Even though this post could have been called PS2 Notes #11: Hylozoic, I got tired of putting that tag into my entry titles. I guess I could flag these novel notes via a Category tag at the end of each entry, but I find that too much trouble, too. The blog’s internal Search box takes care of categorization actually. Search for Hylozoic or PS2, and you’ll find the entries about the novel.

[Here, by way of segue, is an Art Sample from the Glorious Seventies.]

I was set off on today’s line of thought by a comment on my blog from RedSlime: “I think you need a good physics reason for limiting teleportation — suppose that, say, humans’ Higgs particle interactions are unique, with the difference caused by some quality of human mentation.”

Yes, what if the human ability to teleport is very rare among the intelligent beings of the cosmos? It would be cool if the Khan and need humanoids to drive the teleportation engines of their intergalactic spaceships. Maybe they’ve enslaved a humanoid race in another galaxy.

This puts me in mind of Robert Sheckley’s 1953 story ‘Specialist,’ from his landmark anthology, Untouched By Human Hands. In the story, humans are so-called Pushers, who can push starcraft to faster-than-light speeds. The starcraft is in fact a symbiotic organism composed of cooperating aliens: Walls, Engine, Thinker, Eye, Talker. Their Pusher has died, and they land on Earth to abduct a regular guy to help them.

He Pushed. Nothing happened.

Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate.

[Passage quoted above is from Robert Sheckley, “Specialist.” The image below is from Sheckley’s journals.]

It occurs to me today that this is a transreal description of becoming a writer! Doubt and fear is why I write. Also, of course, the jonesin’ for “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” But in any case, it’s the doubt and fear that make me need that rush so much.

Back to teleportation, yeah, it’s gotta be what the Sheck-man says. Doubt and fear. That’s what makes me write; that’s what allows humans to teleport. And hardly any other beings have our levels of doubt and fear.

Certainly it seems as if animals don’t have doubt and fear in the same way that we do. If a predator comes, an animal runs away, end of story. If cornered, a rat bares his teeth and fights. Animals don’t worry about what might happen; they don’t brood over what they did in the past; they don’t mentally agonize—or at least one can suppose that they don’t. [Maybe elephants do, though. Maybe elephants can teleport, too.]

And it’s easy to suppose that the silps that inhabit natural processes don’t have doubt and fear either. Silps don’t much care if they die. A vortex of air forms and disperses, no problem.

And for the purposes of the story, we can suppose the aliens—the Kang and Rull—are also lacking in doubt and fear. They’re like kiwis/cockroaches and manta-rays/rats. So they can’t teleport either.

I still need to cook up some physics-like explanation for why the human qualities of doubt and fear entail the ability to teleport.

As a first stab, I’m thinking that having doubt and fear involves creating really good mental models of alternate realities. And being able to create good mental models of alternate realities means the ability to imagine yourself being there rather than here. And this means that we can spread out our wave functions in ways that other beings can’t. We carry out certain delicate kinds of quantum computation.

I found a version of the kiwi-like Kang’s starship in a photo supply store, it’s a black natural-rubber dust-blower bulb called Giottos Q.ball. The tip tilts over and poof, the kiwi Kang come tumbling out.

And, dig this, the Kang have a pilot. A humanoid Pusher who allows them to teleport between the galaxies. He’s black and stocky and he wears shades. He’s modeled on the jazz hero Charlie Parker! Maybe he’ll win Thuy away from Jayjay. Maybe he plays an alien instrument that’s something like a saxophone.

I’ve been listening to Charlie Parker all day every day lately—I’m a born-again late-life convert to the Church of Bepop. I’m reading this great biography, Bird Lives, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse, New York 1973). Got this picture off a KC library site. Not much video of Bird online, most of it seems to be excerpted from an unfinished movie of him with Coleman Hawkins playing first, you gotta wait a minute for Charlie.

Also there’s a nice YouTube clip of Bird playing “Hothouse” with Dizzy Gillespie at a DownBeat awards event where Charlie only gets “Alto Sax of the Year 1951” and Diz gets “All Time Jazz Great” award, which I’m sure bugged the Bird a certain amount.

I’m not so into embedding YouTube video on the blog page as I was a couple of weeks ago, as I find the embeds really slow down the page load time.

Our granddaughter was visiting this weekend, also our two daughters, and our son and daughter-in-law. A great family time. We went to the beach a couple of times, once in SF and once in Cruz. The baby liked it a lot. “Wawa!” spells “Mama!” upside down. She was dragging some seaweed. She’s quite lively. I showed her my seashell collection every morning. Especially the cone shells!

The seaweed she was dragging is a funny kind of seaweed with little leaves just along one side of a band. Like a fancy ribbon. Hail Gaia, rich in gnarl.

Being with the family at Ocean Beach in SF, I was thinking about nature’s rhythms. The wheel of life, me on the downward swing, and the baby coming up, balancing. Our heartbeats. The cycle of a pregnancy. The breath and the heartbeat.

The rhythm of the surf. The wheel of the seasons. Spring’s just about here in CA.

The rhythms not quite repeating. All nesting together.

Isabel stood on a rock to see the anemones; a flock of seabirds flew by.

We visited the SF zoo as well, my first time there, I’d been waiting for a grandchild to take. We saw a nice flock of Magellan penguins, circling a rock, flying beneath the water. Imagine an animal that “flies” through the soil. It would have very thin wings.

We walked in the hills too. The wild cucumbers are out, springing their helical tendrils. Boing.

I’m grateful to be in this world.

