by Rucker, Rudy
Nowadays I’m dreaming of getting rid of computers. What are the ideas that I’m using for this? And what tech might this lead to?
I got started by thinking about what comes after the vaunted computational singularity that we may be approaching. I think most thinkers get it absolutely wrong. They think we’re heading towards an ever more digital world. I believe that the opposite is the case. Chip-based digital machines will son go the way of horse-drawn carriages, steam engines, and wrist-watches made of gears.
How would this work? I have two goals or desiderata, as the philosophers say: non-digital computational engines, and a means of interfacing with them. To wit:
Natural computation: Natural objects can do all the computation we need.
Natural Interface: We can talk to objects.
The first of these goals is reasonable. As Wolfram has pointed out, any gnarly, chaotic natural process embodies a classical universal computation. And at the quantum level, even dull-looking objects are seething with universal quantum computations. In my recent novel Mathematicians in Love, I wrote quite a bit about naturally occurring universal computations.
The second of the goals seems harder to bring about. Achieving a natural interface with computing natural objects is hard. But science fiction is all about transmuting philosophy into funky fact, and having whatever you want. In order to imagine a world where my goals are attainable, here are the SF-ictional axioms I’m now working with:
Hylozoism: Every object is alive.
Psi: Telepathy is possible.
Hylozoism has an estimable history in philosophy, the word come from the Greek hyle, matter, and zoe, life. Hylozoism is related to the similar doctrine panpsychism , which says that every object has a mind.
As for telepathy, in my short story “Panpsychism Proved” in Mad Professor, I have a preliminary sketch of using quantum-entanglement based telepathy to talk to objects.
I combine the two axioms at the end of my novel Postsingular , (Tor Books, October, 2008). I show how to move through a nanomachine-based singularity into a digital-free future.
And in the sequel I’m now writing, Hylozoic, everything is alive. You’re building a stone wall, and the stones are talking to you, they’re happy, they think it’s cool to get to live half a meter off the ground, and they dig being mortared together. But, oh oh, you pissed near the stream, so now the stream gets the trowel to twist and cut your hand. Animism becomes real.
How do the objects wake up? Well, at the end of Postsingular, I give every point on Earth an infinite memory upgrade. It’s just a matter of unrolling the eighth dimension—which today’s stingy physicists have insisted on rolling into a tiny loop. Unroll the eighth dimension and make tick-marks on it for memory!
Might my new work be part of burgeoning literary movement? I don’t know, though some like-minded people are gathering in the pages of my webzine Flurb.
Call it psipunk.
The Tech From Psipunk
Okay, so we still can’t really upload ourselves into computers, but the idea of it us has led us to photo-sharing, personal web pages, social networking, and blogs. Where do hylozoism and telepathy lead?
Let’s take telepathy first. Cell phones, instant messages, and email are already bordering on telepathy. One missing thing is the ability to link into another person’s mind.
Ordinarily, I communicate an idea to you by talking or writing. I give you a kit so that you can reconstruct my idea in your own head. If I had telepathy, I could pass you a link that would let you directly access the idea ready-formed in my head, without your having to reconstruct it.
In terms of technology, this might mean an increased use of links. Why are we distributing bit-built music files? Why not have a music player that just holds links? Why not have the one platonic music file for each song and let people link into it with a micropayment structure? This was Ted Nelson’s Xanadu dream back when I was working with him at Autodesk in the 1990s. Maybe it’s finally time to make it work.
Another technological aspect of telepathy is that we imagine it as working across great distances. How can this be done? Quantum entanglement may yet lead the way. We haven’t yet begun to utilize the magic of quantum computation.
A more rudimentary instance of telepathy-like tech: cell phones that can detect and transmit subvocal speech, so you don’t have to actually talk out loud like a crazy person on the street.
Let me move on to the less familiar notion: hylozoism. As I mentioned earlier, there’s two ways in which ordinary objects are universal computers. As I discuss in my tome, The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul, Stephen Wolfram’s analysis of computational complexity suggests that natural processes are already carrying out universal computations. And if we take a femtoscale—rather than nanoscale—view, any object is seething with quantum computation. When I look at a stone, I think of ten octillion balls connected by springs. There’s a lot going on in any object.
