I got to know Jaron Lanier a little bit in the 1990s, when Virtual Reality was becoming a craze. Jaron was one of the very first people to talk about VR—see his April, 2001, Scientific American article, “Virtually There.” By the mid 1990s, his company VPL Research was making one of the first “Data Glove” devices, and the Advanced Technology group at Autodesk was using these gloves for their so-called Cyberspace project.

I was working at Autodesk at this time, writing some demos for the Cyberspace platform, so I’d see Jaron from time to time, and I found him very interesting. Once he remarked that his motivation for working on VR was because he dreamed of having a really good air-guitar, one which could in fact morph into arbitrary instruments. And then, being Jaron, he went ahead and made an album this way, The Sound of One Hand. And here, on the same theme is a link with some playable tracks from his latest album, “Proof of Consciousness“.

In person, Jaron makes an odd impression. Like other programmers and mathematicians I’ve known, he incorporates a mix of being very well-informed about certain things, while being unaware of some topics that the average human might know. And—extra wild card—he’s a musician as well.

In the last section of his latest book Jaron hints that he seems odd because he’s an alien cephalopod—“More than one student has pointed out that with my hair as it is, I am looking more and more like a cephalopod as time goes by.” The truth is coming out! But maybe I’m overinterpreting! I do love cuttlefish a lot…I pretty much try and work one into every novel that I write…

The book I’m talking about is You Are Not a Gadget. He’s trying to put his finger on some things that might keep the Web from being as wonderful as we’d like it to be. Cephalopod or not, Jaron does a good job of promoting his work, see his recent interview on “The Wisdom of the Hive” in Scientific American, and many more pages and links on his book site.

One point Jaron makes is that group-written sites like Wikipedia aren’t necessarily as good as we think they are. I gather that he was in part drawn into making this critique by some problems he had with his own entry in Wikipedia. I know this feeling—it’s frustrating if anonymous strangers post “official reference information” about you which strike you as factually incorrect. Personal issues aside, you’ll notice that if you read a Wikipedia entry on some topic about which you’re very well-informed, you’ll often find that the posted information includes subtle errors and biases. In principle, you set about trying to correct the entries, but at some point this becomes a waste of energy. If you’re truly an expert on something, it’s more satisfying to make your own independent web page about it.

Jaron argues that the very anonymity of the Wikipedia contributors can serve to conceal the contexts from which their speaking. He makes the point that, if you take the time, you can often find better, more grounded information by looking a little further down into the list of hits that Google returns when you search for a topic. Even so, for casual use, it really is very pleasant to have Wikipedia around, with the information being presented in an encyclopedia’s uniform format.

But a lot of crowd-sourced pages really seem like crap, cf. the growing number of Web 2.0 “answer” sites, where people post answers to questions, and other people vote on which answers they like best. Ask any question in the Google search bar and you’ll see five or more sites like this. It’s like, “We want an advice website, but we’re not going to pay anyone to write the advice, we’ll let it emerge, and we’ll make money from ads.” Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t. My guess is that the wiki format, in which people can revise each other’s posts is more likely to converge on something useful—with the caveat that you then have the anonymity and lack of context.

You can preview some of Jaron’s thoughts on crowd-thought in his essay, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.”

I’ll mention one other issue that Jaron raises—a topic that hits very close to home for an author or a musician. It’s really not sustainable to expect for people to be able to read and hear everything out there for free. Some have argued that, even if you give away your creative work on the Web, you can still earn money by value-added activities like selling T-shirts or making personal appearances.

But if you’re a creative type, you don’t necessarily want to be rushing around trying to scrounge up small-money deals. It’s too much like panhandling, or having to “sing for your supper” as Jaron puts it. You’d like to be able to create something in undisturbed privacy, put it out there, and gradually get remunerated as people access your work.

