I’ve been rereading The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959, edited by Oliver Harris (Viking 1993). I’m focusing on the letters from Tangiers, Tangier, Tanger, Tangers as it’s variously spelt—these run from 1954 to 1958, and a lot of them are to Allen Ginsberg. This particular edition came out in 1993, and I read in it then. It’s a nostalgia trip for me, reading this stuff, fitting as spring itself is a nostalgic season. The return of youth. The drifting blossoms. I’ve been into Burroughs for almost fifty years, I first read him in my brother’s copies of Evergreen Review when I was 12 or 13. See also my blog entry on Burroughs and his Yage Letters.

I also read a lot of his letters in an earlier collection, Letters to Allen Ginsberg, edited by Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman (Full Court Press, 1982), I remember reading that in my office on Church St. in Lynchburg, Virginia—I’d set up as a freelance writer there in fall of 1982, and was greatly heartened by Bill’s depression, frenzy, and hysterically funny turns of phrase.

In October, 2006, I wrote a story, “The Imitation Game,” in which Alan Turing escapes being murdered by the British secret service on June 8, 1954, and makes his way to Tangier, disguised as his Greek boyfriend Zeno. Turing has actually grown a copy of Zeno’s face which he’s glued to his face—and he left behind a copy of his face glued to the cop-poisoned Zeno’s face so that the Pig thinks they’ve offed Turing himself. That story is supposed to come out in Interzone magazine next month, the editor meant to put it out sooner, but lost track. You can, however, hear me reading “The Imitation Game” via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

In his letters, Burroughs talks about his work in progress as being called Interzone, a phrase he probably coined because Tangier was at that time an International Zone, governed by France, Spain, Britain and Italy. This amalgam of “routines” became Naked Lunch.

By a routine, Burroughs means something like what we’d now call a rap or a rant. It’s kind of a vaudeville term. He starts talking about routines in his early 1950s novel, Queer. In a letter from June 24, 1954, he says a routine “is not completely symbolic, that is, it is subject to shlup over into ‘real’ action at any time (like cutting off finger joint [which Burroughs once did to impress a lover] and so forth).”

The routines are compressed short stories, long on affront, very in-your-face, often very funny. If you’ve read Burroughs you know what I mean. “Like snap, wow.” A phrase he uses a couple of times—a bit ironically of course—in one of his happiest and longest letters, written Oct 29, 1956, when he’s temporarily off junk and swinging with Miss Green. Even the threat of jihadist attackers amuses him. “It’s like the sight of someone about to flip or someone full of paranoid hate excites me. I want to see what will happen if they really wig. I want to crack them open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that will ooze out.” Like snap, wow.

On Nov 1, 1955, once again after kicking junk and having a few words with Miss Green: “Watching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blown back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney. It seemed to have some special significance like an object spotted in a movie. I was thinking like a book you read which also has pictures and accompanying music. Of course couldn’t approximate life itself which is seen, heard, felt, experienced on many different levels and dimensions…”

This dovetails synchronistically with the recent posts on RR vs. VR.

On Feb 18, 1955. He writes about an SF theme he hopes to weave into Naked Lunch. “…an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man, so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted by the scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences.”

Der Meister’s words hitting me like tracer bullets.

Synchronistically again, this is a theme in Hylozoic, where I write about the Peng birds siphoning off the world’s computational gnarl. I push it a little further, in that I don’t see a big distinction between the deep creativity of humans and the computationally irreducibility of matter. In Burroughs’s time, people didn’t yet realize that the physical sciences can’t in fact predict jack in terms of actual details, like which sand grain goes where in a slide.

In a letter of April 22, 1954, Burroughs mentions knowing Brian Howard, a dissipated graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, who might have known Alan Turing. Howard is in town for a cure of his (perhaps imaginary) TB. Howard in turn mentioned Burroughs in a letter, see Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, edited by MJ Lancaster, 1968, in particular this page online, from Howard’s letter to his friend John Banting, in March, 1954: “a nice, if slightly long-winded, ex-Harvard creature of forty who is endeavoring to cure himself of morphinomania by taking this new medicine which the Germans invented during the war. There are several trade names for it. He uses two. Eukodal and Heptenal.”

If I fudge the dates a bit, I can suppose that Howard was still in Tangier in mid-summer of 1954, when Alan Turing hit the town. I want to write a story about him meeting Burroughs. I think I might write it in the format of “lost” letters from Burroughs. I’ll call the story “Tangier Routines” and publish it in Flurb. Flurb will print it for sure—I sleep with the editor (me).

