I’ve been posting about telepathy or teep recently. And in the novel I’m working on, The Big Aha, my characters Morton Plant and Loulou Sabado are now connected by teep.

“Night of Telepathy,” oil on canvas, November, 2012, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

And today I finished a big new painting of the couple, and it’s called Night of Telepathy. I posted a draft of it the other day. Note that the picture now includes six little rats. They’re alien beings called jumbies. I’ll be talking about then below.

Morton and Loulou met at a picnic in Louisville—the scribbly drawing above was my rough plan for the chapter about them.

I got interested in the awkwardly drawn figures in the lower right corner of my drawing. It’s hard to draw that badly and childishly if you’re paying attention. Expression at a deeper level. Despite the labeled names in my original sketch, I now think of these two as being my characters Morton and Loulou.

Looking for something new, I put theses two into a painting that I jokingly called “The Louisville Artist.” I’ve posted this image before.

So what’s up with those six little rats in my “Night of Telepathy” painting?

“Loulou and Skungy,” oil on canvas, February, 2012, 30” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

Rats play an integral part in The Big Aha. I did a painting involving Loulou and a rat all the way back in February, 2012, when I posted about it. Not that I had any solid ideas at all about my novel then. The paintings really do guide me. And then I ended up writing Chapter One about a quantum wetware rat.

Anyway, the morning after their big Night of Telepathy together, Morton and Loulou are talking about aliens. Morton is narrating.

“I’ve always had a thing for space aliens,” I said, sidestepping a capped youth steering a roadhog limo. The six-legged pig had a depression on his back, with two rows of passenger seats. Funny that the limo had a chauffeur driver. An absurd luxury these days.

Loulou was still thinking about my remark. “If there’s aliens at all, the likeliest place to find them might be in the cosmic mind mode,” she said,

“How do you mean?”

“I always hear rustling and scrabbling when I’m teeping,” said Loulou. “Like there’s things that creep around beneath our reality.”

I’m deeply into the notion of there being odd critters living behind straight-reality’s sets. Like rats on a sound stage. The unseen, ghostly Qwetland darters.

It would be too corny to have the secret aliens be bug-eyed-monsters in UFOs. Better if they’re tachyonic, subdimensional, crooked-beetle, spirit-like beings emerging from an alternate view of reality. “Mighty Mites From Quantum Land.”

Note that I’ve already written about these kinds of aliens as “subbies” in my novels Postsingular, and its sequel Hylozoic, and in “Elves of the Subdimensions” with Paul DiFilippo.

The subbies relate to the quantum wetware thing of The Big Aha. You plug into the cosmic wave function and it’s wiggy. And you can get stuck in this merged state, you’re hearing the “voices of the gods,” you’re lost, talking to all the objects around you.

Scuttlers behind the baseboards of reality, yeah. I like to do a seen-from-the-corners-of-the-eyes routine about these Qwetland darters, or I might call them jumbies—creatures that live out in the analog mindspace. The heretofore invisible aliens whom, for whatever reason, we’re ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes—those are alien beings.

Putting it differently, the jumbies can be figure/ground kinds of creatures—they were always here, but we weren’t noticing them.

The word jumby, sometime spelled jumbee, is a Caribbean word for ghost. I remember my sister-in-law Noreen telling me about them in Grand Turk in the British West Indies. In the town of Grand Turk, they have zigzag boards on the ridges of houses called “jumby boards.” These are meant to keep those Qwetland darter spirits from alighting on your house like pigeons.

“The Lovers,” by Rudy Rucker, 24 x 20 inches, January, 2012, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.

As long as I’m running so many of my Big-Aha-related paintings in today’s post, I’ll also put in my painting from January, 2012, called “Telepathy” or “The Lovers.” Here’s a link to my old post about it.

My character Joey Moon says he’s an artist. He wanted his friend Morton Plant to show his work in an art gallery, but Joey wouldn’t tell Morton the gallery-owner what his work looks like. So at this point, I need to decide what Joey’s work does look like, so I can be prefiguring it, and so I can set it up for a role in the story of The Big Aha.

I’m thinking Joeys work should be nurb-related—where nurbs are the wetware tweaked biocomputational “devices” that we’ll be using in a hundred years. Simple idea: Joey’s works are squidskin displays that mirror the viewer’s face, but with some processing tweaks added.

Call it a magic mirror.

[Here’s a draft of a painting of Joey Moon and Loulou Sabado, characters in “The Big Aha.” The painting is called “Night of Telepathy.” An earlier painting of these two people appears below. Joey doesn’t really look like this, but it’s how he visualizes himself. Actually this might be Joey’s friend Morton Plant, and not Joey himself in the picture. Doing these paintings is helping me a lot with the novel.]

