Future Commons with Rudy Rucker

Today I attended my first Future Commons event at the Institute for the Future down in Palo Alto. It was really quite fantastic!

The event began with Mark Petrakis engaging the thirty or so attendees in a short but fun game of whoosh, wow, zap, groovelicious and freak out which quite effectively loosened everyone up. In fact perhaps that's why I found myself actually participating in the conversation later instead of being my normal introverted self. It probably also helped that I had quite a few friends there (Anselm, Todd, Sean and Mike Liebhold).

The speaker for the event was Rudy Rucker. He took part on a rather weird panel discussion at the Accelerating Change Conference a couple of weekends ago that left me wanting more, so it was quite a nice surprise to see him scheduled for this little shindig. He's got a new book out called The Lifebox, the Seashell and The Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life and How to Be Happy. (A very California subtitle as he put it).

Rucker has been interested in Cellular Automata since the 80's when he was rubbing elbows with Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram, of course, has created a New Kind of Science based on the study of CA and how simple rules applied repeatedly can lead to the emergence of complex patterns. Rucker's new book seems to be a continuation of Wolfram's work with more of a philosophical bent.

A Gnarly Computation was presented as the equivalent of a Class Four pattern in Wolfram's parlance. It's that sweet spot on the edge of order and chaos where the interesting and beautiful bits live. A number of CA examples were demonstrated. One particularly appealing one was called Brian's Brain, which consisted almost entirely of gliders (a term for automata that transfer information around the automata space). Some of Rucker's own floating point CA looked quite organic.

The gist of how the CA examples apply to the universe is that all of nature is a set of computations being carried out. There are quite a number of different types of computations. There may or may not be a single underlying computation. Many computations are irreducible (or in other words, there are no shortcuts). Rucker stacked levels of reality in a slightly unusual way to reflect this. Philosophy lay upon Sociology, leading down through a few other disciplines to Biology which lay upon Physics. Normally Mathematics is placed under Physics but he actually preferred to lump that in with Philosophy and put Computer Science as the foundation of all reality.

There is something inherently compelling in these ideas Wolfram and Rucker present. After the presentation, we went into chat mode where we listed various different Theories of Everything. My favorite ToE these days is based mostly on Howard Bloom's Global Brain with a dash of Robert Wright's Nonzero thrown in. I did a quick five minute summary of the Global Brain for the group and made the point that his system is an example of a simple set of rules being carried out repeatedly throughout the history of the universe.

Other Theories of Everything presented included:

• A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber
• Spiral Dynamics
• Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson
• The Great Chain of Being, by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873-1962)
• The Nature of Order, by Christopher Alexander [Book one, Book two, Book three, Book four]
• The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama
• TRUTON (The Rational Unified Theory of Nature)

The discussion then turned towards the nature of consciousness. This got me all excited because it was yet another subject that has been on my mind a lot lately. In particular, I've been trying to understand Sir Roger Penrose's theory of Quantum Consciousness and how it could be a purely scientific explanation for consciousness that fits in well with the spiritual principles of Buddhism and other religions. I made an attempt to explain QC, but my grasp of it is still much too limiting.

As I mentioned to Rudy after we wrapped up, I feel as if my whole life I've been like a person tossed into the ocean and unable to swim. I've been thrashing about, grasping at things that float by and trying to find something to keep me afloat. Lately I've been finding some solid pieces that I think I can build a raft out of to make sense of it all. The Global Brain, Nonzero, Quantum Consciousness, ASSA, Wolfram and Rucker. It's all starting to come together. I feel quite lucky to be alive at this time in history.

By the way, more information on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul can be found at http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/, including a pdf containing chapters 1, 2 and 4.

Comments

[mikel_maron]

Dav I am jealous! Rudy Rucker is one of my favorite weblog reads these days, digging his computational approach to spirituality.

[dav]

Mikel, I'd never actually read/heard his works before, in fact I was more familiar with his son who is active in the local tech-arts scene, but I'm certainly a big fan now! Years of teaching computer science and writing science ficition seem to have given him a great style for speaking and explaining things.

[dav]

I just found out that Rudy posted a PDF of his slides -and- an MP3 of his talk over at his blog. I can't firgure out a permalink, but go to http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/ and look for the September 27 post.