A very few authors and musicians do give away their work online and do fine with their careers. In SF circles, Corey Doctorow is the canonical example of someone who gives away electronic versions of his work while managing to sell plenty of paper copies. I myself have toyed with this approach, putting my novel Postsingular up for free download at the same time that it appeared in paper. In my case, I didn’t see this as significantly helping or hurting the sales of the book, although possibly it hurt sales a bit, or maybe it did help, as Hylozoic, which wasn’t posted for free download, sold a bit less. Writers want to be read, so at some level we do like giving away electronic books, and I probably would have given Hylozoic away as well, but my publisher didn’t want me to do it, they had some hopes of making money with Kindle and ebook sales.

It’s always hard to tell about these things, because we only get to live in one universe. At this point, there’s still very very little money in ebook sales for people other than, say, Stephen King or authors of (The)+(Proper noun)+(Noun) books, so the issue of free electronic books is somewhat moot. But now, as the ebook market keeps edging towards picking up, I think many writers and publishers feel more resistance about giving away their electronic books for free. The situation is different for musicians as the preferred form for music distribution is now electronic. The dilemma comes up for artists, too—some of us like to sell prints of our works online, and for that reason we don’t make hi-res images of our work freely availalble.

[MandelQuinticMosquitoes, detail of a quintic Mandelbrot Set.]

Jaron advocates a very nice solution to the problem that was proposed by Ted Nelson many years ago: this is that there be, in effect, only “one” copy of each artistic creation on the Web, and that whenever anyone access this copy, their browser automatically makes a smallish micropayment to the author. In practice there wouldn’t literally be only one copy of, say, a photo, a song, or a book—but it would be possible to make the system seem to behave as if this were in fact the case.

As things now stand, artists now seem fated to be selling our out-of-print or more obscure creations through things like Google Books or iTunes. These “Lords of the Cloud” (as Jaron calls them) collect the viewing fees and the revenue from sidebar ads and pass on whatever cut they deem reasonable to the actual authors. But why do we need Lords of the Cloud? An iron-clad, possibly government-backed, micropayment system would be cleaner, more open, and more fair.

Though maybe we don’t want the government, per se, involved. But, as Jaron also points out, it’s kind of crappy the way that the main, inviolable thing on so many web pages is ADs, ever more personalized, ever more intrusive and easy-to-mistake-for-something-real.

One more remark about cephalopods like octopi and cuttlefish. Jaron argues that their brains might in fact be comparable to ours, but they don’t get to have a childhood during which their elders teach them things. The edge that they do have is that, with their intensely variable skins, they are in some sense born masters of virtual reality. Jaron encapsulates these thoughts in an equation:

Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality.

Or, to quote the title of the great Talking Heads movie: “Stop Making Sense.” You go, Jaron! Lead the fight against bland consensus reality.

A couple of posts ago, I was writing about “Virtualization.” And my attention was called to “True Names,” a 2008 novella by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, about competing layers of VR. You can find “True Names” either online or in print in Lou Anders’ Fast Forward 2 anthology—I don’t like reading long thing on the computer screen, so I actually got a used copy of Fast Forward 2 for about $3. And I read “True Names” this week. And it sets off all kinds of thoughts, as did a comment that Benjamin Rosenbaum made on my initial post.

Spoiler alert—I want to discuss the idea behind the novelette in some detail here, and what I say will give away some of the tale’s surprises. (On the other hand, if you do read this post before the story, you’ll understand the story better.)

The set-up in “True Names” is that we have three competing reality systems: Beebe, Demiurge, and Brobdignag.

(1) Beebe is a videogame-style VR world, where competing agents live inside a computationally generated reality that uses repurposed ordinary matter as its underlying computational engine. To give it a computer sheen, Doctorow and Rosenbaum cast the characters into the form of Unix-style entities called “strategies” and “filters,” and when they split in two they’re said to “fork” (Unix-style). But most of the time the chracters take on a colorful appearance.

(2) The nature of Demiurge was a bit hazier to me—my sense of it was the Demiurge was devoted to preserving, park-like, as much of ordinary reality as possible, although I wasn’t quite clear what computational substrate the Demiurge creature(s) run(s) on. One might suppose that the Demiurge is, as the name suggests, the universal consciousness that exists Hylozoic-style within ordinary reality. The “divinity” that underlies the natural world.