But I need more, something to kick it up a level. Another person’s face can kind of hypnotize you, and you sometimes feel compelled to mimic it. Speaking of fascination, think of the way that you can become enthralled with your own mirror-image, especially if you’re a teenager, or bored, or vain. So the magic mirror’s is showing you your own face slightly tweaked, and you start reacting to the image, and you get into a feedback loop that drives you toward some extreme emotional state.

The extreme state you reach varies according to the viewer’s emotional make-up. The magic mirror simply feels around interactively for the biggest reaction on your part.

Some viewers fully freak out—raging in anger, weeping hysterically, frantically apologizing, roaring in rage, getting lost in grimaces. Their faces get so distorted that they look like Francis Bacon paintings. And the magic mirror might then freeze on a little blither-loop of that peak intensity image.

Later, if you want, you store that clip into memory and reset the magic mirror and collect another image. Or maybe not—maybe Joey freezes all images of himself or of those around him and those are the finished works he sells. If you can do-it-yourself it has more the feeling of a toy than of an artwork, so you ask as high a price.

I saw something a little like this at the San Jose ZeroOne festival in fall, 2012. You’d lie on your back and right over your face you’d see an interactive video image of your face that was tweaked to show your face decaying like a corpse, and with flies, and with fungi growing on it.

Joey doesn’t want to show his magic mirror works to anyone until they go on sale, as the idea could be relatively easy to pirate.

Re. the software in the magic mirror, we can suppose that Joey has some nurb-hacking abilities. It’s fairly non-technical, in that you don’t use a formal computer language. You just need to learn to nurbs in a certain way—perhaps it’s like how the Unipuskers speak in my novel Frek and the Elixir, that is, every sentence is an imperative.

The same two people in a painting called “Louisville Artist,” oil on canvas, October, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

I’ve been circling around and around some ideas that I want to use in my next novel, The Big Aha. In today’s post, I’ll expand on some of the remarks in my October 15, 2012, post, “SF Religion 3: Qwet.” But my focus isn’t on religion in today’s post, it’s on the nature of mind and the possibility of telepathy.

Open your (inner) eyes to your true mental life. Your state of mind can evolve in two kinds of ways that I’ll fancifully call—“robotic” and “cosmic”. The “robotic” mental processes proceed step-by-step—via reasoning and analysis, by reading or hearing words, by forming specific opinions. Every opinion diminishes you.

The “cosmic” changes are preverbal flows. If you turn off your endlessly-narrating inner voice, your consciousness becomes analog, like waves on a pond. You’re merged with the world. You’re with the One. It can be a simple as the everyday activity of being alert—without consciously thinking much of anything. In the cosmic mode you aren’t standing outside yourself and evaluating your thoughts.

The cosmic mode is what’s happening between/behind/around your precise robotic communicable thoughts. The idea is to notice the spaces between your thoughts, or to avoid being caught up in your thoughts. This is a fairly common meditation exercise.

We might have some specific brain sites that control when our state of consciousness flips from being with the One, that is, in a smooth, mixed, continuous or “cosmic” state—of being with the Many, that is, down to the “robotic,” specific-opinion state. If you’re a dreamy sort of person, your natural trend is to drift out to unspecificity, out the One. But other personality types tend always to be pushing down into the robotic, studying the details of the Many.

I’m imagining a qwet treatment that helps you can get into—and remain within—a smooth state for a longish period of time.

As I’ve often said, I have the experiential sensation that my mind oscillates between One/Many about sixty times per second. Between the “cosmic”/”robotic” consciousness modes. You do need both modes to get buy. The One state is like a radar ping you reach out into the world around you, and the Many state is when you say, “Okay, I’m alone here, it’s me against the world, what do I do next to stay alive?”

Breaking away from the cosmic mode can be thought as involving a quantum collapse. You go from a broader, more ambiguous state to a more specific state. How does the collapser work? It affects not just you, but the things that you’re looking at and coupled to. Everything around you becomes overly precise, that is, robotic instead of cosmic. Less interesting. Like—think of they way that some people can make a whole scene dull just by the way they start talking about it. “How much did that cost? Is that safe to have around? Did you notice the scratch on it?”

Do animals have collapsers? Do physical objects? Let’s say “not usually.” Might the ability to collapse be connected to having consciousness? Let’s say “yes.”

What if I use the Antonio Damasio’s definition of consciousness as “the ability to visualize yourself visualizing yourself.” You can watch a model of yourself watching yourself. It’s a three-level map. Actor, strategist, analyst. The actor just does things, like an animal. The strategist observes the actor and makes corrections. The analyst observes the strategist’s decisions and improves on them.

