on, no socks, no shirt, and that I was wearing what seemed to be calico trousers with a fly-flap like sailors’ bell-bottoms. I stood and found that the pebbles of the river bank were soft and giving underfoot, as though made of rubber.

  I became aware that there was no bird-song. There was an almost total silence; only the wind in trees made a sound. The river looked almost like a lake, glass-surfaced, quiet, deep. I swam, gingerly at first but with growing enthusiasm. The water was warm and very clear. With my face in the water I could see the bottom, the stones, the river weed. Four trout swam past lazily, browsing occasionally on the weed, rummaging in the gritty sand between the stones. There was no current, and I floated, arms and legs akimbo. I watched the trout, who seemed unaware of my presence. They moved slowly, edging toward a large bank of weed. As they approached there was a flash of silver. A large pike darted out from the weed cover and took a trout cross-ways in his bill. While the trout’s tail flailed the pike appeared to stare at me, unblinkingly. The three other trout moved on unhurriedly, unconcerned, while the pike remained motionless. I could hear the beat of the trout’s flapping tail, rhythmically keeping time to its death rattle. Slowly the flapping stopped, the trout’s mouth gaped open in a bizarre grin. The pike’s pectoral fins twitched, then started a slow beat. The fins were almost transparent, big, lazy, floppy things like an elephant’s ears. The pike’s broad, flat, duck-bill shone with a brown lustre; tiny clouds of blood rose from the trout where the pike’s teeth had penetrated the scales. They hung in the water, growing slowly. Idly the pike opened its jaws once or twice, turning the trout round, head towards its gullet. A gulp, and the trout was gone. I watched as a lump moved through the pike’s body until it came to rest in the belly. Another sudden flurry and the pike was gone.