Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  RR: Something must have happened in high school?

  Stang: I’d been making movies since I was ten. By the time I got to high school I started winning awards for these claymation films I’d made. I was already a celebrity and a has-been by the time I was twenty. I’d won these awards all over the world.

  What really happened in high school—I hit puberty at the age of five—I was really ready for female companionship, but my parents put me in a private school that was all male. All I could do was beat off and make violent horror movies. And then I was going to be the next Orson Welles, and I started doing like really weird art films. About the age of sixteen I switched from being a nice dutiful boy to being a bad hippie.

  RR: That sounds like drugs.

  Stang: Well yeah. I took LSD before I’d ever even tried a beer. That’s what definitely what took me away from the monster movies and into art films. Plus about that time Frank Zappa appeared and Jimi Hendrix, and I discovered R. Crumb and underground comix. My main ambition for a time was to be accepted by these guys who do underground comix. That’s one of the only goals I’ve achieved. By the time I was 26 I was married and struggling in sweatshop companies doing cheesy business films. But I had written that first SubGenius pamphlet which as far as I’m concerned was equal to doing Citizen Kane. The first place I sent that thing was the underground comix publishers. The owners threw them out, but two of the artists fished copies out of the trash can, Paul Mavrides at Ripoff Press and Jay Kinney at Last Gasp. Those two guys were a big help. They were the first professional artist types I knew.

  I was not actually an outcast in high school. I was a friend to the outcast but I was in pretty tight with the in-crowd. Did you ever see that movie Dazed and Confused? I could just as well say go see that movie, that was my high school years. As long as you were one of the dopers you were okay. I was like the class Beat poet.

  I’ll tell you what, though. There’s no question to me that if I had gotten laid a little earlier in life there wouldn’t have been a Church of the SubGenius.

  RR: How did you meet your wife?

  Stang: I needed a girl to act in a 16 mm film I was doing and she was in the drama club at her school. She was an older woman; she was a senior and I was just a sophomore. We ended up going to the same college together, to University of Texas at Austin. I was only there a year, and then I went to SMU and flunked out because I was making World of the Future.

  RR: That movie showed you dressed like a crazed crying clown and shooting up speed.

  Stang: That was fake. If you look closely it was a big beer can with a spike that slid up inside it. I never did do that, shoot up hard drugs. Compared to my friends I was real straight. Most of my high school friends are dead from drug overdoses. It’s a real shame. Only the hardy SubGeniuses survived.

  RR: How often have you really seen “Bob”?

  Stang: The only time I’ve ever seen him was when he got shot in San Francisco. I never get invited to those parties where people see him. Philo always says, well the guest list was full. “Bob” owes me quite a bit of money. This check’s been in the mail for fifteen years now. If it’s in his best interest to meet you then he’ll meet you. But frankly, I’m scared shitless of the guy. What might be good for him may not be good for you.

  RR: What are the Church’s teachings in a nutshell?

  Stang: Fuck the normals and get all the slack you can.

  RR: How do you get away with being so weird all the time for so many years?

  Stang: I have a wife and a color television and they both work.

  * * *

  Note on “Ivan Stang”

  Written 1994.

  Appeared in Mark Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair, and Gareth Branwyn, eds., The Happy Mutant Handbook, 1995.

  The amazing SubGenius Pamphlet #1 is still available by sending one dollar to “the sacred box number” of the SubGenius Foundation, PO BOX 140306 - Dallas, TX 75214. Or you can view the Pamphlet for free on the Web on the subgenius.com site. There’s lots of other goodies at this site; one can, for instance, access Stang’s taped “Hour of Slack” radio shows via online streaming audio. Two other good sources of information are the SubGenius Foundation books: The Book of the SubGenius, Simon and Schuster, New York 1987, and Revelation X, Fireside, New York 1994.

  When the Earth didn’t come to an end on July 5, 1998, Stang’s assembled followers tarred and feathered him, using pink feathers. Stang now explains that his prediction was a simple mix-up: he happened to read the paper with the X-day date upside down, and the true year of “Bob”‘s coming will be 8661! In the meantime, X-day is still celebrated every year.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Benoit Mandelbrot burst upon the public stage in 1977 with his extravagant work of genius: Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension. As Mandelbrot himself might put it, “I know of very few books…in which so many flashes of genius, projected in so many directions, are lost in so thick a gangue of wild notions and extravagance.”

  (He made this remark about George Kingsley Zipf’s book, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. The Mandelbrotian word “gangue,” more commonly used in French, refers to otherwise worthless material in which valuable ores or gems may be found. It’s pronounced like “gang” in English.)

  I went to Mandelbrot’s house early in 2001, when I was involved in an abortive project to try and make a large screen (IMAX) science movie featuring some huge, prolonged zooms into the Mandelbrot set.

  The movie, which was to be about fractals, had the working title Search for Infinity, a title which was dictated by the producer, Jeff Kirsch, director of the San Diego Space Center Museum. Jeff was committed to presenting the film as being about infinity instead of being about fractals, as he felt many more people would be interested in the former than the latter. And in a mathematical sense, fractals are indeed infinite, in that you can zoom into them, forever finding more levels of detail. It’s an infinity in the small, rather than an infinity in the large.

