On March 30, 2024, I spoke at an event sponsored by City Lights books, in honor of Terry Bisson.  Here’s my three-frame pan of the crowd in front of me.

And here’s a version of what I said.

Terry Bisson 1942-2024
Memorial event at the Lost Church in SF

I met Terry in 1984.  We felt an immediate rapport. We’re beatnik science fiction writers from Kentucky. We grew up wanting to be Beat authors, and to some extent we did that.

I’m from Louisville, Terry from Owensboro, which is the third largest city in Kentucky, as Terry would testily remind me, annoyed that I was unsure.  Louisville was, after all, the  big city.

Terry retained his Kentucky accent. His rasp and drawl gave our chats a pleasant, down-home tang. I always felt safe and comfortable with him. He was like a brother.

Re. growing up in the provinces, Terry has a wonderful, telling passage in his marvellous autobiographical novel, Any Day Now. His character has walked out past the end of a street in his small town..

“He kept his eyes on the ground until he was far out in the field. Then he looked up. There was the Universe. It was all stars. He lit a Kent and watched the smoke drift up into the Universe. Nobody in Owensboro even knew it was there.”

Terry is  perhaps better known for his stories than for his novels. He once made in interesting comparison. “Writing a story is like fixing a car. You work on it for a couple of week and you’re done. Writing a novel is like being a farmer. You’re out in the field for  years.”

My favorite of Terry’s SF novels is Pirates of the Universe. A work of genius, with the furthest-out SF I’ve ever seen. And it has a transreal quality, that is, it’s SF is grounded in the details of the author’s life; the hero is from somewhere like Kentucky

I started seeing more of Terry after 2002, when he moved to the Oakland hills with his partner  Judy Jensen who is, among other things, an extreme quilter. At some point my Sylvia got into the craft, and that made another thing the four of us had in common.

We  relished our get-togethers. Most years Terry would organize an Oscar-watching party, as befitted his self-anointed status as the world’s greatest film critic.

Terry was a man of letters. He edited scores of short books in the PM Press Outspoken Authors series, each including an incisive interview by him. And he was the convivial emcee of the monthly SF in SF readings organized by Rina and Jacob Weisman.

Terry was at all times knowledgeable, worldly, witty, good-humored, and radical. His wide-ranging autobio, Any Day Now, reflects his and Judy’s life in a commune. And his revelatory alternate-history novel Fire on the Mountain is about a world where, the Blacks of the US stage a successful revolution and secession.

SF writing can be a collaborative affair, and I had the pleasure of writing a fun story with Terry, “Where the Lost Things Are.” It’s about about two old men and their wives. It’s inspired by the following phenomenon: when you drop a pill on a tiled bathroom floor, the pill instantly disappears forever.

As another joint effort, I published Terry’s Billy’s Book under the aegis of my very small press Transreal Books. In today’s benighted marketplace nobody else would print it—although later another edition appeared.

The Billy stories are parody children’s stories, like some wag might have published in the 1950s New Yorker. They’re  deep, simple, caustic, and punctuated by Terry’s stylistic trick of fastening on some phrase and repeating it multiple times in his narrative. Like riffs or beats. Good times.

I visited Terry and Judy a couple of weeks before he died. Though ailing, he was his same wise and congenial self. He was toying with a tool chest of wrenches, rearranging them.

His last words to me?

“See you on the other side.”

 

The man was a hero.

Over the years I’ve written two non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, edited a book of C. H. Hinton’s writings on the fourth dimension, published a novel set in the fourth dimension, and worked the concept into a number of my other novels and short stories.

Shortly before Christmas, 2023, Jeff Carreira interviewed me about my thoughts on 4D for his ezine The Artist of Possibility, where it appeared in March, 2024, with the title “The Reality of the Fourth Dimension.” At one point Jeff contemplated a subtitle of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”

So here’s the interview, along with some related illos. Two of the illos, from Spaceland, are by Taral Wayne.

JEFF: Can you give us an introductory explanation of what the fourth dimension is and then tell us why you have devoted so much of your time to exploring and elucidating the idea?