Now, at present, objects are solely interested in computing themselves. But why not siphon off some of this richness for our own purposes?
I can think of one simple, easily attainable technology that shades towards hylozoism: finally giving our desktop and pocket-sized computers really good voice and gesture recognition. Let them track your eye movements as well as analyzing your voice. If your computer can simply watch and listen to you and figure out what you want, it’ll feel like as if it’s finally alive. As an example, the MIT AI lab has some robotic heads that turn and watch you walking around.
Ubiquitous computation and giving objects RFID identifiers also shades into hylozoism.
As with Software Immortality, think of Hylozoism and Telepathy not so much as things we actually expect to achieve, but as dreams to beckon us forward into a fresh wave of technology.
The future is always stranger than any of us expects.
* * *
Note on “Psipunk”
Written in April, 2007.
Published as a page on Rudy's Blog, 2007.
This was the text for a talk I gave at a “Cyberspace Salvations” event in Amsterdam, April, 2007. R. U. Sirius spoke as well. I was tense and keyed-up for the talk as I’d had a disagreement with one of the organizers, who’d written up a newspaper announcement of our event under the title “FS is Dead.” He’d meant to write “SF,” but he’d gotten it wrong. And I was, like, “He can’t even write the two-letter word ‘SF,’ and he’s saying my whole field is dead?” Instead of speaking extemporaneously, as I more commonly do, I read my talk, declaiming it in fury. I also gave versions of this talk at one of the monthly Dorkbot event in San Francisco in May, 2007, and at the University of Osaka in 2010.
Sex and Science Fiction
Science fiction is a mountain of metaphors, a funhouse of crooked mirrors that give us new views of our actual world.
From our genes’ point of view, we’re meat-based landcrawlers to ride around in. Imagine little double helices lounging in the hammocks of your cells. What makes us especially useful is that, now and then, we spawn off new landcrawlers with copies of the passenger genes, carrying them ever forward through time.
Putting the same point differently, if living organisms weren’t obsessed with sex, none of would be here. We’re each a link in a chain of generations, we’re dangling dollies on a slimy macramé of a trillion umbilical cords.
Of course we enjoy sex for more immediate reasons than reproduction: erotic pleasure, the orgasm, and partnership bonding. The last one is important. That’s why we talk about making love. We’re wired so that loves readily grows from the sex act.
Certainly, if reproduction were the only reason for sex, you wouldn’t be having so many orgasms. How many? Math time! Suppose you live to your eighties, and that you have seventy years of sexual activity, which makes for about 3,500 weeks. If you’re energetic enough to average three pops a week for seventy years, you’re talking about something on the order of ten thousand orgasms. All that brain-flashing to bring forth at most a couple of kids!
“Oooo Mommy, you mean you and Daddy did that twice?”
So how about science fiction and sex? Where have we been, where are we headed, and how much further can we go?
One sex story I always think of is Samuel Delany’s, “Aye and Gomorrah,” about a cadre of spacers who’ve been surgically altered so that their crotches are as featureless as those of a plastic Barbie doll’s. Why? Given the amount of mutating radiation that these astronauts absorb in their space-stations, it would be too dangerous to allow them to reproduce. In the story, there are people who are sexually obsessed with the Barbie-smooth spacers. These fetishists are called frelks—a great word.
In this context, I also think of a particular story about people being sexually attracted to aliens, “And I Awoke and Found Me Here On The Cold Hill’s Side,” written by Alice Sheldon, under her nom de plume James Tiptree, Jr. Upon seeing aliens, the story’s characters have a surprising and overwhelming sense of lust. Kind of like how some of us may react to our first sight of a gay pride parade! Ah, those six-foot-tall honking-loud brides…
One reason we’re attracted to sex with other people is simply because they’re different. Gender isn’t necessarily an issue. That’s the core idea in both the Delany and the Sheldon stories: otherness is a turn-on. And any other person is, for all practical purposes, an alien, if you really think about it.