(3) Brobdignag is an omnivorous gray-goo kind of reality that’s eating up all matter and space, converting it into a uniform, distributed computation that I would think of as being a cellular automaton—or CA. A CA, by the way, is a computation arrived at by dividing space up into tiny “cells” and having each cell run exactly the same computation, over and over, in parallel. As computer scientists learned in the 1980s and 1990s, (see the images on my CAPOW page) you can in fact get lovely, emergent patterns in a CA, so the restriction to “simple repeated programs in cells” is in fact no more limiting than are the laws of physics which are, after all, “simple repeated rules at points of space.” Brobdignag is an off-stage menace till the very end of the tale.

The kicker in the story is that the Beebe and Demiurge characters keep discovering that their Beebe or Demiurge “realities” are in fact simulations being run by an opposing camp.

It’s not always easy to discover whether your “reality” is a simulation, and initially the characters believe that, “No inhabitant of an emulation could ever discern the unreality of their simulated universe.” But then the character Paquette finds a rather simple mathematical proof for the so-called Solipsist’s Lemma.

“An emulated being can detect its existence in emulation, and there is a way to find the signature of the emulator in the fabric of the emulation. Specifically, in certain chaotic transformations, a particular set of statistical anomalies indicates the hand of Beebe—another, that of Demiurge.”

But… “The numbers seemed to imply that we were in emulation . . . but not in Beebe, nor in Demiurge. In something else, with characteristics that were exceedingly odd.”

[I haven’t done jack in terms of photography lately, so I’ll be using some images and a video of fnoor-like fractals, for an explanation of them, see my post , ”Cubic Mandelbrots and the Rudy Sets”]

And at the story’s end, the competing Beebe and Demiurge characters learn that the great competition is long over, they’ve been simulations living in Brobdignag all along.

Hegelian that I am, I sense a dialectic triad here. Demiurge, or plain old godly Nature, is the thesis. The antithesis is Beebe, the by-now-ubiquitous-in-SF artificial VR that I railed against in my post, “Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality” and its follow-up post, “Limits to VR #2: Answers to Comments.” So then, if “True Names” is indeed in dialectic form, the synthesis should be Brobdignag.

How so? We can regard Brobdignag as being the two opposing things at the same time: “natural reality” and “computed reality.” And to some extent this seems to be what Doctorow and Rosenbaum have in mind in their closing pages where we hear a voice from Brobdignag.

“Those little engines—void-eating, gravity-spinning, durable, expanding through the territory of known space—those aren’t us. They’re just what we’re made of. That’s right: we arise in all that complex flocking logic. … We are lucky: we have the gifts of abundance, invulnerability, and effortless cooperation. Let us enjoy them. Let us revel. Let us partake. Let’s get this party started.”

It’s a nice twist although, philosophically speaking, I don’t really see a need for Brobdignag. As I’m always saying, the natural world already is incalculably rich. But my personal opinions are kind of irrelevant here, as we’re talking about an SF story, and about the moves that the authors took to make it work. “True Names” is a good story.

I’m especially intrigued by the Solipsist’s Lemma. When I was working with the Cyberspace project at Autodesk in the 1990s, I used to talk about this notion with John Walker. We were noticing that certain kinds of computational round-off errors would, in time, degrade a virtual physics simulation. Planets, for instance, would move out of their proper orbits. And Walker was saying that maybe there were some weird things in particle physics that indicated that our reality was in fact a slightly shoddy simulation.

I used a variation of Walker’s notion in my transreal, VR, artificial life novel that emerged from my time at Autodesk, The Hacker and the Ants. In my novel, I had the idea of making these simulation errors take on the form of odd-looking inconsistent computer graphical objects that I dubbed fnoor.

Somehow “fnoor” seemed like just the kind of word that my new code-hacker friends like Bill Gosper would come up with. And, God knows, I was seeing plenty of fnoor coming out my initially ineffective attempts to program such simple shapes as dodecahedra. So in The Hacker and the Ants, there’s cracks where some of the “walls” of the VR join up, and inside the cracks are bits of…fnoor. A race of voracious artificially-alive VR ants are hiding inside the fnoor.