RUDY: I first heard about “the fourth dimension” in science fiction stories, and I thought it sounded cool. I remember an anthology that had a 1929 story by Miles J. Breuer called “The Captured Cross-Section.” A four dimensional being’s body intersects with our 3D space, and the people in the story see a shifting, flailing ball of meat, with maybe a tooth or a claw on it…and they drive a long crowbar through the meat, and anchor the ends in concrete and supposedly that keeps the 4D creature from getting away, although why would you want it to stick around?

Right away I knew the fourth dimension was cool, and I wanted to know a lot about it.  By the way, as a boy, the other big mathematical topic I wanted to know about was infinity. And somehow my life worked out so that I published books about the fourth dimension and about infinity. I’ve been lucky; my dreams came true.

So what is the fourth dimension? The first thing to understand is that “fourth dimension” can be used in various ways. People often say that time is the fourth dimension and leave it at that.

But I want to talk about a mathematical, geometric fourth dimension. A point is 0D, a line is 1D, a flat square is 2D, a cube is 3D. So what about aa 4D hypercube?  Well, it’s sort of like two cubes connected at the corners—maybe you’ve seen an image like that, and it’s often called a tesseract. But the slanting lines between the corners shouldn’t really be in our space. How do we imagine a direction that’s not in our space?

The traditional method is to reason by analogy. You think about a 2D being who lives in a plane, and wonder how this being could imagine the third dimension. We get this approach from Edwin Abbott Abbottt, who wrote a wonderful 1884 tale called Flatland, featuring a character called A Square.

(Just in passing, isn’t it great that Abbott has the same middle and last name?  And two T’s in each of those. Like the two cubes we’re trying to connect to make a hypercube. And note that his publication date’s digits are kind of like that too. Two 8’s and 8 is two times 4. Mathematicians notice things like this. Numbers speak to us..)

A Square slides around in Flatland, and he can’t imagine the third dimension because it’s a direction completely different from any direction he can point to or move in. And that’s we’re at relative to the fourth dimension. We can’t move in that direction, but even so it exists.

I’m not going to give a full recap of Flatland here, but you ought to read it.

JEFF: Tell us about your own books on the fourth dimension.

RUDY: The first book I ever wrote was Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension, in 1976. I was  a long-haired thirty-year-old math prof at a small college in upstate New York, bascially a hippie with a wife and three kids, and about to get fired for not being square.

Dover Books paid me a thousand dollars for the book, and I think by now they’ve sold three hundred thousand copies. They’re a little embarrassed about it, but not embarrassed enough to pay me more money. I love them anyway. They gave me my start.

Oddly enough, this first effort of mine was the most successful book I ever wrote, with about forty more books to come—science books and science fiction novels. And I wrote another 4D science book, The Fourth Dimension.

If you’re curious, you can can read all of my science books for free online. The links for the books are here:

https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/rudy-rucker-free-books/

Why would I post my books for free online instead of making people buy them?  Two reasons. Primarily, I think the information in these books is important, even life-changing, and I want people to read it. I want to infect their minds. Secondly, if I give books away, it builds my brand. Name recognition is an author’s lifeblood.

JEFF: And how about the fourth dimension in physics?

RUDY: In the special theory of relativity we speak of time as a fourth dimension. In general relativity, we explain gravity by saying that 4D spacetime is curved in still higher dimensions.  Cosmologists suggest that the space of our universe as might be curved into a 4D hypersphere. Or that possibly it’s “negatively curved” like a saddle, and it’s infinite.

The popular notion of a multiverse speaks of alternate parallel universes stacked in a higher dimension. Particle physicists suggest that our space might have a slight 4D hyperthickness. And string theorists talk about using ten or eleven dimensions—although they pretty much waste all those nice dimensions by curling them into tiny loops. Vermin dimensions, as my SF friend Bruce Sterling calls them.

As a mathematician, I have limited sympathy with the speculations of physicists. I almost want to say that they’re bullshitters who make it up as they go along.

But, oops, that’s what science-fiction writers do! Pile on the bullshit and keep a straight face. But we don’t claim that what we say is really true!

Re. modern physics, it’s less than two centuries old. And compared the the universe, we’re like tiny protozoa in a puddle. How likely is it that   our physicists have the final answers?