Note that it’s not just the difference that turns us on, it’s the idea that there’s an intelligent mind inside the different body. Another mind that mirrors you, a mind you can in fact pair up with for an endless regress of mutual reflections.
There’s a major difference between sex with a person and sex via media. In sex with a person, you’re talking about emotion, the positions of your limbs, touch across large skin areas—about tastes, scents and pheromones. A candle by the bed is nice, but you can just as easily make love in the dark.
In media-based sex, we’re reduced to visual images, perhaps enhanced by recorded sounds. But there’s no emotion, touch, tastes, or smells. And text-based sex is even more abstract.
I’m a little sorry to see the decline of text-based pornography. It used to be in every corner store, and now you hardly see it—although it can be found online. In the 1970s, I had a bar-fly friend who was paid by the hour to write porno novels in an office in downtown Rochester, New York. I thought he was cool. A real writer!
Still on the theme of sex with aliens, my novel The Sex Sphere features a giant ass from the fourth dimension. She’s called Babs. She has eyes, breasts, a mouth, a vagina—but no limbs. She can fly, she’s into nuclear terrorism, and her ultimate goal is to utterly destroy our universe. Have any of you ever dated her? The book’s being reissued by E-Reads this fall.
One of the earliest bizarre SF sex stories that I read was in Philip Jose Farmer’s 1950s anthology, Strange Relations. I’m thinking of his story, “Mother” in which a stranded space-explorer finds shelter within a cavity in a meaty plant. The plant—or perhaps its an animal—feeds him food and bourbon, nursing him along. And it turns out that the astronaut is expected to attack a certain area of the plant’s womb, which will catalyze her into a pregnancy, enabling her to bear young. And after his attack the mother-plant will eat him. In a way, it’s an incest story, but looked at differently, it’s also a story about retreating into a cocoon.
Think of a person alone with their computer—whether they’re viewing internet porn, having sex-talks in chat-rooms, or playing erotic roles in a multiple-user videogames. Or think of people lying in Matrix-style jelly-pods with their brains plugged into a group virtual reality.
I find these scenarios sad. In “Mother,” the character at least has the ability to fecundate the surrounding blob—but what can you as an individual do to the internet? What can you do to some vast virtual reality that you’re duped into spending all your time with?
Well, in the case of the internet, at least you can post comments, upload videos, start a photostream, run a blog. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can galvanize another human into meeting you face to face.
It’s always important to remember that computers are dead and boring compared to our fellow humans. Even if there’s a human on the other side of the computer output that you’re interacting with, the machine is still between you, even more isolating than—you should pardon the expression—glory-holed toilet-stall wall.
For a little while, people were talking about having sex via the internet by means of computer-operated sex toys. It’s doable, but who wants to bother? It’s the skin that matters, the breath, the eyes, the voice.
As a partial improvement, in my novel, Freeware, I had sex toys that were made of flexible and intelligent plastic that could move on its own. I called the material “piezoplastic,” and it had become rather intelligent due to a wetware mold infestation. Bigger chunks of the fungus-dosed piezoplastic were autonomous and vicious beings called moldies—and those who loved them were known as cheeseballs. Moldies would take control of a cheeseball by inserting a small slug of their plastic into the human’s skull, and the sluggie would run the person like a robot remote. You might call this an objective-correlative for sexual obsession.
As an SF writer, I wonder if there could be a non-plastic and purely biological medium for enjoyable remote sex. Certainly a sex-toy would be more congenial if it were made of a human tissue culture instead of plastic. Ideally the seed cells for the tissues would come from your lover’s body, so that the smells and pheromones are just right. Actually, Bruce Sterling and I wrote a story called “Junk DNA” in which these little jobbies were called Pumptis.
Of course, for full satisfaction, the personal-intelligence touch is needed. You want a way to project your mind into that remote Pumpti that your darling is going to use—and vice-versa. Well, we can do that via quantum entanglement, no prob. Everything’s easy in science fiction.