It could be significant for the end of my story that Burroughs’s grandfather founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, later Burroughs Corporation, which was just beginning to get into computers in the mid-1950s.

To really emulate Burroughs in the composition of “Tangiers Routines,” I need to be pasting the thing together from scraps in letters. Or scraps in blog posts.

Perhaps Alan finds a way to form himself into something like a slug. He crawls across the room and schlup, he assimilates Burroughs. Or rather merges with him. In any case, the process ends with only one eccentric forty-year-old in the room. Feeling very full, Alan/Bill went into the outhouse in back and took a seventy kilogram dump — eliminating redundant parts. Like a corporation that’s “right-sizing” after a merger. And then home to re-organize the Burroughs Corporation!

Or maybe they’ll be wearing ruffs of shelf-mushrooms on their necks. And I want a Happy Cloak routine (more on that later). If it’s routines, then I don’t have to choose. It can all come down.

Dear Allen…

This week I finished the second draft of Hylozoic and mailed it off to Tor Books.

Last night someone asked me how it feels to finish a novel you’ve been working on for about a year and a half. I said, “It’s like I was in a concentration camp, and the war ended and the guards left, and now I can just walk out.”

Into the California spring. We were up at Stanford yesterday, just for fun. Such a pretty campus.

As well as the relief, there’s a bit of post-partum depression in finishing a novel. This thing that lived inside me is gone. So what do I live for? Vacation, Ru, vacation. And don’t even think about my inevitable recidivisim into the the next camp up ahead, which woudl be volume 3 of the Postsingular series. Or a full-length non-fiction book explaining my ideas about RR vs. VR. For now I’ll just fool around with some short stories. And ride my bike. And paint a little.

Speaking of VR, Nanostuff’s comment “if you believe that people would rather go skiing on a real mountain because it has real atoms, I think you’re greatly exaggerating the number of people that really give a damn” on my recent VR posts suggests that I think it’s important to model individual atoms. That’s not exactly what I was getting at.

My point is, rather, that the richness of macroscopic form that we see in our world results from the ten tridecillion quantum computations per neighborhood underlying it. I don’t care about those low-level computations per se. What I care about is that the world should look gnarly and interesting. And what modern computer science (a la Wolfram’s New Kind of Science) tells us is that the only way to get the “simple elegance” of actual natural forms is to generate them by a honkin’ big computation underlying it. Nature doesn’t allow herself to be drastically compressed. So we do in fact need the low-level computations, not because we care about them in and of themselves. but because of what comes out of them that we want. This is not an obvious or a trivial idea which is (a) why it’s worth mentioning and (b) why some people strongly resist it—learning something new can be upsetting.

So what else do I have for you today? How about a superseded early version of my character Jayjay’s vision in Chapter One of Hylozoic.

Near the top of the beanstalk they found a castle resembling a gigantic version of Jayjay’s cabin in the woods. Resting upon the royal table beneath the sky-high ceiling was a magic harp with a girlish face and an enchanting voice, the same harp that Jayjay had used to unfurl the eighth dimension some hundred days ago. The harp’s sound box was painted with solemn naked people in a pale garden.

Sonic, who, in the mutable manner of dreams, had come to resemble a cartoon duck in a sailor suit, seized the harp. The harp screamed like an opera diva. Her voice echoed and immediately the castle floor shook from giant footfalls.

The castle’s master entered the vast, arched hall: a figure of light, far bigger than Gaia, a personification of the entire physical universe. Jayjay could discern but the smallest part of one luminous toe. The air rumbled like drunk molasses from the vast being’s voice.

“Jayjay,” he said. “I am Cosmos.”

Wow! Thanks, all, for the responses to my blog post, “Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality”, on the subject of RR (real reality) vs. VR (virtual reality).

I think that’s the most comments I’ve ever gotten on a single post, and they’re still trickling in. It’s nice to know that there I do have readers out there in RR, even if you don’t always agree with me. And it helped that BoingBoing mentioned my post.

I’m not exactly “against the singularity.” It’s rather that I’m against one particular postsingular notion, that is, the idea of grinding up Earth to make a VR Vearth. If I have any beef with the singularity it’s simply with how rapidly the public discussion of it has narrowed down to a very few ideas that are already cliches. And that’s what I’m trying to shake free from in my Postsingular series. Being a Hegelian, I like to leapfrog discussions, moving to the next idea down the line.

I’ll post some more pictures from the Pinedale, Wyoming, environs today, along with some back-atchas. I wrote this up somewhat hastily, so I apologize to those I left out, and to those whom I’ve misquoted or misinterpreted.