My sense is that you’re  more likely to find the truth if you look into your own mind. You don’t need any special equipment for that. Ultimate reality is right there in your head. But for some reason we tend not to pay attention.

JEFF:  I find the fourth dimension a valuable way to understand my spiritual experience. Can you talk about that?

RUDY: Yes, higher reality has higher dimensional aspects.

We can go all the way back to Plato’s allegory of the cave. He speaks of a group of people in cave, watching shadows move on the cave’s rear wall, and never realizing that the true reality is the world of objects behind them.  The great P. D. Ouspensky wrote about this.

Sadly, Plato’s cave people resemble what we’re turning into, all of us staring at our phones, even as we walk around outside. Portable caves!

Despite what I said in the last answer, I do in fact admire physics. It’s very useful to imagine the world as a 4D spacetime pattern. Philosophers of science call this the “block universe” model.  The past isn’t gone, it’s “underneath” us. And this is a weak form of immortality.

“We’ll always have Paris.”

My beloved wife Sylvia died in January, 2023, and immortality is much on my mind. And it is indeed soothing to look back on the shape and the particulars of the life we had together. Not only does she live on in my heart and in my mind—she lives on in spacetime.

But I’m lonely, and I want something more than a pattern in spacetime. Among nineteenth century spiritualists it was common to say that ghosts live in the fourth dimension.  It’s convenient.  They can hover just above you, up in the fourth dimension, and suddenly dip down into your zone. I wrote a section about the history of this idea in my book The Fourth Dimension.

I like going to the bluffs in Santa Cruz, and watching pelicans fish. They glide along over the wrinkled surface of the sea and then, spotting something, they rise up, and then plummet down, beak first, grabbing a fish. For a fish in the sea, the surface looks like a mirror.  What a shock to have a pterodactyl-like beak come spearing in.

Not always such a good thing to have a ghost pop into the room! This brings us back to Miles Breuer’s “Captured Cross-Section” a little bit.

JEFF: Do you think our physical bodies might have a 4D hyperthickness?

RUDY: In Flatland, the hero A Square travels up out of his 2D Flatland, and he moves around in 3D space.

In 2002 I wrote a 4D version of Abbott’s story: a  novel called Spaceland. My book is about a Silicon Valley middle manager who travels into the fourth dimension and meets the beings there. At the end he finds a way to create wireless antennas that project out into 4D space so that their signals aren’t hampered by buildings. (Kind of a  joke ending.)

A point I get into in Spaceland is that if you were in fact able to go up into 4D space, your body would need to have a hyperthickness to it, and some hyperskin, otherwise your guts would fall out on the open sides.

Note also that our universe would divide hyperspace in half, like a plane bisection 3D space. You can go all traditional and say “heaven” is on one side and “hell” on the other.

I had fun writing this book; things really came together, and I did some good thought experiments. It was especially challenging to imagine what a 4D eye would see.

Not that I seriously think Spaceland is true. I don’t see there being a bunch of 4D ghosts or guardian angels or evil spirits  hovering around our space. This is of course a popular convention in horror stories, but I feel reality isn’t so heavy handed and obvious. Horror is corny. Nature is subtle, graceful, and warm.

But if we don’t have 4D ghosts, is there any hope of immortality? How about this: the ghost of a lost loved one is literally living in your heart and mind. And this isn’t meant as a platitude. The ghost is a living pattern that’s in your system. It’s like a thought, or a memory, or a dream, or an emulation—and it’s not under your control. An autonomous entity who, if you’re lucky, loves you. And if you’re unlucky, they don’t.

And here we face the old dichotomy of guardian angel vs. mean devil.  Human traditions tell us that you want to be on good terms with your ghosts. Your ancestors, your lovers, your friends. All those who live within you. Honor them. Make offerings to them. And if you’re hosting a demon, boot it out. Or starve it with lack of attention.

JEFF: Can you talk about how this relates to spirituality and mystical states?

RUDY: So many possibilities. I’m intoxicated by my word hoard. Having fun. Thanks for asking all these good questions!

