On Tuesday, Jan 23, 2007, I went for a big hike in the woods at Big Basin State Park, which is an hour-and-a-quarter’s drive from my house. I’d planned to walk up the so-called King Trail to the Mt. McAbee overlook, but I missed a turn or something and stemmed off into a smaller trail that dead-ended on an old logging road with trees across it blocking the way. I picked my way around the trees and kept going. At first I thought I was still on the right trail and that it was just poorly maintained. And then I realized I wasn’t on a trail at all, but I figured that as long as I headed uphill, I’d reach the top of Mt. McAbee all the same.

I was enjoying being in the wilderness, thinking about all the silp minds in the trees and leaves and air, and especially the genii loci or spirits of place that inhabit certain spots.

I’d been thinking of spirits of place from reading up on Papua New Guinea spirit boards, in which the natives hope to house some local spirits of place. Kind of like bird houses. As chance would have it, the other day I saw a documentary TV show about a tribe in a jungle, and it was raining too much, and an elder man said the rain was because the spirit of the sacred bend in the river was angry because people were disturbing him, and then we see the kids playing there and they say, “We like playing in the sacred bend of the river!” It was refreshing to see how children are just as ready to ignore elders’ injunctions when the tribe shares an animistic religion as when they’re kids in a Christian society. Somehow when we read about other society’s religions, we imagine every single one of “them” takes their religion very seriously and robotically—but in any society there are jokey, agnostic, practical-minded people who view religion as just another input in the mix.

Anyway, I’m walking along, and suddenly the spirits start harshing on me. I encounter a stand of tough-to-get-through manzanita, with branches like stern claws. I fight my way through, expecting to find a saddle ridge leading up to my targeted peak, but damn, there’s this really deep gorge here with a kind of scary slope to it.

Studying my map—finally really seeing it—I come to understand that the correct trail is way over on my left, passing along the high ground at the head of the canyon. I’m on a wrong (lower) peak, and the gorge is between me and my goal. The good news is that the gorge contains a blue line, which must be stream leading down to the Skyline to the Sea trail which itself wends along the bottom of Big Basin itself. I decide to blow off Mount McAbee and clamber down the slope into the gorge, follow the stream to the Skyline to the Sea trail and take that back up the basin to the park headquarters where I parked my car.

Heading downwards, more and more mental danger signals go off. The thick humus of leaves and sticks slips beneath my feet. Most of the branches I might grab onto are dead and brittle. Up ahead are some giant boulders with fairly sheer drops on their downhill sides. I focus, planning my route, which is something I’ve always enjoyed about tramping the woods and mountains—looking ahead and picking out the safest and easiest route. I’d be doing that a lot on this outing—to the point of getting sick of doing it.

The best route seems to lead over a boulder, and as I work my way down a spirit—that is a branch—plucks off my beloved, expensive, perfected-via-many-readjustment-trips-to-the-optician bifocals and sends them skittering down the slope, who knows how far. I can’t see! I do dig out my prescription shades form my knapsack, but it’s shady and dim in the gorge, so it’s hard to see through them. I search a half hour for my lost glasses with no success.

And now I’m at the woodsy bottom of the canyon. In retrospect—and I did a lot of retrospection in the next three hours—it would have been easier to go up the canyon and find the so-called King trail that I’d lost. But, seriously underestimating the distance to the Skyline to the Sea trail, I headed downstream.

On a good day, with my glasses and with the sun shining and with a walking stick (which I’d neglected to bring) and without time pressure (I’d gotten a rather late start, so I had nightfall to worry about), I would have found this little scramble to be exhilarating. As it was, the passage was a strenuous ordeal. And the walk back up the Skyline to Sea trail was hella long. It was quite dark when I finally made it back to my car—wet, bruised, exhausted, half-blind. I wore my shades to drive home, switching on the brights whenever the other lane was clear.

But it was a useful day. Even if it wasn’t exactly fun, I got some insights. For one thing, it’s always salutary for me to be reminded that I’m not in control. And for another, while I was struggling those miles along the steep, slippery banks of that rock-and-log-choked stream, I came to revise some of my notions about silps, spirits of place, and genii loci. Previously I’d been laboring under a lazy default happy-hippie conviction that Gaia is our friend, that nature is a nurturing mother. But in the wilderness I was reminded that, in truth, nature is utterly indifferent to us. Each object is placidly doing it’s own thing. They have no feelings towards me whatsoever. And the stark disinterest can feel like hostility.