Jeff Saltzman : “Still, virtual realities are very real, they just have different qualities from RR– isn’t a 3D multiplayer game a virtual reality? … I think the only content with staying power will be captured reality– people you know, telepresence at sporting events or concerts or plays, the ability to have a simulated window that looks out on a real_ vista.”

Rudy: In terms of actual applications, I think “mixed reality” software is going to be very big. Things like overlays on actual scenes and live video blogs. I wrote about these “vlogs” in Mathematicians in Love.

Jeff Taylor: “In the virtual worlds that we now inhabit in games, the 3d environment is rendered only when it needs to be … with a bit of imagination isn’t it possible to make a long and dubious leap to theorizing that the universe is tracking what is being observed? And once that theory has been thrown out there, couldn’t a system that tracks observation also be rendering reality in a finite bubble around all ‘observed’ particles?”

Rudy: The solipsistic version is that the narrator is the only real character and everything is simply being brought into view as he or she (but usually its a he) looks around. Fiction dramatizes our own psychodramas. Solipsism is an immature worldview, not the view of someone who’s been around the block, loved people, fought enemies. But you’re suggesting something different, that maybe only certain points in the universe are conscious and those are the zones being decohered. My current thinking is that consciousness is universal, so that everything is being filled in.

abend : “If you can simulate a person on a computer sufficiently well that they don’t notice the difference, then you can do things like send copies of them to other planets, keep backups in case of damage, optimize their thinking to eliminate cognitive biases, eliminate the need for sleep, etc.”

ChristopherMoody:“The only difference between me in a biological substrate and me in a utility fog is that the former is limited in its capabilities and extraordinarily fragile whereas the latter is infinitely mutable and near immortal. This is a life-affirming notion not a life-hating one. I love all of the zany, unpredictable complexity of life more than anything which is why I don’t ever want it to end. Cobb Anderson seemed to understand that soul=software as well as the desirability of continuing to run that software indefinitely. …Did I completely miss the mark in your writings?”

McBob: “The life-hating bit though…personally, if my mind could stay intact, I’d like to see the stars. What’s so magical about your body that you’d lose your joy in life by changing it? The techie dream here is simple – I am me, no matter what body or form I have.”

Rudy: These responses make the point that, given that our bodies do seem doomed to decay, might it not be wise to seek out digital immortality? I’m all for immortality—at least on my good days—but there’s no particular reason to think we’ll find it in digital form. My sense is that the digital age is going to be over in another couple of hundred years. We’ll be back to analog matter biocomputations. Rather than going all around Robin Hood’s barn to put yourself into a buzzing beige box, you’ll just grow yourself a new meat body.

I’m still somewhat comfortable in saying that soul = software, but I now realize that the software goes down much deeper than I’d realized before. You need to carry over the machine code and the ROM code and the laws of physics… And, again, I think that modeling all this digitally is a dead end.

Steve H: “Erasing this world to make another one would be nuts. Making another one just like it would be cool, though. Turn Jupiter into computronium, or Mercury, and make a really hardcore Second Life.”

Rick York: “Isn’t the point of creating VR is to make it different? I love RR, but I want to bend the rules.”

Jeff: Where do you get the energy to turn conventional matter like silicon or iron into raw, unprogrammed computronium?”

Rudy: Certainly if you want to crunch up a junker world like Neptune (but what do the Neptune crystal creatures think of that?) and make a Vearth, that is less objectionable. And making a world quite different from Earth seems interesting, that’s what we do when we write novels, too.

I take objection to Stross’s notion of smashing things up to make computronium. Remember, guys, ‘computronium’ is just a word that Charlie made up. Matter doesn’t need to be optimized for computation. It’s just that we don’t yet have the I/O, the input output.

[Correction form a late-breaking comment by Andrew Doull: “Computronium” predates Stross.]

paradoctor: “My own fantasy isn’t Vearth but Earth 2.0. Keep nature, just add to it. For instance, how about giving every cell on Earth a molecule-sized computer to use? The difference between Vearth and Earth 2.0 is that on Vearth the nanocomputers own the cells, and on Earth 2.0 the cells own the nanocomputers.”

Rudy: This is exactly the idea that underlies my ending to Postsingular and the whole underlayment of my novel Hylozoic, which I’m just finishing.

someguy: “Maybe the best explanation for plank time / length and all the other quantum weirdness is that we are in a simulated universe and we are viewing the computational limits of that simulation.”