For me, the key spiritual or mystical thing is to view the world as a cosmic unity, and to be in touch with this. Looked at in a certain way, each part of the world is alive and conscious, and we join in a beautiful dance, parts of the cosmic One.

Not that, of course, it has to be called the One. It can just as well call it  the Many. Two sides of the same coin. You know the saying: a great truth’s opposite is also a great truth.

In either case, One or Many, I want to move beyond my weary frame, discarding my fears and my remorse—and finding peace.

I sometimes think of the universal mind as a higher-dimensional mollusc that pokes out little tendrils, like a snail’s horns. The horns are the people. And each horn has an eye, looking at the others.

“Hi, it’s me.”

God seeing god.

JEFF: What would it mean for us to expand our thinking to higher dimensions?

RUDY: When I want to go fully ape with higher dimensions, I talk about Hilbert space, a mathematical construct invented by David Hilbert. Hilbert space has infinitely many dimensions.

It’s a little like the inside of your mind. You don’t really think in terms of a mere three or four dimensions. You see layers, patches, and blobs—blending and differentiating like paints on a palette.

Recently I was thinking a lot about the Hilbert-space mind model, trying to bring it to life for some scenes in my novel, Juicy Ghosts. As always when I’m writing one of my SF novels, I know it’s a surreal fantasy, invented almost at random.  But while I’m writing it, I pretend that it’s true—and see what happens. I put myself into a world and I see what happens. It’s a type of thought experiment. Or, as the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger put it, “ein philosophie des als ob” that is, “a philosophy of as if.”

Certainly our minds are more like Hilbert space fractals than they are like feeds from surveillance cameras. And, while in iconoclastic mode, let me point out that we don’t really really think logically. We don’t actually sit around deducing things.

Thought is all about feelings. A process of free association. A stream of consciousness. “What does this remind me of?”

The latest AI flavor-of-the-month is ChatGPT, a type of “large language model.” It’s a way of emulating our process of free association, and it does this so well that the outputs seem almost human.

Bringing the topic of dimensions back in, these large language models have billions or even trillions of parameters. And, if you like, you can think of each parameter as an axis in a multidimensional space.

With so many axes, you’re more or less in Hilbert space. So looking for a good set of parameters is a bit like roaming around in Hilbert space, looking for a sweet spot. A nice hilltop for a picnic.

Changing gears, the weirdest, most incomprehensible theory of the world is quantum mechanics. And a full quantum mechanical model is a shifting pattern in—where else but Hilbert space?

4D is for lightweights, dude. Hilbert space is where it’s at. Glowing brain goo.

Are you high yet?  That’s what a rap like this is for.

In this context, I might as well mention that I’ve been clean and sober since age fifty. That’s twenty-seven years.

We don’t have to get high. We are high.  All you have to do is notice.

We’re patterns in Hilbert space, and nothing matters.

JEFF: Okay, that sounds nice, and I’m enjoying the flow,  but can I be so bold as to say I don’t know what you’re talking about? What exactly do you mean by saying my mind is a pattern in Hilbert space?

RUDY: Thanks for asking. That helps me. As I keep hinting, I’m making this up as I go along. I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t know where it’s going. But this is how I work. This is how I get my ideas. I write or say something, and then think about the new rap for a few days, pushing it further. And maybe then something falls into place.

So ever since yesterday, when I wrote that last answer, I’ve been focusing on my stream of consciousness and trying to see what it is.

I see something like a mass of macaroni with a central region lit up. Or a hollowed-out zone with a bunch of passages leading off of it, and maybe I’m looking into a number of the passages at once. Shining my attention into them, and each passage leads to as-yet-unformed further branches.

Right now I’m writing this, and each word and phrase sets off associational thoughts. Maybe it’s not really like branching paths after all. Maybe it’s more like being in a crowd with companions pressing up against me and accompanying me for a little while..

The forks, or the temporary companions, or the “next thoughts”—they’re like the phrases produced by a Rudy-tuned large-language-model ChatGPT process. Outputs of Rudy’s Lifebox, draw up from my memory hoard, selected on the basis of closeness to where I’m momentarily at.