I now see that if, for the purposes of my novel, I do want to ascribe minds and personal feelings to the spirits of place, then these elemental minds are just as likely to be hostile (stealing my glasses, making me slip), as opposed to being helpful (extending a solid branch for me to grab).

So rather than having the silps smiling and dancing around and helping Jayjay and Thuy build their house in the woods—I’d been thinking of an Amish barn-raising kind of vibe—maybe it’s more that the silps will be tripping them up, breaking their fingernails and being sure that nothing fits. Maybe the silps will like hostile xenophobic neighbors jeering at immigrants who are trying to fashion an ethnic little dwelling for themselves. A brick flies through the window, wrapped with a paper saying, “No Humans Here!” In other words, I’m seeing a scene where things go wrong for Thuy and Jayjay in the woods. And that’s fine, it’s more interesting that way for the story. One of the basic tricks for story-telling is to have the characters’ plans go awry.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back there early in the morning wearing my backup glasses and find those glasses that got away. Running as fast as their little legs would carry them…

More notes towards Postsingular #2, a.k.a. After Everything Awoke.

How Telepathy Works.

As mentioned in the lazy eight note a couple of days ago, there is a singular shared point accessible from each location, as if the vanishing point of a painting were in contact with each spot in the picture plane. This universally accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity. A router.

Animals, plants and objects are telepathic too, although I still need to figure out how this feels. I’ll call the intelligent, telepathic objects “silps.”

I’ll use “teep” for an all-purpose verb to mean “doing telepathy.”

How Telepathy Feels

This is hard. Thinking about it is like trying to stare into the sun.

William Burroughs, in his February 28, 1953 yage letter, describing the upper Amazon jungle near Mocoa, Colombia. “The trees are tremendous, some of them 200 feet tall. Walking under these trees I felt a special silence, a vibrating soundless hum.” What a wonderful image for how telepathy might feel. The vibrating soundless hum.

I’ve always thought of my science fiction as an extension of Beat literature.

As I mentioned in the omnividence section yesterday, lazy eight telepathy is going to be participatory rather than voyeuristic. Think in terms of our brains having empathy circuits that let us internally emulate someone else—it’s said that autistic people are weak in these abilities.

In Saucer Wisdom (Forge Books, 1999, pp. 78-84) I describe telepathy along the following lines:

You’re looking far away, but you’re looking inside your head. People can get into endless mirror-regresses, seeing each others’ images of each other inside each others’ heads, and it can lead to feedback with an unpleasant effect. Strong emotions bring this on, too. Whipping each other up, possibly to the point of having a seizure. One way to block the regress is to focus on a specific detail. Also, to prevent the emotional feedback, you try and project a low affect. “Just go, ‘I’m all boo-hoo,’ instead of actually slobber-sobbing.”

It’s easier to understand a stranger’s telepathy if you have a context for them, that is if you absorb a lifebox model of their mind.

The telepathic fields can feel like gnarly egg-white-stiffened dreadlocks or Mohawk spikes on your head.

Lovers enjoy skirting around the white hole of telepathic feedback, bopping around the fractal edges of overamplification.

It’s more than omnividence; you’re not just seeing through someone else’s eyes, you’re picking up shades of feeling.

Blocking Telepathy.

* Intrigue. It makes it easier to create a story if we can evade certain teep contacts, as plots depend on people tricking each other or surprising each other. Could I have intrigue in a world of perfect information? Maybe—I think of a game of chess between two masters who can very well deduce what their opponent plans to exfoliate from a given move. If I had perfect information about the plans and motives of everyone in my real life, and they conversely could see all my thoughts—then some outcomes would still be unpredictable. For instance, you know that I want to write a good book, but you dan’t predict if I’ll succeed. Or think of two male rivals courting ths ame princess and they know each others plans and schemes, but they still can’t predict whom the princess will choose.

* Offensive thoughts. A blogger is almost like someone who’s broadcasting telepathically. On my real blog, I don’t express my less attractive fears, worries and dislikes. If I did, I’d seem like a hot-head, a depressive, a pig. Everyone does have certain unattractive thoughts that they know better than to vent lest they become social outcasts. But if telepathy airs everyone’s secret seething, then maybe no one person’s seething seems like a big deal?