Rudy: My friend John Walker has been talking about this, too. It’s a great SF concept. This said, I don’t see our universe as a simulation inside something else. It’s a simulation that’s simulating itself. It’s the hardware and the software.

Jason Blum: “VR will very soon fly straight past rR (with a small r.) It doesn’t need to match nature – it need only match your perception of nature, which ain’t much.”

I dunno: “All you have to do is fool the entities in the Vearth … That said, the whole concept is silly to me. I don’t get why anyone would want to.”

mahalis: “I think it’s reasonable to say that …it would be possible to set up a virtual space that was real enough.”

Rich: “There are huuuuuuuuuge amounts of detail we can’t perceive that doesn’t need to be rendered, which is computational power which can be used for other things. Like laserdragons.”

Vidar Hokstad: “We can’t predict the arrangement of individual atoms in a large object. Why would a simulation even try? If someone do point an electron microscope at an object in the simulated world, the simulator can pick any random arrangement and we wouldn’t know better.”

Sam Walker: “Quantum computing, could duplicate pretty much the whole universe in something like 10^300 fully entangled qubits.”

Rudy: My whole point is to wake people up to the fact that the physical, daily world is inconceivably rich. It’s something that we forget if we look at screens all the time. And I think it’s safe to say that the rulers and merchants in our society are interested in blurring this distinction. If you’re outside looking at a cloud, you’re not spending money and you’re not thinking about what the politicians are up to.

And if you really think that there is some shortcut desktop way of simulating reality in full, I’m sorry, but you’re just factually wrong. Not that 10^300 fully entangled qubits is a desktop system! That’s, like, the universe. One remark re. quantum stuff— it may very well be that quantum mechanics is just a high-level approximation, and matter is in fact infinitely, or even transfinitely, divisible.

The notion of leaving the details up to randomness is an interesting move. But maybe they aren’t random. Wolfram sometimes claims the whole kaboodle comes out of some, like, ten-bit rule that’s run for a really large number of cycles. Here’s the number of cycles that’s the thing that won’t fit on your desk.

When people talk about a substitute being “just as good,” I think of the Who song.

You think we look pretty good together
You think my shoes are made of leather

But I’m a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I’m just back-dated, yeah

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine looking suit is really made out of sack

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
…
Substitute me for him
Substitute my coke for gin
Substitute you for my mum
At least I’ll get my washing done

OmgWtfBBqNewFag: “What happens after the singularity level event is speculation. … My favorite is that the godlike AI computer mind could reorganize all matter in the universe and that the dimension containing our universe would recognize our universe not as an ignorant blob but something like a cute puppy.”

Rudy: The universe as a whole having a mind is a nice concept. These days I’m leaning towards the notion that the universe is larger than transfinite in size, so that there truly is no final “One” thing. There’s always a higher level.

MB: “One wouldn’t have to recreate the whole Earth, but only its surface down to a certain depth (say 100km) and then use some sufficiently realistic model for the interior. The resulting savings in material would be enormous and would allow for even more than slight inefficiencies in matter usage.”

Jeff: “There’s a lot of planetary volume that we don’t need to simulate at the atomic level. Do we really need to simulate the geophysical dynamo at the earth’s core that generates the magnetic field that creates polar auroras?”

Rudy: That’s a move worth mentioning, that you can just make a Hollow Earth replica. But this only what a computer scientist would call a linear speed-up, and it’s a logarithmic speed-up that you’d need to make computing Vearth feasible.

Anton Bijgaarden: “There is no reality out there, just interpretations, perceptions, a collective hallucination tinted by emotions and interests that we agree upon only to fulfill the practical business of living. Therefore, every reality is a virtual reality, never reaching the actual thing. … “

Auer Westinson: “ We already live in a simulation. Every one of us. We already have a simulated VR presentation of the world — running on the cybernetically feedback-looped brain wetware supercomputer. I am interested in getting to the bottom of what it is we already are experiencing—not building another simulation.”

Evan : “When you consider how rich and detailed and complex the world around us is, it’s staggering to imagine how much more so the real one must be…”

Alek Traunic: “Does the human brain already have all the software needed to create a 100% believable VR?”

Rudy: These conversations are good in that they do get us to thinking about Ultimate Reality or, maybe, the Ultimate Morass of Reality Layers. I like the notion that, since we dream convincingly, our brains can simulate reality. This said, I don’t usually see very realistic things in my dreams.

outerjoin: “Don’t forget that Vearth would actually require dev, test, and staging environments to enable all phases of the testing cycle … Post-release bugs are what we refer to as the “paranormal”, and people like Jesus are no more than test user accounts with admin rights.”