Many of them are dim and cringing, like uninvited guests, unsure if they’re welcome, and not fully brought into the light. But even so they’re present, at least in my peripheral vision, and I love them them, as they’re part of my life and mind, but even so I wat to get on with the coherent stream I’m hoping to craft.  Hoping to wind up this phenomenological investigation that I’m laying down.

And, um, you asked how this relates to Hilbert space?

Okay, got it.

Each possible line of thought is a alternative direction for the flow of my stream of consciousness. And it’s convenient to say that taking a different direction is like moving along a different dimension. Going off o a fresh tangent.

And there are so many possible dimensions of thought that we might informally speak of them as infinite various. And this means we’re in Hilbert space, baby.

So here I am, in the lambent laptop glow of my thoughts, relaxing into my performance space.

And maybe it’s not so much that I’m going anywhere. Maybe I’m not worming through the macaroni, or pushing my forward. It’s more like I’m a gentle mosh pit, and the endless shades are dancing with me.

JEFF: This is getting pretty trippy. I’m intrigued by the title of one your novels, The Big Aha. What’s that one about?

RUDY: When I wrote this one I was thinking about the Sixties, and about Tim Leary in Millbrook and William J. Craddock in San Jose. These guys were taking acid nearly every day. And I was was wondering, “What if there was some SF way to make this work?”

Note that I’m not an acidhead. I really only took it once. But I saw the White Light, and that was enough. I remember it very well. The White Light talked to me. It said, “I love you, Rudy. I’ll always be here.”

In The Big Aha I didn’t want to use garden-variety psychedelics, as that carries so much baggage with it. I mean, face it, psychedelics didn’t really work out as well as the pioneers had hoped! Certainly there were lots of good trips—but we’ve also seen sadness, strife, and greed.

Mystical illumination is still the dream. So I wanted my characters to get high on…something that wasn’t a familiar a drug.. I came up with some telepathy-inducing quantum wetware. Philosophie als ob! And the book was pretty cool.

But, in the end, I felt like people maybe dismissed it as a drug book anyway. Some critics tend to be suspicious of me. Like I’m trying to get away with something. I’m not square enough.

I guess the problem is that mystics tend to sound like stoners.  Even when we’re not.

JEFF: In addition to being a writer, you had a career as a professor of mathematics and computer science and have written about what you call gnarl. What is gnarl and what did your exposure to it teach you about life?

RUDY: Surfers say a wave is gnarly if it’s very richly patterned and intense. Foods or situations can also be gnarly. “Gnarly, dude.”

Originally a gnarl is the part of a redwood or an oak tree at the base or at a knot, where the wood is all warped and twisted around, and if you polish a piece of that, you see these really intricate curves and folds.

In 1974 I got my Ph.D. in the mathematics of infinity, and that was pretty gnarly for sure. The proofs were insanely complex. I wrote about what that’s like in my novel Mathematicians in Love. The best analogy I could find for math proofs was Dr. Seuss drawings.

When my family and I moved out to San Jose in 1986, I switched from teaching math to teaching computer science at SJSU. All my life I needed a day job as a professor. Sylvia had a good teaching job, but I never made enough money from my books to pay my share with that.

I really liked doing computer science. I liked the experimental aspect of it. Thought experiments! My thing was generating gnarly graphics from relatively simple mathematical formulae. Fractals are a well-known example of this, particularly the celebrated Mandelbrot Set. And I discovered a multi-dimensional Mandelbrot Set that I looked at a lot. I called it the Rudy Set. If you Google it you can find it.

Seek the Gnarl.

As it happens, that personal slogan of mine is engraved with my name on the granite headstone that stands by Sylvia’s grave. Sylvia’s name above, my name below. I’ll join her in a few years. Her slogan is Carpe Diem. Means “Seize the Day,”

Chaotic processes are another source of mathematical gnarl. You take what seems to be some simple rules for how a dot on the screen will move, and they get into never-repeating oscillations and layers of intricate patterns. Flocking algorithms and cellular automata are rich sources of computer gnarl as well.

But never mind the computers. Over time I’ve learned to see gnarl all around me. Right there in nature. Particularly in clouds, the wobbling of leaves in a breeze, and above all the ocean.