While your partner is getting it on with your Pumpti, you’ll be diddling the Pumpti that he or she gave you. And, even better, you’ll projecting your consciousness into the remote Pumpti and into your partner’s mind as well.
Great. But, wait—this doesn’t sound all that different from phone sex. Or love-letters.
Basically, remote sex is boring. There’s no substitute for face-to-face. Let me say a little about possible SFictional amplifications for in-person encounters. For instance in my Ware novels, there’s this drug called merge. Lovers get into a bathtub called a love puddle, they splash on the merge, and their bodies melt and flow together—making a happy glob of flesh with four eyes on top. After an hour or so, the merge wears off, and the couples’ body shapes return.
I like to think of telepathy as a sexual enhancer. I already mentioned that it’s exciting to have your own mind mirrored in someone else’s, even as you’re mirroring then and so on forever. Suppose that the mirroring is though a direct brain contact. It’s easy to suppose that the feedback could flip into a chaotic mode, generating fractal strange attractors. It would take a bit of delicate maneuvering to avoid spiraling into the fixed-point attractor of a brain seizure.
Here’s a longer passage about this, drawn from my novel Saucer Wisdom.
Larky and Lucy, painting "The Lovers" by R.R.
At first it’s mellow. Larky and Lucy lie there side by side on the floor, smiling up at the ceiling, thinking colors and simple shapes. Blue sky, yellow circle, red triangle. Now Larky puts his hand in front of his face, stares at it, and the image goes over to Lucy. But Lucy isn’t able to see the hand yet. She can’t assimilate the signal. “You try and send a picture to me,” says Larky. He doesn’t say the words out loud, instead he imagines saying them—he subvocalizes them as it were—and Lucy is able to hear them. Words are easier than pictures. Lucy stares at her piezoplastic bracelet, fixating on it, sending the image out. Larky can’t get it at first, but then after a minute’s effort, he can. Eureka!
“You have to let your eyes like sag out of focus and then turn them inside out, only without physically turning th
em, you wave?” explains Larky none too clearly. “It’s sort of like the trick you do in order to see your eyes’ floaters against the sky. You’re looking far away, but you’re looking inside your head.”
So now Larky and Lucy can see through each other’s eyes, but then Larky glances over at Lucy and she looks at him and they get into a feedback loop of mutually regressing awareness that becomes increasingly unpleasant. It’s kind of like the way if you stare at someone and they stare back at you, then you can read what they think of you in their face, and they can read your reaction to that, and you can read their reaction to your reaction, and so on. It gets more and more intense and pretty soon you can’t stand it and you look away.
But with a direct brainwave hookup, the feedback is way stronger. In fact it’s like what happens when your point a video camera at a TV monitoring what the camera sees. Lucy’s view of Larky’s face forms in Larky’s mind, gets overlaid with Larky’s view of Lucy and bounced back to Lucy, and then it bounces back to Larky, bounce bounce bounce back and forth twisting into ragged squeals.
Lucy and Larky are starting to tremble, right on the point of going into some kind of savage epilepsy-like fit—but Larky does a head-trick that makes it stop.
Larky’s method for stopping the feedback is like one of the things you can do with the video camera to keep the TV screen from getting all white: you zoom in on a detail. You find a fractal feather and amplify just that. In the same way, Larky shifts his attention to a little tiny part of his smeared-out mouth, a little nick at the corner, and a soon as that starts to amp up, he shifts over to a piece of Lucy’s cheek, just keeps skating and staying ahead of the avalanche. Lucy gets the hang of it too, and now they’re darting around their shared visual space.
Larky and Lucy slowly develop a language for transmitted emotions. Part of the trick is to keep a low affect, to speak softly as it were. If you scream a feeling, it bounces back at you and starts a feedback loop. You can think a scream, but you have to do it in a calm low-key way. The way Lucy puts it, “Just go ‘I’m all boo-hoo,’ instead of actually slobber-sobbing.” So pretty soon Larky and Lucy are good at sending the emotions in that gentle chilled-out kind of way.