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.
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Andrew Ross
A loose and sloppy ramble that could have been more
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 15, 2009