This said, on a one-to-one basis, arguments could really escalate, I see violent feedback loops flaring up. But perhaps after a period of adjustment, people would get thicker skins? Like in some subcultures, people yell at each other a lot without necessarily getting excited. Also it could be that we’d all become more accepting, as telepathy would be hipping us to the fact that we’re really all the same on the inside. Sometimes I remember to try this in daily life, to trying for empathy with fellow humans.

* How to Block Telepathy. In PS1 I had a high-tech substance called quantum-mirror varnish to block orphidnet “telepathy”. But in PS2, no spatial barrier is possible. For the telepathy is via a higher dimension (the eighth) and it hops over any three-space barrier. So the only way to get privacy will be to use jamming or camoflague. Help I’m a rock.

I think, as with internet security, many people won’t bother to hone their jamming or cammo skills. And even those who do will have an ongoing struggle; there will be an arms-race akin to the spam vs. spam-filter co-evolution.

Entertainment After Telepathy.

* Food markets, restaurants. If we have telepathy we can really watch the chef. Maybe there’s someone with such a great sensitive palate that it’s pleasure to mind-meld with them as they chow down. You’re eating with the chef’s whole sense of the process, the preparation, and as you eat it, the chef’s eye guides you, he’s put teep-tags onto the food.

* “Sin.” Would people still get drunk and high? Sure. Imagine the havoc you could wreak getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just email or phone or conversation. You’d really need to have a filter to block this. But maybe you forget to put it up. Some will be addicted to the high of intense feedback via mutual mirrorring.

With telepathy, peeping is unlimited and free, but, again, this won’t be so much of an ocular thing. It’s more like you merge with other minds, you can’t stand back and peep. If you find a mind that really welcome you in, that might be quite sensual.

* Art. A chaotic medium—an agitated tank of immescible fluids—senses what you want to see and shows you that. Someone finds a way to record mood snapshots. So we have objects that simply project the raw experience of transcendence, sense-of-wonder, geuphoria, mindless pleasure, a vision of actual infinity, a savor of sensual beauty.

This gets close to the “teep-tags” I talked about in PS1. How will teep-tags work? How do you create an object that is a copy of a mental state? I guess you mark it out on the eighth dimension of some object that will presumably be passive enough not to go changing the marks you made.

But even rocks have memories. I think of the beautiful memoreis of a rock that’s lain in a stream bed and you look at it and savor the years of lovely currents in the water.

* Books. Telepaths have language for superficial small talk, but they more often use teeped images and emotions. They barely use the written language. Books are now like very elaborate teep tags. Writing is like being a bas-relief sculptor. Or video-blogging yourself. A beautiful state of mind is saved into the a memory network, glyph by glyph.

* Ads. Things projecting vibes of paranoia to get your attention. Or anger or lust or ecstasy: the whole palette of extreme emotions.

John Walker’s Thoughts on Telepathy:

We want to imagine a world in which telepathy has high bandwidth, but people retain their individuality and sense of self. In other worlds we want a full-on mentally networked society, but without having it turn into a group hive mind where everyone speaks of “we” instead of “I”.

In order to retain individuality in the presence of high bandwidth telepathy, you need some kind of individualized filters. For if all the input reaches everyone’s conscious level, then everyone’s thoughts are in everyone’s head and everyone is be the same, and you have a hive.

But it’s natural for us to filter. The vast majority of what goes on in the brain is below the conscious level. Even for senses like hearing and sight, most of the input is filtered at a low level, and conscious attention is directed only toward things you are trying to concentrate upon or things which your low-level mental processes identify as important threats or opportunities. (Snakes, guns, food, nudity.) The influx of telepathic info will largely be processed at a subconscious level, and we’ll only become consciously aware of, like, things we’re looking for, valid threats and unusual opportunities.

Now kick it up a notch. You’re not necessarily ignoring the subconscious telepathic input. You might, for instance, be providing information and services to others at a subconscious level, but without your conscious attention and without detracting from your own work. I can think of this in a positive light as Mental Google, or in a more sinister light as Mental Slave Computers.

(Mental Google.) You’re supplying memory data to others. In this system, information requests are distributed among a pool of telepaths without the need for conscious intervention. This is an altruistic kind of sharing—the entire knowledge of the species is on tap for each individual. Searching the collective mind isn’t as fast as getting something in your own brain, but you have access to far more information.