If you don’t pay attention, the ocean might always seem to look the same. But, no, it’s a gnarly chaotic process. The details are always different. You could watch waves hitting a rock for a hundred thousand years, and it would never be exactly the same.

Before fractals and chaos theory, people didn’t used to grasp that gnarl is good. It’s not a flaw, or an error, or a defect. It’s what there is. Chaos is health. Life is gnarl.

JEFF: You write fiction in a style you call transrealism. What do you mean by this, and how do you see your fiction as a vehicle for expanding consciousness into four dimensional thinking?

RUDY: I feel that SF needs to have realistic human chracters to be fully engaging. So I very often base my characters on myself, my family, my friends, or even people that I know only casually. That’s a thing that the Beat authors used to to.

If you want to bring dimensions into it, you might say that my transreal stories are an overlay on reality, slightly displaced into the fourth dimension.

But there’s  more to it then that. In a deeper sense, transreal writing can mean more that connecting characters to actual people. My transreal practice applies also to a story’s themes, scenes, actions, phrases, and even words. That is, I’m writing with my full attention, then every part of my tale connects to essential parts of my life.

A raygun might look like a water pistol I had. An ambush might be a reworking of a trick someone played on me. A spoken phrase might come from something I heard on the street, or in a conversation. A made-up futuristic word might be a combination of several words or phrases that are significant to me.

Many writers do things like this, but I’m putting a special emphasis to the practice by calling it transrealism. We’re talking writing that is utterly original, and is taken from your experience. No second-hand dreams wanted.

Nonfiction can be transreal as well. Indeed my answers to the questions in this interview are transreal in that, by writing this material, I’m trying to find out who I am, and what I think, and what I might think next. My method is to throw more and more of my experience into the brew.

JEFF: You’ve lived a fascinating life exploring some of the most progressive edges of thought, can you tell us about some of the people who have most influenced your own thinking?

RUDY: Try Kurt Gödel, Martin Gardner, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Sheckley, Dennis Poague, Ivan Stang, Bruce Sterrling, William Gibson,  Benoit Mandelbrot, John Walker, Stephen Wolfram, Ken Goffman, Diana Vaughan, Eileen Gunn, Faustin Bray, Sylvia Rucker, Terence McKenna, and Tim Leary.

But I don’t have time to excavate the details. You can read about some of these characeers in my Collected Essays. And others in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. And still others in my autobiography Nested Scrolls.

Or try the online search-engine model of me that I call Rudy’s Lifebox. See https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/rudys-lifebox/

Seek and ye shall find.

Thanks for interviewing me, Jeff!

And stay high.

This describes an experiment with with ChatGPT that I made on Jan 17, 2024. I mention “skinks” a lot, so just below, you’ll see a painting of with a bunch of skinks; they’re the guys in the center. I’m writing about a couple named Oliver and Carol, and about their adventures with two skinks named Jenna and Kanka. The skinks who have unexpectedly appeared in San Francisco just a few years from now.

Skink painting entitled “Farmer’s Market.” 

Anyway, I’ve been getting curious about ChatGPT, so I finally went online and gave ChaGPT 4.0 a try. I was urged on by two of my fellow Computer Science professors from my years at San Jose State: Jon Pearce and Michael Beeson. I took about five hundred words of my novel in progress, and fed the chunk to ChatGPT.

Dr. Pearce advises Dr. Rucker in the Red Room, of Santa Cruz.

A ChatGPT “prompt” can in fact be quite long. So you really can use a chunk of your writing. The passage, which I show, below describes a scene where my characters Oliver and Carol are running away from the SFMOMA museum after these skink friends of theirs have eaten a whole bunch of Andy Warhol paintings.

With painter friend Paul Mavrides, admiring the Warhols.

I’m not yet sure what the title of the novel will be, or if I’ll even finish it. After the the end of my experiment with ChatGPT today, I asked it what the title should be, and based on the passages the app had seen, it made a few suggestions, including: “Skinkland Odyssey,” “Warhol’s Whimsy,” “Skinks in the Canvas,” “Pop Realms,” “Artmover’s Dilemma,” and “Surreal Serendipity,”

Chinese edition coming out!