Suppose that this is a kind of physical map, a three-tier flow of quantum information, and that for a fixed-point theorem type reason, these flows cause quantum collapse—they throw a system into an eigenstate, that is, into a robotic, non-cosmic, fixed point. Humans are the main things that are three-tier collapsers, but such collapsers do occur naturally in certain places, just as certain types of crystals or mirrors might be found in nature. The spots with collapsers seem to have bad juju, that is, they’re inherently boring.

I see the collapsers as being like snags in a rushing muddy river of quantum flow. And the snags leave precise ripple wakes. And there can be a kind of beauty to the moiré patterns of the overlaid wakes—this is what we call our human culture.

In my novel, I want to work with the idea that managing to stay in the uncollapsed cosmic state, they can achieve a kind of telepathy. You can couple your “cosmic” mental state to the “cosmic” state of another person. I won’t be like a phone conversation. Your thoughts aren’t at all like a page of symbols—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations.

Key Plot Point: For quantum theoretic reasons, a quantum link between the two systems isn’t of a kind that can leave memory traces, otherwise the link is functioning as an observation that drags consciousness back down to the robotic mode. So you can’t directly exchange specific, usable info via quantum teep. In my novel this will be a disappointment to the government backers of the qwet experiments.

But your mind state will be changed by your teep interactions. But not in the obvious way of “remembering what they ‘said’.” After teeping with someone, when you later drop back down into your chatty “robotic” state, you’ll find that you are saying things you wouldn’t have said before the merge. But maybe you’re not sure why.

This isn’t so different from a memory of a very deep, close, intense conversation with someone—a talk where you really got onto the same wavelength. Like a talk in bed with a lover, or chatting happy with a pal, or, getting into deep concepts with an admired mentor—telepathy happens.

This is my third post on SF religion, and I probably won’t post on this again for awhile. I’m interested in the topic these days as I’d like to have the founding of a religion be a plot element in my next novel, The Big Aha.

I’ll start with a physical process that produces an unusual state of consciousness. And then I’ll trace out the sense of excitement and personal liberation among the adepts; the wider public’s incomprehension and fear; the denunciations and attacks from the politicians and the exponents of existing religions; and the inescapable international tsunami of interest.

I want the catalyzing, mind-altering spark to be something involving quantum mechanics. Not a drug. A technique of mind-alteration that’s literally physics-based. I’m going to call it qwet, which is short for quantum wetware. The users of this technique are called qwetties.

In a nutshell, qwet gives you a certain type of telepathic power—called teep for short. You can share the mind states of other people, and animals and, to some extent, the “mind states” of plants and objects. You’re sharing the states in the sense of merging-into, rather than in the sense of observing-from-the-outside.

At the end of today’s post I’ll say a little more about the nature of quantum wetware and about how this quantum-mediated teep is going to work.

But first let me talk about some models for the birth of a modern religion. The psychedelic movement was in some ways an event of this kind. And it was based upon science, that is, upon the use of a specific newly-discovered synthetic chemical. The idea of a physical or chemical process that leads to a cult or a religion is very SFictional.

It’s easy to replace LSD by qwet teep and recast the cultural history of the psychedelic revolution: the early voices-in-the-wilderness Beats, Tim Leary’s high-minded proselytizing, the Pranksters’ street psychedelia, and then the mass fad, complete with convivial freakouts and light shows.

I see a qwettie wearing a button: Are you qwet yet?

How do we get from qwet as a method to qwet as a religion? The acidheads were interpreting a certain brain phenomenon in religious terms—what you might call experimental of mysticism. But street psychedelia never attained the status of a sanctioned religion—although the traditional Peyote Religion did find cover as the Native American Church.

Mormonism is another intriguing model of a modern religion. The underlying physical object here is the Book of Mormon, said to have been found inscribed on golden plates and deciphered via two “stones of sight” called Urim and Thummim. What if the plates had been left on Earth by a UFO? Or what if they’d welled up from a hidden, subdimensional level of reality? Not that I want to pick on the Mormons. We could ask the same kinds of questions about the origins of any religion.

But this move interests me: what if the techniques of quantum wetware were unearthed rather than invented? What if the qwet rats from Dimension Z fed them to us?

Yet another modern-religion story is that of Dianetics/Scientology. As I understand it, Dianetics was originally a scientifically inspired tool for exploring one’s personality—the E-meter, a fairly simple device that measures the changing resistance of a person’s skin—not unlike a simple lie detector. In order to fend of unwelcome government scrutiny of his E-meter technique and of any health claims made for it, L. Ron Hubbard changed his movement to a religion, that is, to Scientology, and the E-meter results were now viewed as religious phenomena rather than as diagnostic medical results. This origin story provides a scenario I could use in my book.

