The other day we went to downtown San Jose and it was so boring there. Poor old San Jose. No matter what improvements the city tries, you can look down two, three, four blocks of sidewalk ahead and see nobody on it whatsoever.

I decided fuhgeddaboutit being a loyal San Jose booster and featuring it in my Postsingular novel. I was gonna set it in SJ, but, come on, I’m changing it to be in San Francisco where there’s some action.

[Sculpture in SJ Museum by someone living in Los Gatos.]

I read an article in the New Yorker about some kid in, like, Nebraska. His parents fell into the orbit of a “gifted children” counsellor (whom the article seems to depict as something of a con-woman) who told them their son had an IQ of 182 — although apparently the numbers don’t mean much when you get past 170.

And the parents flipped out over that number, and didn’t let him go to school with other kids, feeling it would be too “slow” for him, as if school were about learning facts instead of being about socialization and getting the hell out from under your parents’ eyes. And the poor kid got depressed and killed himself. Not that the suicide is necessarily the parents fault; it might well have happened no matter what they did. Brain chemistry gone awry. A sad story.

The relevance for my novel is that the article quotes some people nattering on about how very strange and different it is to have an unusually high IQ.

[Sculpture of “Dalilah” [sic] in the new SF De Young museum.]

My programmer friend John Walker suggests that IQ might more likely be proportional to the log of one’s brute processing power rather than being a linear function of it. So a thousandfold increase in processor power would make you only three times as smart.

That sounds right; just think of a desktop machines. A gigaflop machine isn’t a thousand times as good as a megaflop, it’s more like three times as good. So it would take a hundred-thousand-fold increase in brain power to get to five times as high an IQ, that is, to jump from a high end of IQ 200 to a high end of a thousand.

[Toon-like 20th C African mask in the new SF De Young museum.]

I’ll call the kiloIQ people “kiqqies”. I love the word kiqqie, it’s “kiddie” with some letters upside down. The kiqqie kiddies. Wow, Mom.

In my novel, I peg an individual human at the exa or 10^18 flop-and-byte level and the entire orphidnet at the ubba or 10^36 level. If IQ goes up as the log of the flop-and-byte, that’s an eighteen-fold amplification of normal IQ, which turns the usual IQ range of 100 to 200 into a range of 1800 to 3600. Two or three thousand for the IQ, in other words.

[Mexican ceramic of chihuahas mating, dated 300 BC to 300 AD in the SF De Young museum. Mexicans and chihuahuas go way back! I gotta put a chihuahua in my book to hang out with the Big Pig posse.]

So the beezies and the fully netted-in people are at the kiqqie level, and the Big Pig is just a few notches higher. I guess that makes sense. When I go to a guru, I’m wanting to see a guy only a few notches higher than me. Unless you're already a kiqqie, the Big Pig gonna seem too starkly incomprehensible.

[More two-thousand-year-old chihuahas. Such marvelous intelligence shows in this work. We imagine we've advanced so much in 2000 years, but really so little has changed.]

I need to put some effort into codifying what it is that makes a high IQ person different from others, so that I can do some analogies to push out to imagine life for the superintelligent AI beezies or for the enhanced humans plugged into the orphidnet.

This is a topic that people totally want to read about. An itchy fascination with what it is you might be missing. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Mindscapes of the Kiqqies.

[My fellow mathemagician Nathaniel Hellerstein at home with his daughter’s toys.]

Certainly having serenity and feeling content has nothing to do with high IQ. Serenity is all about valving down the logical machinations and the memory accesses. So that baseline feeling will be the same even for the kiloIQ and megaIQ people. Just sensing your breath.

Yet, part of the meditative slack feeling is being open to inputs from all over the body or all the senses. And this would be richer for the kiqqies

Parallel trains of thought and extra associations would be kiqqie. Extra branches in the thought tree. Anticipating ideas. Modeling behaviors. Drawing conclusions.

Walking down the street, I was thinking, “What really do hypothetical thousand-times-as-capacious brain-like systems have that I don't have, walking down this street looking at the trees?” They can look at the trees from more angles at once, they can analyze the motions in more depth.

By the same token, what do I have in my perception of a scene that’s all that much richer than the perception of a crow perched in the tree? Assume for the sake of argument the crow sees in color and has good visual acuity — actually I think birds do see very well, so as to be able to swoop down on bugs and other small prey. Pushing it further, might not a colony of ants on a tree also have a very rich model of the world? (Note that I speak of the colony and not of an individual ant, as the ant-mind is indeed a distributed intelligence.)

And then I saw the entrance to the Mirrorbrane.

I found some cheap Mirrorcalifornia real estate, with a starter car included.

I moved right in.

Nice thing is, in Mirrorbrane, something’s always on the braneware TV.

The sand is filled with gnomes, the flames with salamanders, the wood with dryads, the ocean with undines, the air with sylpyhs, the dogs with dog. Each uses the bulk-space’s Higgs field for memory storage.

