Customer Reviews

Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. Rudy Rucker is an accomplished science fiction author and popularizer of mathematics and computer science. In this book he seems to bring together everything he has written in the past while playing with constructing a coherent world-view and philosophy of life. It works quite well. (Rucker is such a fascinating writer that my son was going to apply to San Jose State just to take classes from him. The book's revelation that Rucker is retiring disappointed my college-bound son and left him scrambling for other schools.)

Any description of this book with less complexity than the book itself will do the book an injustice. If you're a fan of Rudy Rucker, of infinity, or of mathematical and speculative philosophy, you MUST read this book. Students of the social sciences may have some difficulty wrapping their minds around the computational science ideas, but this book is an essential part of understanding what it means to be human.

Rucker has structured the book well. Each chapter is prefaced with a piece of microfiction that illustrates the concepts to come. The chapters begin with an annotated outline that relates the concepts discussed. Ideas are reconnected with earlier mentions in the book as well as preceding ideas.

Rucker is not afraid to make novel combinations of philosophy, psychology, math, computer science, quantum physics, science fiction, and personal anectdotes. This is one of the best books produced for handling notes well. Turning to the back of the book for a note is generally rewarded with insights or speculations related to the text. Only occasionally is a note simply a bibliographic or web reference.

The book itself is a gnarly computation as well as a gnarly program for gnarled minds. It should be required reading for everybody who things they have a grip on life, the universe, or anything. If I could give it more than 5 stars, I would.

I found Rudy Rucker on a road trip. Or at least, I found part of his lifebox. If you haven't yet read this book, you probably don't know that the lifebox is a fictional invention into which a person speaks, and eventually it gets to know him well enough to tell his stories, and perform more menial conversational duties. That was Wetware, the first of his books that I read. Since then, I've read everything of his I could get my hands on, and I anxiously awaited the arrival of my pre-ordered copy of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

I had a bad experience with submitting a snarky review about A New Kind of Science after I'd only read 200 pages, so I decided to actually read this whole book before trying to draw any conclusions. I believe that is something the crappy reviewer from Publishers Weekly just didn't do. My conclusions after the first read:

1. This is the most phenomenal, approachable, and thorough introduction (certainly leaves Fredkin and Wolfram in the dust for approachability) to cellular automata and computation that I've ever met.
2. This book, true to its title, has soul. It's wacky, interesting, fun, deep, and self-critical of the so-called "Universal Automatist" philosophy.
3. The illustrations, stories, personal anecdotes, and tables (yes, he loves his tables) are what makes the book work- it would have been possible to write this book (and probably to read it) without them all, but it would have been less fun, less interesting, and less illuminating.
4. Rucker obviously spent a tremendous amount of time in actual experimentation- doing it himself. He articulates a better "feel" for the field than anything else I've read.

I'm sending this book to my dad and my brothers for Christmas. I got them all A New Kind of Science year before last, but none of them got past the first chapter. I can't wait to hear what they think of this one!

Genius SF writer Rudy Rucker's new book is fantastic, and just in time, too! He writes, among other things, that we are
presently in the midst of a third global intellectual revolution. The
first came with Isaac Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second
came with Charles Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third
revolution, says Rucker, we are coming to realize that even minds and societies
emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations.
Everything is a computation. Cool!

Does this, then, mean that the world is dull? Far from it. The
naturally-occurring computations that surround us are richly complex.
For example, a tree's growth, the changes in the weather, the flow of daily news, a
person's ever-changing moods --- all of these computations share the
crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic,
gnarly computations are --- and this is a key point --- inherently
unpredictable. The world's mystery is preserved.

Mixing together anecdotes, graphics, and fables, Rucker teases out the
implications of his new worldview, which he calls "universal
automatism." His analysis reveals startling aspects of the everyday
world, touching upon such topics as chaos, the Internet, fame, free
will, and the pursuit of happiness. More than a popular science book,
this book is a philosophical
entertainment that teaches us how to enjoy our daily lives to the
fullest possible extent.

This book is Rudy Rucker's latest mind-child, and incorporates all the many threads of his very active and acute intellect. For those who have read some of his earlier books on math (esp. the superb Infinity and the Mind), this latest work builds on the vital importance of approaching the cosmos from the perspective of computability. Rucker's thinking on this is precise and playful, a rare and valuable combination. He extends the ideas toward applications of how to view your own "lifebox," and offers great suggestions for booting up an expanded appreciation of your reality. Highly recommended.

As a disiple of the Stephen Wolfram's universal automaton paradigm this book does a good job of looking at the different areas of science to see how they work with such a view. Taking on issues like free-will, quantum mechanics, and psychology he attempts to demonstrate there compatibility with his thesis that the world consists of computations. I recommend this book to anyone how has interests in determinism, aritificial intelligence, and/or Wolframs "new science" as this book has something of value to offer on all this areas.

It's been at least six months since I finished reading The Lifebox, The Seashell & The Soul, and I just ran across it today while pawing through my collection searching for a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and realized I'd forgotten to write a review.

I'm not much of a math or technical reader, so to get through this tome, that I had repeatedly opened without making much headway, I set aside an hour every morning to read, using a little discipline to combat my tendency to avoid intense thought about things with which I'm unfamiliar. I was well-rewarded for the effort. Rucker's patiently-constructed explanations of von Nuemann machines and cellular automata laid a good foundation for further discussions, and helped me to understand what I'd been missing when I read Stephenson's The Diamond Age. It also helped me appreciate Rucker's flatland musings in Mathematicians In Love and the Singularity series.

I even thought I understood his explanation of quantum computing. But all thought of quantum computing is evanescent. I can't retain it very well. It's a discourse I can comprehend as long as I stick to the thread of the discourse, but when I step back it's a tangle. C'est la vie.

For me, the test of learning is what you retain without effort, like the chords a guitarist will never forget. I will remember that Rucker's core proposition is that all appearances are computations, that the world is therefore deterministic, but that determinism doesn't mean predictability, because living patterns are gnarly patterns, poised between repetitive mechanistic patterns and the ooze of creeping crud (I think of these as the "three states of computation"). I also remember that all computation is translatable to any other form of computation. So for example, a tree is a sufficiently complex shape, with its myriad forkings and potential alternative positions, to model something as complex as, say, the positions of all the planets in the solar system. If you could decode its language. Rucker's proposition made me more comfortable with my own deterministic inclinations, that I have encapsulated in a five-minute video to which I gave the title of "Randomness Is A Myth Created By Scientists To Simulate Ignorance" (google it if you're curious).

I've shared Rucker's "three states of computation" concept with a fair number of folks, and everyone seems to vibe to the idea that our world is gnarly.

The only impediments to understanding were a couple of pagination errors at pages 236 - 240 and 369 - 372 (the second one is real hard to figure out if you don't know it's there). But maybe Rucker put these little mind-twisters in there deliberately to see if his friends had really read the book.

I hear Rucker's working on an autobiography. His Wikipedia says he's Hegel's great-great-great grandson. Maybe he'll tell us what that feels like. Probably pretty gnarly.