  The very talented film maker Ron Fricke (Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka) was committed to shooting the film, and I was going to write the script. Ron and Jeff were also bent on including Arthur Clarke in the movie as a character. And Ron wanted the movie to star a computer-brained space probe who was afraid to fly off into the endless void of interstellar space. Jeff had scored a development grant for the project from the National Science Foundation and we worked on preparing a final proposal over a couple of years.

  Taking all the story constraints into account, I put together ten or eleven successively more refined treatments for a film script, resulting in a fairly reasonable treatment. I went to meet Mandelbrot in the hope that he'd give our project some support.

  Here are my journal notes from January 14, 2001, regarding my meeting with Benoit.

  Mandelbrot is waiting for me at the end of his driveway, he’s worried I might not find the house as the address on the curb is covered by snow. A white-haired balding man, stocky, somewhat diffident, he sees me, I wave, he doesn’t wave back, not sure yet I’m the one he’s waiting for, when I’m closer he says “Are you Rudy Rucker?” We introduce ourselves, shake hands, I tell him I’m thrilled to meet him. In the house his wife Adèle greets us, Mandelbrot disappears to take a pee I suppose, then we sit in a cold room with some armchairs. They don’t seem to really heat their house. He sits on an odd modern chair with parts of it missing, a collection of black corduroy hotdogs. He wears a jacket, a vest, a shirt, trousers with a paperclip attached to the fly to make it easier to pull up and down, I guess he’s 75. Rather rotund and, yes, a bit like the Mandelbrot set in his roundness and with the fuzz of hairs on his pate.

  He starts talking almost right away, an incredibly dense and rich flow of information, a torrent. Fractal of course, as human conversation usually is, but of a higher than usual dimension. It’s like talking to a superbeing, just as I’d hoped, like being with a Martian, his conversation a wall of sound paisley info structure, the
twittering of the Great Scarab.

  His wife listens attentively as we talk and from time to time she reminds him to tie up some loose thread.

  Mandelbrot doesn’t seem overly vain—as I’d heard him described by some rivals. Certainly he has good self-esteem, but I think it’s well-earned and justified.

  I repeatedly feel a great urge to go out and have a cigarette. The firehose-stream of information in his strong French accent—I have to cock my ear and listen my hardest to process it. Conscious of his wife watching me listen to him. I imagined she’s judging how well I seem to listen, and when once I smirk as he says something a bit self-aggrandizing, she catches my expression and I imagine her giving me a black mark.

  He isn’t clear exactly what Jeff is trying to do with the movie, how Jeff plans to fund it, what his (Mandelbrot’s) role is supposed to be, etc. I explain it as best I can; we don’t really expect Benoit to do much more than to say that that he doesn’t find our project totally absurd. He seems to want to exact some kind of concession; at the end I have the feeling that he considers Jeff’s emphasis on “infinity” to be a deal-breaker, to the extent that there might have been a deal.

  I mention how much he’s affected my view of the world. I mention also that I’m as excited to meet him as I was to meet Gödel. Mandelbrot says, “Oh Gödel didn’t talk much, I saw him at the Institute, I was von Neumann’s last student.” I rejoinder, “Well, Gödel talked a lot when I saw him, I was working on something he was interested in,” and Benoit is impressed.

  I’ve been thinking some more about ways in which Mandelbrot resembled the Mandelbrot set, it’s a conceit I’m bent on playing with. As I mentioned yesterday, he was rather round about the middle, even bulbous, and his clothes and his head were indeed adorned with any number of fine hairs. He appeared and disappeared from my view several times; he’d get up and leave the room and then return. Perhaps each time it was a different bud of him that came back in!

  A key point in perceiving his multi-budded nature is that his wife in many ways resembles him: accent, age, attire, knowledge about his work. She was in fact a mini-Mandelbrot set hovering near the flank of the larger bud I was talking to. The two of them were connected, of course, by a tendril of love and attention, rather hard to physically see.

  At times I felt a bit of menace from Mandelbrot, as when he was repeatedly asking that we not bill the movie as being about infinity. I felt some anxiety that he might somehow do something against us if we didn’t accede. He has, one imagines, a wide range of influences. What was going on here was that I was sensing the presence of the stinger at the tip of the Mandelbrot set. A stinger so fine as to be all but invisible, a stinger that, as he grew somewhat agitated, was twitching with rapid movements that made it yet harder to see. But nevertheless I could feel its whizzing passages though the air near me. Palpable menace.

  * * *

  Note on “Benoit Mandelbrot”

  Written in

  Appeared as a footnote in The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul, 2002.

  I very excited to meet Mandelbrot. It felt almost like going to meet Gödel. Except this time I was fifty-four instead of twenty-four. But it was the same rush, going to see a wise older man, a guru—this time it was the inventor of the fractal, something which has affected my way of thought as much as did set theory and logic. Not being so young and starry-eyed anymore, I didn't see Mandelbrot as a mythopoetic guru.