Not bad, although none of them is perfect, and as the novel grows, I’ll need a broader title. I wondered if I could feed in all six thousand words of the novel that I have, but ChatGPT doesn’t really like a prompt that’s more than five hundred words. When I tried feeding in all six thousand words, the app crashed, but it did display pretty cool phrase as a label for the crashed conversation. The phrase was “Skinks in Rubber Flight.” Now to me that is a good title, and it’s cool that it comes from a crash, which gives the title a meta and transreal significance.

Frankly I’d been thinking the hype over ChatGPT is a bunch of bullshit. But after this test, I’m staggered and flabbergasted by how well ChatGPT works. As Beeson put it, the method of “choose the next word based on the odds” seems, on the face of it, like a pedestrian and uninteresting approach. . But now—presumably thanks to the size of the vast neural net large language model that is in use—it’s undergone a phase transition.

And by large language model, or LLM, I mean an immense simulated neural net that was evolved by Earth’s mightiest computers. The net consists of a zillion nodes with numerical weights along the lines connecting the nodes. Nobody understands, or can understand, the meaning of the individual weights. As Kurt Gödel proved back around 1930, understanding these weights is, even in principle, impossible. But our tech titans calculated the weights by a somewhat opaque process of simulated evolution.

As a proud writer, I assumed ChatGPT could never write anything colorful or interesting. That it could only churn out bland pap akin to political speeches. But, no, the writing isn’t bad, and it’s got originality, and a bit of verve. Although still, I would say, not much humor.

For me, the crushing thing is that, when I went ahead and ran ChatGPT twice in a row, feeding it the same segment of my novel each time…it wrote two utterly distinct continuations. It could go on writing new continuations all day long.

Somehow this is very deflating. It makes the ground shift beneath my feet.

But I don’t think I’ll often use ChatGPT to help with my fiction! Too much like having a know-it-all full-of-ideas roommate who won’t shut up.

I may yet find a way to get the better of ChatGPT. Some meta parodistic SF trope. Wait till the new novel’s done. Not that, as I say, I’ll use ChatGPT to write it. For now, for sanity’s sake, I’ll return to scorning it from afar. Bitter mockery from the soon-to-be-laid-off craftsman.

You’ll find me alone with my word processor in the coffee shop or my home office or my living room couch or the town library, same as usual. What else can I do?

Daughter Isabel’s jewelry saw

Rudy’s Prompt

Extend this passage in the style of Rudy Rucker. (Note that the following is the most recent a part of the novel I’m writing, and that I pasted this right into the prompt.)

The hall is glass on one side, with a patio out there. We’ve reached a side door. Our skinks snout the doors open. It’s a nook with no exit, a dead end, but whoops we’re rising into the rainy city sky.

Up.

“Hard to hold on,” I wail and, as if understanding me, Kanka enlarges himself and tightens the gaps between his segments, forming a rubbery arc. Like a tyke’s bouncy caterpillar toy and, yes, Jenna has done the same for Carol.

We’re low above the city, not much higher than the buildings, rain pattering into our faces. We’ll need new clothes again. Assuming we make it back to the Box Farm instead of being whisked off to Skinkland or some such. No emergency helicopters in sight as yet. A plus.

The skinks are happy and fooling around, flying circles around each other, comfortably full of chewed Warhol masterpieces. What would Andy think? He wouldn’t like it. What artist would?

We’re flying side by side, slower than before, away from the buildings, right down near the water of the bay. Essentially invisible. Not especially feeling any good luck. I can see the Box Farm.

“Wait!” exclaims Carol. I’m noticing that she says that a lot. She hammers on the side of Jenna’s rubbery bod. “Stop flying. I want to talk to you two.”

“Give us nice dry clothes,” I tell the skinks. “Just switch them out. With waterproof yellow rain gear and waterproof hats.”

“Not yellow,” says Carol. “Gray. Secret mission. We’re going back to the museum.”

My clothes shift and crawl. I’m dry. And not quite cozy yet, by getting there. The rain patters on my impermeable yellow oilskins. I feel my head. The top hat is still in place. Glad for that. My personal logo. Like the villain in a superhero comic.

