Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946) is an American
mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and
philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary
movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known
for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software
and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits
the science fiction webzine Flurb. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)
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A lot of the world's apparent complexity is the result of there being
lots of different things in the world rather than a result of the world
having complicated laws. You can think of the world as huge parallel
computation, with lovely things emerging from the interaction of simple
rules.
All these years, and I'm still looking for the big aha.
America isn't young, you know. It's ancient and evil. With aluminum
siding.
Culturally speaking, mathematicians are about as close to living and
breathing aliens as you'll ever see. Weirder than stoners, weirder than
computer hackers, weirder than SF fans. My people.
For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy
shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole
thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's
right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly
it's interesting again.
I bet dystopias are becoming fashionable again. Back in the Fifties and
Sixties, dystopias were where it was at.
I think people who obsess about becoming immortal are on an ego trip.
They don't want to accept that the world will go on just the same
without them.
If nobody's pissed off, you're not trying hard enough.
If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite
abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there
won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation
halt!
Kerouac and Poe don't work as role models when you're pushing fifty.
Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a
computation.
Life is a fractal in Hilbert space.
Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines,
fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space,
teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism,
endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software
highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo
composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace,
monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of
the giant ants!
No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us.
Nothing lasts. The petals whirl, the leaves fall, the river flows. Why
fight it? You get the one lifetime and it's enough.
Our brains are made of the same quantum mechanical matter as everything
else in the world, so if there's an explanation to be had, there's no
reason we can't understand it.
Physical laws provide, at best, a recipe for how the world might be
computed in parallel particle by particle and region by region.
Politics makes me uptight; I have so little control over it. It's like
forever being in high school with rah-rah idiots in charge
Programs are writ by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.
Reality is an incompressible computation by a fractal cellular automaton
of inconceivable dimensions.
The more that people understand about the secret machinery of the
universe, the less likely it is that they will be duped and victimized
by television and politicians.
The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into
a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes
feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.
The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.
There's a persistent tendency for us to very seriously underestimate how
much design has gone into our brains in the course of our beloved Gaia's
yottaflop parallel computation running on a quintillion processors for
several billion years.
Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.
Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons. 'Twas
ever thus, if that's any consolation.
What's the big problem with dying anyway? I mean, what's so frigging
special about my one particular mind? I don't want to be God, I want to
be a human with my spark of God Consciousness. Think of a field of
daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who
wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a
bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?
When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people
look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at
computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and
just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to
that garden of Eden.
Categories:
Quotes of the day,
Rudy Rucker
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