Rudy Rucker's new book comes out this fall.
An excerpt:
"When I open my heart to universal automatism, I can see that it's not as far-fetched as it sounds. The key fact is that, far from being dry and dull, computations can generate physical, biological, and psychological phenomena of great beauty. Maybe a weird explanation is better than no explanation at all. Might it be that, by analyzing the notion of computation, I can finally understand what it means to be conscious? I'm prepared to follow the argument wherever it goes. If it turns out that universal automatism is right, and I really am a computation, then at least I'll know a little more about what kind of computation."
3 comments:
I am, therefore I think?
Rucker definitely has a cyber-spiritual edge to his musings on the nature of "life, the universe, and everything." I suspect his use of the term "open my heart" is meant to convey an intuitive, subjective knowing sort of like "grokking." It's one thing to think the universe is a computation; it's another to actually *live* that concept.
"But maybe it's an attempt to synthesize left-brain and right-brain approaches starting with the left-brain?"
That seems to be basically it, along with the assumption that blind mechanics can produce "gnarly" (Rucker's term) emergent phenomena that are inherently unpredictable and thus in some respects as unknowable as the more old-fashioned notion of the "soul."
There's more good stuff at http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog
Post a Comment