Rudy Rucker, a mathematician and science fiction author, shares fiction, essays, and writing on infinity, the fourth dimension, and cellular automata.
HN commenters link his free online books and cellular automata tools, and cite his scathing review of David Foster Wallace's book on infinity.
Do I have any scientific research on it? No. :-( I'm actually dismayed that there isn't more scientific research on this sort of thing. But it makes sense: merging consciousness is a deeply personal thing, far beyond physical nakedness. Without a proper context ("set and setting") one's own inhibitions will prevent it, or prevent one even thinking about it.
I learned about it from (and I swear I'm not making this up) a pamphlet I ordered by mail out of the back of a comic book on "How to Read Minds". Much to my surprise, the simple technique it described worked. It turns out that thoughts are in a kind of space around us and the same faculty that we use to perceive "our own" thoughts can just as easily be used to perceive the thoughts "of others". In fact we don't have thoughts of our own, no one does, no more than a TV set has TV shows. Your brain has an ability to "tune" thoughts in and out, but they exist separately from us ourselves.
Cf. Kurt Gödel's description of how to "perceive pure abstract possibility" in http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-godel/
Now the sharing of thoughts deliberately (forming a thought and "sending" it to someone who is primed to receive it) aka "telepathy" is different than the merging of two consciousnesses into one consciousness. In fact there is only one consciousness, it is unitary, and the belief in separate identities is a perceptual structure founded in the ambient thought-forms. Separate identity is…
This is one of the many reasons why I love science fiction. Many of my favorite novels center around consciousness and the related technology to assist/enable/enhance it. Reading these in my younger years, many of these novels have shaped my life, especially my career.
I may be confusing my authors, but some of the more recent novels I've read (from about 10 years or so ago, it's been a while), I think from Alastair Reynolds, have a wide range of ideas. Some center around the same kind of thing that Elon Musk talks about with Neuralink. Others take a wildly different path... putting an extant brain in a box or cabinet on wheels.
On this topic I used to be a huge fan of the concept of uploading. But then I formed the opinion that, if all we're doing is copying state, then the new instance is not the old inshttp://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/tance. It's just another instance with its own state from that point forward. I think it's also a Reynolds book where a person creates a copy of their consciousness and puts it into a very physically small spacecraft in order to travel a maximum speed to a very distance place (I forget the intended task). But upon return the two instances and ended up becoming antagonists due to their different experiences in the meantime.
Likewise, I want to say it was a Rucker book, a person is copied, and the copy is not them, just a new instance.
That kind of soured me on uploading. However, at the same time, it seems to me that can be akin…
Wow! If you ever get tired of it I will buy it from you. It's impossible to find copies now, and they make great wedding or graduation presents. ;)
Just joking, I know you would never part with it!
If you were sneaky and transgressive like Aaron Schwartz, you might notice the url of the pdf file is shown in the browser bar in the video, and type in the url to steal the book:
https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf <= DO NOT CLICK THIS URL! IT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL RHETORICAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Fortunately Norman Margolis has generously given me permission to distribute that pdf file (although I don't know what MIT Press would think about it, but last time I was at MIT I visited their store and they didn't have any copies, so if they would only get their shit together and publish the fucking book somewhere I could buy it, I would already own a pile of them to hand out to tricker-treaters and religious zealots who knock on my door, as brain candy to set them on a better path).
He's also given me permission to make interactive versions of any of those chapters, and he said that his favorites were the physical simulations, because they have something to say about nature and physics. That's definitely on my TODO list!
I'd really like to do a "KidPix" kind of cellular automata playground, like Rudy Rucker and John Walker did with Autodesk CALab. There's some great stuff from that online, including a web based version of CALab and a fieldbook of many rules in the…
http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/09/10/what-was-alan-turing-like/
> 1942, age 30. [Alan] Turing joined the Home Guard so he could learn to shoot. “[Turing] had to complete a form, and one of the questions on this form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Well, Turing, absolutely characteristically, said: There can be no conceivable advantage in answering this question ‘Yes’ and therefore he answered it ‘No.’ … And … he was duly enrolled, because people only look to see that these things are signed at the bottom.” He learned to shoot, but he refused to attend parades, and the apoplectic chief officer confronted him, and Turing said, “You know, I rather thought this sort of situation could arise…If you look at my form you will see that I protected myself against this situation.” He’d decided on the “optimal strategy if you had to complete a form of this kind. So much like the man all the way through.”
>I asked my classmates whether they had heard of the sci-fi writer Rudy Rucker’s book
Rudy Rucker was/is also one of the most prominent cellular automata researchers of recent history. I can highly recommend "Cellab" [1], which I first encountered as CA Lab. You may need to install a virtual machine to get it running properly [2].
[1]: http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm
[2]: [In the spring of 2010, the Cellab software became semi-obsolete---in that it won't run under Windows 7. The "good" news is that Windows 7 can in fact run a virtual machine in Windows XP mode, if you download and install some free Microsoft virtual XP software. I tried this just now, and it works pretty well. You get a little window or a full screen which is an XP desktop. And CELLAB runs fine in the XP window—to make it easy to find your files, you drag the CELLAB folder from your normal C: drive (if that’s where it lives) onto the desktop of the XP Virtual machine window.]
Charles Howard Hinton is actually a very prominent figure in the history of eccentric mathematicians. Anyone who read Rudy Rucker's book about the fourth dimension in the 90s knew about the earlier Hinton's bigamy and superstitions.
https://books.google.ie/books?id=8J0djs-FK_8C&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=hinton+rucker+bigamy&source=bl&ots=WDzst7ssb5&sig=ACfU3U3a4piO8h40346bbbARGxOxfhQb3Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB8uurhp_kAhW8TBUIHUIYAZEQ6AEwBXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=hinton%20rucker%20bigamy&f=false
http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2009/06/08/alicia-boole-charles-hinton-and-the-fourth-dimension/