(As with Mormonism, I don’t mean to disparage Scientology. I’m only mentioning these two religions in somewhat abstract way—in terms of historical patterns that might play out in my SF novel. I don’t want my comments thread to become a battleground! To this end, I’m going to be blocking out comments advocating or criticizing these religions. I’d much prefer that you comment on Qwet!)

Getting back to my main line of discussion, I can see a situation in which the qwet technique might initially be viewed as a practical communication channel, or as an empathy-promoter, or simply as an offbeat mind-toy. But then it evolves into the Qwet religion. The switch might initially be a tactic to forestall some type of governmental crackdown.

But then we’ll get an SF kicker—a big aha—whereby there are in fact some higher-level beings revealed by the qwetties’ telepathic visions. Weird and otherworldly experiences. Odd critters living behind straight-reality’s sets. Like rats on a sound stage.

Qwet is real!

So what is quantum wetware and how does it give you telepathy?

(In a way, “quantum wetware” is a pleonasm, like “hot fire.” I’m using wetware to mean a person’s biological material, viewed as a kind of computer. Not just the DNA, but all the other chemicals as well. The interactions of these complex biochemical molecules are ruled by quantum mechanics. So any wetware is already in some sense quantum.)

This said, our PowerPoint descriptions of something like DNA often depict it in a classical-physics, Tinker-toy, Turing-machine kind of way. Indeed, there really is a crisp, mechanistic quality to the actions and reactions of our bodies’ proteins and enzymes. Quantum mechanics is the playing field, but the players are solid little lumps.

But now I want to get away from that. Since it’s states of consciousness I’ll be talking about, I’m particularly interested in having neurons and neurotransmitters that are in the so-called mixed states of quantum mechanics. Not yes, not no, but both.

And if you get some quantum catalyst in your system (it’s transmitted like a sexual disease), all of your bodies processes can take on a fey, QM quality. And this is going to lead to telepathy, a.k.a. teep.

One way of starting to imagine telepathy: my thoughts aren’t at all like a page of symbols—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations. Open your (inner) eyes to your true mental life. A related notion that continues to inspire me is the mind-as-quantum-system notion that my philosopher-sage friend Nick Herbert calls quantum tantra.

Your state of mind can evolve in two kinds of ways that I’ll fancifully call—“robotic” and “cosmic”. The “robotic” mental processes proceed step-by-step—via reasoning and analysis, by reading or hearing words, by forming specific opinions.. Every opinion diminishes you.

The “cosmic” changes are preverbal flows in which several opinions can co-exist. If you turn off your endlessly-narrating inner voice, your consciousness becomes analog, like waves on a pond. You’re merged with the world. It can be a simple as the everyday activity of being alert—without consciously thinking much of anything. In the cosmic mode you aren’t standing outside yourself and evaluating your thoughts.

As Nick Herbert has explained in his “Quantum Tantra” essay that you can find in the link that I mentioned above, it’s natural to regard the cosmic, analog mental process as essentially quantum mechanical. And once you’ve got QM happening, you can get quantum entanglement, whereby you couple your “cosmic” mental state to the “cosmic” state of another person, or even to the state of another object.

For quantum theoretic reasons, the link between the two systems isn’t of a kind that can leave memory traces, otherwise the link is functioning as an observation that drags consciousness back down to the robotic mode. So you can’t directly exchange specific, usable info via quantum teep. (And in my novel this will be a disappointment to some government backers of the qwet experiments.)

But your mind state will be changed by your teep interactions. And whenever you drop back down into the chatty “robotic” state, you’ll find that you are saying things you wouldn’t have said before the merge.

One more hit: Synchronicity might be evidence that we’re all parts of some higher being. The higher mind’s cosmic states filter down into surprising links within our mundane robotic reality.

And—look out!—here come the qwet rats!

What might be some rituals of the Qwet religion? Once I was at the Esalen Institute south of Big Sur with Terence McKenna. He and I were leading a seminar entitled “Wetware and Stoneware.” A cute woman in the group was talking about “sacred dancing.” Cheryl from Carmel—she was a follower of Terence’s, and she talked about driving up from Esalen to the River Inn in Big Sur to get in some sacred dancing. By way of explaining this, she held her upraised hands together and moved her head back and forth.

If you have qwet teep, you can do sacred dancing without having to be in the same place as the other dancers, and there doesn’t have to be an audible sound. I’m thinking of a Silent Disco scene I saw at the San Jose Zero1 Biennial this September, where each dancer had a pair of earphones, and we were dancing in a virtual soundscape.

[As mentioned above, I’ll be curating the comments on this post, so please don’t try posting any passionate screeds pro or con existing religions. Other than that, we’re wide open.]