The cyberspace crack I found myself in held an odd, drifting piece of geometry, an “impossible” self-reversing figure of the type that graphics hackers call fnoor.

The piece of fnoor was of wildly ambiguous size. Relative to my tiny dimensions, the fnoor first seemed to be the size of my car, but a moment later it loomed as large as the pyramidal Transamerica building… The fnoor was a clump of one-sided plane faces that seemed haphazardly to pop in and out of existence as the clump rotated. The fnoor’s vertices and edges were indexed in such a way that the faces failed to join up in a coherent way. There was no consistent distinction between inside and outside, leading to a complete failure of the conventional cyberspace illusion that you are looking at a perspective view of an object in three-dimensional space.

The rotating fnoor changed size irregularly; at a moment when it looked much bigger than me, I sprang forward and landed on it. I ran across the faces, which flipped out under me. I still had seen no ants. Finally I came to a crazy funhouse-door in the fnoor in the dense angles of the fnoor; I squeezed through it and the fnoor turned into a solid model that lay all around me.

Just recently, before reading “True Names,” I was thinking about revisiting this notion, in fact I’d made an outline for a short story called “Fnoor.” And now “True Names” energizes me, I like how the explicitly worked out the “Solipsist’s Lemma.” Hopefully I’ll get around to writing a longer form of my own story in the next month or two, but for now, here it is in outline form.

“Fnoor”
Point of View: a more or less normal woman who has a crazy mathematician friend.

Setup: The mathenaut zooms in and finds an scary apparition in a high-degree computer graphic, it’s some new kind of fractal that he’s investigating as a kind of retro move. He calls these weird little shapes fnoor.

Twist: He finds the same kind of fnoor in a scanning-tunneling-microscope image.

Flash: He concludes the natural world is generated by an algorithm.

Task: What does the world’s computation run on? His woman friend, the narrator, says that consciousness is the substrate. The mind is the “metal” of the “machine. The mathenaut is okay with this idea, but then he begins wondering what the underlying the consciousness is running on. Are we in a strange loop or in a tower of virtual machines.

Action: So our hero seeks out fnoor in our consciousness—perhaps he starts with the phosphenes you see when you press your closed eyes. And now the mathenaut begins changing the world by changing the operating system of his mind. And thanks to entanglement, everyone else’s world changes too. It’s for real, at one point the mathenaut conjures up a ragged hole in space, a hole the size of a knapsack, and he pushes his hand into it.

Finale: By now his woman friend has left the mathenaut, and he’s trying to get her back. She takes action to stamp out the fnoor. And…[wait for the zinger.]

Updated June 17, 2010. My new book, The Ware Tetralogy is in print!

I originally created this post after revising the early proofs of this Prime Books omnibus, The Ware Tetralogy—consisting of my four novels Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware—we’re talking about some 750 pages of phreakadelic cyberpunk goodness here.

I was copy-editing the proofs for next two weeks—they were put together from optical-character-recognition scans of the decades old originals, and the work takes a little care. The tome becomes available in mid June, 2010, dropping from the sky like an engraved plutonium tablet from a low-flying saucer.

Today, just for kicks, here’s a reprint of the classic brain-eating scene from Software, somewhat abridged, Copyright Rudy Rucker (c) 2010.

And, as an extra, I’m also including a podcast of me reading this brain-eating scene from Software, as well as Sta-Hi Mooney’s introduction to the drug merge in Wetware. Click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

Read on for the brain-eating scene…

[The original Ace cover, and the Avon reprint cover.]

Sta-Hi opened his eyes. His body seemed to have disappeared. He was just a head resting on a round red table. People looking at him. Greasers. And the chick he’d been with last . . .

“Are you awake?” she said with brittle sweetness. She had a black eye.

One of the men at the table shifted in his chair. He wore mirror-shades and had short hair. He had his shirt off. It seemed like another hot day.