Kelson:“Do you suppose that Nature might have some sort of auto-immune response should any one part of herself start tinkering too much?”

Rudy: Some great SF ideas here. I love it. I may shamelessly use one of these…

Mantissa128: “It is amazing that matter is performing computation while just sitting there, but we don’t have access to it, we have no way of making it do our bidding except by blunt force that applies to trillions of atoms. We need to get down there, have our conscious decisions exert a causative force at an atomic level.”

Sam Walker: “In the nanomachine world you describe, the advantage to replacing the blade of grass with pseudograss is that pseudograss is programmable.”

Rudy: This is a key point. As I mentioned above, I don’t think we need to go to computronium. I think matter, just as it is, does as much rich computing as we want. The catch is the I/O problem: how do we get at it? How do we hack matter?

In my novel in progress Hylozoic, the characters do it via a kind of telekinesis. They’re able to telepathically merge into an atom, say, and reprogram it. I don’t have a super-good explanation of how this works, my current one is based on some handwaving talk about unfurling the eighth dimension; I say a bit about this my Psipunk essay.

What is reality?

I’m in Pinedale, Wyoming, visiting my daughter Isabel and doing some cross-country skiing among the aspen trees. They have great patterns like eyes on them. Today’s pictures are all from Pinedale, which is a nice example of an RR “real reality” far richer than any VR “virtual reality” we’re ever going to see.

In the last couple of weeks I twice noticed people online questioning my scientific accuracy when I claim in Postsingular that it’s bogus to talk about porting humanity into a complete virtual model of Earth. So today I want to explain some of the reasoning behind my claim.

Arguments for Vearth are sometimes start by talking about an imaginary substance wittily dubbed “computronium” by one of my favorite writers, Charles Stross. In Accelerando, he says computronium is “matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing.”

Although it’s a cute idea, I think computronium is a fundamentally spurious concept, an unnecessary detour. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the maximum possible rate. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.

[The ice fishing derby on Lake Fremont in Pinedale]

In an extreme vision—which is the one I disparage in my novel Postsingular—Earth is turned into a cloud of computronium which is supposedly going to compute a virtual Earth—a “Vearth”—even better than the one we started with.

This would be like filling in wetlands to make a multiplex theater showing nature movies, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination eco-resort, or killing an elephant to whittle its teeth into religious icons of an elephant god.

[Alley near the Teton Court Motel]

Ultrageek advocates of the Vearth scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that’s a perfect match for the old Earth.

As I’ll explain below, this is factually incorrect. Before getting into that, I might also ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There’s something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It’s a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old “work now, get rewarded in heaven” routine.

[Game heads on display in Ridley’s Grocery (formerly Faler’s)]

Anyway, let’s get back to my main point, which is that VR isn’t ever going to replace RR (real reality). We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that computer science provides strong evicence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

[Girl holding a fish as if it were a stuffed animal]

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts.

For details see The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, or Stephen Wolfram’s revolutionary tome, A New Kind of Science—note that Wolfram prefers to use the phrase “computational irreducibility” instead of “natural unpredictability”.

[On a ridge above Fremont Lake on a climb led by Sherpa Iz-teng]

Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that’s smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments.

[A lo-resolution lodging near Pinedale]

But wait, answer the true-believer ultrageeks, if you do smash the whole planet into computronium, you have potentially as much memory and processing power as the intact planet possessed. It’s the same amount of mass, after all. So then we could make a fully realistic world-simulating Vearth with no compromises, right?

Wrong. Perhaps you can get the hardware in place, but there’s the vexing issue of software. Something important goes missing when you smash Earth into dust: you lose the information and the embodied software that was embedded in the world’s behaviors. An Earth-amount of matter with no high-level programs running on it is like a powerful new computer with no programs on the hard drive.

[Non-bit-mapped wood grain]

Ah, says the VR true believer, what if the nanomachines first copy all the patterns and behaviors embedded in Earth’s biosphere and geology? What if they copy the forms and processes in every blade of grass, in every bacterium, in every pebble, and so on?

But, come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

Just as she is, Nature embodies superhuman intelligence. She’s not some piece of crap to tear apart and use up.

***

By the way, I have written a full-length essay expanding on some of these topics; it’s called “The Great Awakening,” and you can read it free online. It appeared in Asimov’s SF magazine in August, 2008, and in the anthology Year Million, edited by Damien Broderick, from Atlas Books in August, 2008.

For my answers to the many comments on this post, see my next blog post.