  Like so many films, our IMAX Mandelbrot set movie project was never realized. The sticking point was that we failed to get the needed million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation. As I mentioned, one reason I visited Mandelbrot was in fact to try and win his support in case the NSF were to ask his opinion about the project, but he was unenthused about it. One of his issues was that it was wrong to bill the film as being about infinity, when in truth it was about fractals—I agreed with him on this point, but this wasn’t something that I could get Jeff and Ron to go along with.

  And I think Mandelbrot wanted the movie to focus on him! It may even be that he put in a word to the NSF to deep-six our project. Oh well. We still have the fractals, and I got to talk with him.

  Meeting Mandelbrot was like meeting Gödel in the sense that for these two special oasis-hours midway in the long caravan of my life I was talking to someone whom I felt to be much smarter than me. A Master.

  Dialogue With Stephen Wolfram

  Rudy: There’s a widespread expectation that some time in the next century people might become able to amplify their intelligence by plugging into some very transparent Web interface with a nice supply of memory and a customized suite of computational agents.

  Just to have a number to kick around, suppose that a person’s intelligence could be amplified to an IQ of 1000—whatever that might actually mean. And let’s say that these kilo-IQ people are known as kiqqies.

  How would it feel to be an IQ 1000 person, a kiqqie?

  Stephen: I think it’s like the difference between doing cellular automata by hand (or with an ENIAC), and using Mathematica. There’s a lot more that one can explore, quickly, so one investigates more, sees more connections, and can look more moves ahead.

  More things would seem to make sense. One gets to compute more before one loses attention on a particular issue etc. (Somehow that’s what seems to distinguish less intelligent people from more intelligent people right now.)

  Rudy and Stephen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005.

  Rudy: You’re comparing a higher IQ to having an ability to carry out a given mental computation for a longer run-time. Another, related factor might be the ability to access more mental memory; analogous to increasing a machine’s RAM.

  Stephen: Yes. And now we have to wonder how it would feel if so much more made sense, and became predictable? By carrying out larger mental computations you could see the underling patterns in more things.

  I think the kiqqies would be able to tolerate more computational irreducibility. Things that look incomprehensible to us now would be part of some grand scheme that makes sense to the kiqqies. Ordinary people would be like apes wondering why the visiting humans are talking on cellphones at the zoo.

  Rudy: Well, we want to be careful about comparing people to apes! Certainly having serenity has nothing to do with high IQ. Serenity is all about valving down the logical machinations and the memory accesses. And a lot of what people do has to do with wanting to calm down, to relax, to feel happy. I think that sought-after baseline feeling of contentment even for the kilo-IQ or mega-IQ people.

  Yesterday walking down the street at dusk, I was thinking, “What really do hypothetical thousand-times-as-capacious brain-like systems have that I don’t have, walking down this street looking at the trees?” They can look at the trees from more angles at once, they can analyze the motions in more depth. Big deal. They’re still just looking at the trees. By the same token, I don’t have all that much more in my perception of a scene than might a crow.

  This said, part of any meditative slack feeling consists being open to inputs from all over the body and from all the senses. And the sensory input might well richer for the kiqqie. Even if the number of inputs were the same, the associations coming out of the inputs would be richer. And of course a kiqqie could support a larger number of parallel trains of thought, explore extra branches in the thought tree, and, as you say, anticipate things better.

  Another aspect of kiqqies would the ability fully model the behaviors of some less intelligent people. In an ideal world, this would lead to the kiqqies being more compassionate and understanding; in a more realistic world it might well make them more successfully manipulative.

  Stephen: I always like to apply my New Kind of Science way of thinking to questions like this.

  Note that once people had these very high intelligences, then in terms of human affairs, then, the kinds of things that are viewed as being trivial and not worth doing would greatly expand. But computational irreducibility implies that something is al
ways left. There’s always an edge, a zone of intellectual interest.

  Pushing past the kiqqies to more and more intelligent beings, it seems as if, in the limit, a “superintelligence” would understand everything in the universe. It would connect everything together, a bit like the Borg. But computational irreducibility would still keep the universe interesting. No matter how vast are the computational resources you have, so long as they’re finite, there will be future states of affairs that you don’t have the computational power to predict.

  Rudy: Moving past human intelligence amplification, I’ve always though that it would be interesting to have natural processes like wind, leaves, water, and clouds really be computing like conscious minds. I have this anti-extropian bent; I’d like to see the computers to shrivel away, and to see Nature wake up. I agree with you that most natural complex processes are indeed computationally universal are thus, in principle, capable of acting like minds. The catch is that our brain has this really well-organized memory access system. And I don’t see any kind of memory in a cloud or a fluttering leaf.

  The leaf doesn’t “remember” what it was fluttering yesterday or even ten minutes ago. Even when in a continuous flutter mode, past states are lost to friction and averaging.

  What if Earth’s system of clouds had long-term memory? Would they begin acting differently over time? Or brooks? I have a long-term memory, as does the human race, and we don’t actually change our behavior all that much. I type. My fingers moving around are as patterned-but-unpredictable as the waving of a pennant in the breeze. But close observation reveals that my finger-twitching in 2006 is rather different from what it was in 1986. Certain strings have different frequencies (my vocabulary has changed).