(Mental Slave Computers.) In this more sinister form of mind sharing, it might be that you’re unwittingly performing other beings’ computations. When your mind should be contemplating or resting or dreaming, it’s doing work. Mental tasks are distributed among the pool of telepaths; it’s like everyone is a PC hosting some processes in background. Opportunistic individuals increase their own mental powers by enlisting “background computation” in the brains of others. They claim it’s a two-way street, but it’s not.

More notes towards Postsingular #2, a.k.a. After Everything Awoke.

You can tune in on distant objects. The lazy eight link via the ubiquitous point at infinity is like the object in Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Aleph.” It’s like a crystal ball that displays whatever you want to see. Since the lazy eight link attaches to every possible location, the view is endlessly smooth and rich.

Quotes from Jorge-Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, (Viking 1998, pp. 280-285).

“An Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all points…all the places of the world are within the Aleph [which is] the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh!

“I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. … In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems: a bird that somehow is all birds; a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; an angel with four faces, facing east and west, north and south at once…Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but then the report would be polluted with literature, with falseness…

“In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive… Something of it, though, I will capture.

“I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing … was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, … [a wonderful page-long Borgesian list ensues] …, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has every truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

“I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.

“Out in the street…in the subway, all the faces seemed familiar. I feared there was nothing that had the power to surprise or astonish me anymore, I feared I would never again be without a sense of dj vu.

“Aleph … is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the little sphere of my tale would not appear to be accidental…that letter signifies the pure and unlimited godhead [and] its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher.”

I’m going to be printing some excerpts from my notes for my current novel in progress, the second in my postsingularity series, called PS2 for short with working title After Everything Awoke. Today's topic is what I call “lazy eight,” somethign I've posted about several times before. By cotinuing to jabber about it, I'm polishing my rap…

I use the portmanteau phrase “lazy eight” to speak of a change which combines: the eighth dimension, infinity as ∞, and the fact that infinity is “right here” in the eighth dimension as an ubiquitous lazy-man’s enlightenment.

(Lazy Eight 1) Unfurling.

We add an infinite extra dimension at every point. We suppose that the eighth dimension is normally curled around into a Planck-length circle, but that a superspace perturbation caused the magic harp’s Lost Chord unrolls the eighth dimension to infinite length.

There are two possible equilibria for any region of space, having to do with whether the eighth dimension is infinite or not. The eighth dimension is compactified in the neighborhood of Lobrane Earth, but is fully unwound in the vicinity of Hibrane Earth. The equilibria are like the two bottoms of a W. If nudged, a world might move from one equilibrium to the other. One equilibrium is our present mode, the other is the lazy eight mode.

The Hibrane has had lazy eight since Hieronymus Bosch’s time (say 1492 just for fun); our Lobrane achieves it at the end of PS1.

(Lazy Eight 2) Universal Infinite Memory Upgrade

The infinite expanse is accessible; you can reach any location along it in some fixed time. It’s psychically possible to overview the whole infinite expanse of the eighth dimension in a finite amount of time.

The infinite length is metricized so as to require only bounded finite access time for any location. (Ph. D. = Piled High and Deep, .) That is, a Zenonian duality makes the lazy eight point at infinity be both ∞ far away and quite close. It’s like squeezing an infinite number of meters into one vatometer via a Zenonian shrinking. You can view it dually, that is, the other end is both infinitely far away and within a Planck length away, accessible in one tick of Planck time due to the Zenonian access.

You can store info as bumps anywhere you like along the infinite expanse of eighth dimensional space. So the infinite accessible spike provides endless memory at every location, and thereby gives people endless eidetic memories and produces panpsychism.

By panpsychism, I meant that lazy eight adds an infinite amount of state to any physical system, even to an electron. Physics is no longer micro-reversible, for even if an electron is repeating it’s actions, it can “remember” that it did all this N times before. And thus everything awoke.

(Lazy Eight 3) Universal Entanglement

All the eighth-dimensional lines meet at a point at infinity, and due to the Zenonian metric this point is accessible. It’s like you took the vanishing point of a painting and made it be adjacent to every point in space. The point at infinity is ubiquitous. This accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity. A router, a switchboard, a nexus. This leads to omnividence and thence to teleportation, as well as to telepathy.