Although my Mirrorbrane superpartner appears human to our eyes, he is made of superpartner particles: squarks, selectrons, photinos. Earth, air, fire, water are replaced by wood, cuttlefish, mathematics, and dog.

My Mirrorbrane house burns down with Mirror-me inside it, the sylphs scatter my superpartner’s ashes.

Eadem mutata resurgo;

The same, yet altered, I rearise.

Flying into the sun.

Left for the gnomes is the mesh of plumbing that was my Mirrobrane meat body for lo unto sixty years in sixty minutes. And now I am a little child.

I’ve been having some email with John Walker about his article, “Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life,” which I discussed on my blog yesterday.

And I realized that my goal in my novel(?)-in-progress is to have wind, leaves, water, clouds really be computing conscious mind stuff. I want to migrate the beezies to nature instead of doing the opposite. I have this anti-extropian bent, you see, my goal is to sort of deflate the Singularity which is in many ways hype and a category mistake. I want the computers to shrivel away. And I want Nature to wake up.

QUESTION: How SFictionally can I tweak nature to achieve this?

Walker’s suggested obstacle to doing this is, again, that even if a fluttering leaf is capable of class-four universal computation, it doesn’t seem like it gets all that far, as, after all, we don’t see vast innovations coming from the leaves. He feels they don’t get that far because they don’t have reliable long-term memory. The leaf doesn’t “remember” what it was fluttering yesterday or even ten minumtes ago. Even when in a continuous flutter mode, past states are lost to friction and averaging.

So let’s find all-purpose RAM to plug into any old thing. Where to find it? I figure in a parallel brane, or in the subdimensional network architecture of pre-geometry. A little supersymmetric 11-dimensional brane patch, hey?

I’m finding some possible tools for this in a new popular science book by Harvard/MIT professor Lisa Randall.

[Chief Execs of Monkeybrains, Inc., spotted at Fringale in San Francisco.]

Wondering about the relationship between humans and the net-based super-AI beezie beings, I’ve been thinking about an article by John Walker, “Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life”. He argues that life (and presumably intelligence) requires “digital storage”. Examples of what he calls digital storage in nature are: DNA, the human brain’s neural net, and the immune systems of vertebrates.

In Walker's words, “The fluttering of leaves in the wind, the ripples of water in a stream, the boiling of clouds over a mountain range, the intricate N-body ballet of stars orbiting the centre of mass of galaxy, all have no storage apart from their instantaneous analogue state space–they have no way to store and retrieve information in a robust and reliable digital form. Hence … these are not universal computations. They may be chaotic and unpredictable, but they can't be used in any manner to emulate any other computation, and therefore cannot be said to be equivalent to other computations or universal.”

[This shows a glass stomach made by artist Kiki Smith, part of her cool show at SFMOMA.]

I think it’s an interesting and suggestive argument, but I don't really think it's absolutely true. I tend to think that, e.g., sunspots could be alive, and reproduce, and eat each other, and even behave adaptively (as in Frek and the Elixir). But maybe in those sunspot tubes, there were certain long-lived vortex knot patterns functioning as a digital storage form, in which case Walker would still be on safe ground.

This picture, taken at one of my favorite resting spots in Yerba Buena Gardens in SF the other day, has several interesting features. The couple might be my characters Kittie and Sonic. I like the hairstyle of using enough gel to digitize your hair into a small number of distinct peaks. Check out the cool skull that the guy has hand-painted onto his wool suit jacket

And note the bumps of water meandering back and forth at the lip of the waterfall. I see these bumps as a class-four computation. And it seems like you could make them universal (assuming you idealized to make the waterfall arbitrarily wide) by forcing some bump pattern in and watching what happens. It's just a matter of emulation, innit? So I think you can have universality without digital storage, at least not in an obvious form. Although here, again, the info can be viewed as stored in the form of glider-like patterns of wave-bumps moving left and right.

Looking ahead, I’d like to think of the beezies as migrating out of the web and into the actual paracomputation of the world. Whether or not Walker is right in an absolute sense, he’s certainly right in the more limited sense that the computational speed and power of a natural process could be improved by somehow integrating RAM. I’m thinking of some string-theory method of attaching a little bit of RAM-brane to, like, streams and clouds. Animism made real.

[Totally gnarly piece by Kiki Smith called “Tale.” Funny for a novelist to see; thinking of how one crawls along, eating one’s way through life, extruding the long tale. But — ugh. Gotta hand it to women, they really can be gnarlier than men!]

Of course my all-purpose Presidential villian Dick Too Dodd (known as Joe Doakes in Mathematicians in Love) will want to damp all of this down. He claims he’s for a return to the old pre-orphidnet ways, but really, he wants to smash Earth into a Dyson Sphere of computronium where he can reign as a God.

As my character Kittie might put it, “Capitalists want people to be like sheep, and easy to fleece. Therefore they are against personal freedom, against quirky indigenous cultures, against self-expression, and against any non-goal-directed education. They want mass mind they can mass process. Like firm, tasteless, easy-to-harvest tomatoes.”