The man’s foot scuffed Sta-Hi’s shin. So Sta-Hi had a body after all. It was just that his body was tied up under the table and his head was sticking out through a hole in the table-top. The table was split and had hinges on one side, and a hook-and-eye on the other.

“Y’all want some killah-weed?” drawled one of the men. He had a pimp mustache and a pockmarked face. He wore a chromed tire-chain around his neck with his name in big letters. BERDOO. Also hanging from the chain was a little mesh pouch full of hand-rolled cigarettes.

“Not me,” Sta-Hi said. “I’m high on life.” No one laughed.

[Covers for the British Penguin and Roc editions.]

The big man with no shirt came back across the room. He held five cheap steel spoons. “We really gonna do it, Phil?” the girl with green hair asked him. “We really gonna do it?”

Berdoo passed a krystal-joint to his neighbor, a bald man with half his teeth missing. Exactly half the teeth gone, so that one side of the face was flaccid and caved in, while the other was still fresh and beefy. He took a long hit and picked up the machine that was lying on the table.

“Take the lid off, Haf’N’Haf,” the woman with the black eye urged. “Open the bastard up.”

“We really gonna do it!” the green-haired girl exclaimed, and giggled shrilly. “I ain’t never ate no live brain before!”

“It’s a stuzzy high, Rainbow,” Phil told her. With his fat and his short hair he looked stupid, but his way of speaking was precise and confident. He seemed to be the leader. “This ought to be a good brain, too. Full of chemicals, I imagine.”

[Cover of the Japanese edition.]

Haf’N’Haf seemed to be having some trouble starting the little cutting machine up. It was a variable heat-blade. They were going to cut off the top of Sta-Hi’s skull and eat his brain with those cheap steel spoons. He would be able to watch them . . . at first.

Someone started screaming. Someone tried to stand up, but he was tied too tightly. The variable blade was on now, set at one centimeter. The thickness of the skull.

Sta-Hi threw his head back and forth wildly as Haf’N’Haf leaned towards him. There was no way to read the ruined face’s expression.

“Hold still, damn you!” the woman with the black eye shouted. “It’s no good if we have to knock you out!”

[Covers of the German and Italian editions.]

Sta-Hi didn’t really hear her. His mind had temporarily . . . snapped. He just kept screaming and thrashing his head around. The sound of his shrill voice was like a lattice around him. He tried to weave the lattice thicker.

The little pimp with the tire-chain went and got a towel from the bathroom. He wedged it around Sta-Hi’s neck and under his chin to keep the head steady. Sta-Hi screamed louder, higher.

“Stuff his mayouth,” the green-haired girl cried. “He’s yellin and all.”

“No,” Phil said. “The noise is like . . . part of the trip. Wave with it, baby. The Chinese used to do this to monkeys. It’s so wiggly when you spoon out the speech-centers and the guy’s tongue stops moving. Just all at—” He stopped and the flesh of his face moved in a smile.

Haf’N’Haf leaned forward again. There was a slight smell of singed flesh as the heat-blade dug in over Sta-Hi’s right eyebrow. Attracted by the food smell, the little poodle came stiffly trotting across the room. It tried to hop over the heat-blade’s electric cord, but didn’t quite make it. The plug popped out of the wall.

Haf’N’Haf uttered a muffled, lisping exclamation.

[Covers of the Finnish and Spanish editions.]

“He says git the dog outta here,” Berdoo interpreted. “He don’t think hit’s sanitary with no dawg in here.”

Sta-Hi threw himself upward again, before Haf’N’Haf could get the heat-blade restarted. Anything for time, no matter how pointless. But the vibrating of the table had knocked open the little hook-and-eye latch. The two halves of the table yawned open, and Sta-Hi fell over onto the floor.

His feet were tied together and his hands were tied behind his back. He had time to notice that the people at the table were wearing brightly colored sneakers with alphabets around the edges. The Little Kidders. He’d always thought the newscasters had made them up.

Someone was hammering at the door, harder and harder. Five pairs of kids’ sneakers scampered out of the room. Sta-Hi heard a window open, and then the door splintered. More feet. Shiny black lace-up shoes. Cop shoes.