I sometimes write about the “Lifebox,” this being my word for a near-future technology for recording all your experiences. Kind of like a blog with a very good search engine. There’s an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, “ A Digital Life ” in this month’s Scientific American, about Gordon Bell’s Lifebits project, see also Jim Gemmell’s CARPE page.

These notions call for a rigorous and thorough investigation via scientifictional thought experiments! As a public service—and in hopes of catching the rising wave of lifebox buzz—I’m posting “Three Stories About the Lifebox,” a PDF containing three tales of mine about the lifebox: “Soft Death” from 1986, a relevant excerpt from Saucer Wisdom of 1999, and “Terry’s Talker” from 2005.

My old kind-of friend Frank Shook was in town the other day. He materialized right out of the ether, emanating form a tree fungus. I have a lot about my adventures with him in my “novel” Saucer Wisdom.

Frank was telling me some stuff about teleportation, which fits in with my Hylozoic novel project.

Constraints on Teleportation

In order to keep the world from getting too chaotic, and also not to make things too easy for my characters, Frank suggests constraints on teleportation: No Mass Limit, and Silps Can’t Teleport.

(Mass Limits on Teleportation) On a single teleportation hop, a single person can only move a certain limited amount of mass.

(Not “Everyone” Can Teleport) The power to teleport is limited to certain people or perhaps limited to the human race. Animals, plants, and objects can’t teleport.

Mass Limits on Teleportation

Suppose that on a given hop, a person can only carry along about as much mass as would fit in a suitcase—say twenty kilograms. In PS1, the heaviest things that people teleported were the magic harp and a battlefield backpack-style atomic bomb.

But suppose that a group of people working together can teleport larger things. So if you have a two thousand kilogram pre-fab home to transport, you might need to get a dozen or more people to pitch in.

Make it thirteen, like the Last Supper. One of them flubs—the Judas. And the front porch is lost in the subdimensions. n.

[This week my dear old friend Gregory Gibson visited as well. He’s a dab hand author himself, as well as being an antiquarian maritime book-dealer. He was in town for a book fair under the aegis of his firm Ten Pound Island Books. Greg helped me discover the writing style I call Transrealism; in 1969 this sage suggested, “Suppose you were to write about your real life as if it were science fiction.”]

Not “Everyone” Can Teleport

Can objects teleport? What a mess that would be… I have enough trouble keeping track of my wallet, keys, and glasses without them sunnybucks teleporting themselves. Teleportation for objects seems risky. Think of fire, and of how joyfully the flames hop from branch to branch—wouldn’t fire want to teleport itself from tree to tree? This would be a disaster; the whole planet would go up in the spreading inferno.

How to justify the lack of teleportation by the silps? I’d like a fairly firm reason.

Disinclination. Through the eons, objects have been immobile or, at best, passively mobile—why would they want any kind of new-fangled travel now? Maybe they don’t have desires. Maybe that part is lacking. Maybe, if you don’t reproduce, that whole part of you is eliminated. So then they’d simply be too mellow to teleport. Imbued with Buddhist non-attachment. But I’d like an explanation that’s firmer and more science-like.

Interdiction. Maybe the planetary mind Gaia won’t let objects teleport because if they did it would mess up her ecosystems. That’s a little arbitrary.

Mental Structure. Silp minds differ in essential respects from human minds. Compared to a silp, a human’s methods for producing thoughts is weirdly complex and roundabout. They think via a direct quantum computation with lazy eight memory, we do it via our neurons. Perhaps silps are inherently literal minded and can’t cohere themselves into two alternate views?

But keep in mind that, I’d also prefer than plants and animals don’t teleport. Otherwise the rats and ants would eat everything or—if the vermin use third-party teleportation—all our food would always disappear down into the rat warrens and the ants hives. So let’s suppose there’s something unique about a human-style mind that permits teleportation. The painfully evolved ability to be ambiguous and unsure and self-doubting.

If Objects Teleport…

It could be that, later on, maybe bit by bit, the objects do learn to teleport . Maybe that’s a bad side-effect of the Kang parasitizing our silps’ computations, or of the Rull trying to slime us. The objects get restless and bored—or frightened—and wander around. “Where’s my chair?” “He got bored. Went for a jaunt to Alaska.” “He got scared. He’s at the bottom of the ocean.”

But the Kang or the Rull will, as I mentioned before, mess this up.

Social effects of Teleportation

People can live anywhere they can find a vacant lot to build on.

You could be stealing stuff all the time; not only can you see it via omnividence, you can hop there, grab it and carry it home.

If people can reach out and move objects by teleportation, then no woman’s jewelry is safe. Or your food, guns, sculptures, paintings, furniture, and so on. Criminal gangs like the Beagle Boys could work in concert to whisk away cars or even houses. Does property no longer matter then?

Suppose I wake up and my shoes are gone. A passerby has nicked them, and taken them home. The up side is that I can always locate my stolen shoos and teleport them back home. An ownership revision war.

Another possibility is that I can tell the silp inside a valued object to make itself and the object telepathically invisible by pinching off its connection to the point at infinity router in the eighth dimension. But silps might not like to do this. It’s lonely to be cut off.

My son Rudy is working on his cool picture sharing site www.monkeyview.net . Free!

Rudy can make computers do anything he wants them to — including splitting reality into an endless binary tree.

This weekend I saw R. U. Sirius and he interviewed me for a podcast on his MondoGlobo site.

I always enjoying hanging out with him. He’s slightly worried these days, he thinks he may have wandered into a parallel universe, further down the binary tree than the node where he was born. But I’m still shadowing him.

Click on the icon above to access my podcast.
Great sound quality on this one; thanks to Jeff the engineer.