Carol’s got the gray gear, in a fashionable cut, and a big-brimmed waterproof high-fashion beach hat.

“Topper and Lady Gray,” I say.

“What?” goes Carol. “Never mind. The plan, Oll, the plan. We go back and replace the Warhols. The skinks can grow new ones. The old ones they ate—those are like Flybuzz prompts.”

“Hello Infinity”. I drew this while studying higher infinities for Math Ph.D. in grad school at Rutgers, around 1970.

The skinks chirp and twitter, digging on this idea. Somehow Carol understands them. I don’t. Face it, I’m full-on deaf and senile. No use even taking to me, most of the time.

“What?” I say.

ChatGPT Continuation Run One

[So now, the rest of this post is completely fiction written by frikkin’ ChatGPT. Can hardly believe this.]

“Oll, you’re hopeless,” Carol mutters, rolling her eyes at my perpetual state of confusion. “Never mind. The skinks are on board with the plan. We’ll get those Warhols back where they belong.”

The Carol character is to some extent modeled on my Sylvia.

Our skinks, now wearing their own waterproof gear, emit a series of enthusiastic chirps, indicating their readiness for this peculiar mission. As we descend towards the Box Farm, I can’t help but marvel at the rain-soaked city below, its shimmering lights diffused through the falling droplets. The landscape is a canvas of reflections, a Rudy Rucker dreamscape.

Back at the Box Farm, we find ourselves in the familiar workshop, surrounded by the comforting hum of machinery. The skinks, with a strange kind of precision, begin regurgitating Warhol-inspired artworks. It’s an odd blend of the avant-garde and reptilian creativity, a surreal manifestation of collaborative artistry.

“Now, Carol,” I say, trying to focus on the task at hand, “how do we get them back to the museum?”

She holds up a device resembling a cross between a walkie-talkie and a psychedelic kaleidoscope. “This is the Artmover 3000,” she declares. “It creates a temporal fold, allowing us to transport these artworks back to their rightful place without anyone noticing.”

I nod, pretending to understand the intricacies of temporal folds. Carol activates the device, and a shimmering portal appears before us. The skinks, now wearing tiny time-traveler goggles, gleefully carry the Warhols through the portal.

“Follow me, Oll,” Carol says, leading the way into the temporal fold. As we step through, the familiar sensation of being stretched and compressed envelops us. We emerge on the quiet outskirts of the museum, unseen and unnoticed.

Carol takes a deep breath, her eyes gleaming with a mischievous spark. “Let’s hang these Warhols back where they belong and leave the art world none the wiser.”

And so, with skinks in tow, we embark on our surreptitious art restoration mission, a quirky adventure in the rain-soaked city of dreams.

The museum, now shrouded in the quiet hum of the temporal fold, is eerily tranquil. Carol, Jenna, Kanka, and I sneak through the shadows, blending into the backdrop of exhibits. The skinks, their time-traveler goggles gleaming in the low light, carry the regurgitated Warhols with an air of reptilian pride.

“Quietly now,” Carol whispers, gesturing towards the wall adorned with the vacant frames that once held the iconic artworks. We approach the blank spaces, and with the stealth of conspirators in a cosmic caper, we hang the Warhols back in their designated spots. The skinks chirp in what seems like approval.

As we step back to admire our handiwork, a sudden flicker in the air catches my attention. The temporal fold reappears, pulsating with energy. Out steps a trio of beings that can only be described as futuristic art curators—floating entities adorned in chromatic robes, their faces obscured by holographic masks.

“We are the Aesthernauts,” one of them declares in a melodious voice that resonates with echoes of the far future. “We’ve detected a temporal disturbance in the art continuum. What manner of beings are you, meddling with the fabric of creative expression?”

Carol, undeterred, steps forward confidently. “We’re just ensuring that these Warhols find their way home. No harm done.”

The Aesthernauts exchange glances, their holographic masks displaying intricate patterns of abstract art. After a moment of silent contemplation, they nod in unison.

“Very well, art dwellers. Your intentions seem pure. We shall allow this temporal anomaly to close, but be warned—tampering with the art continuum has consequences.”

As the Aesthernauts step back into the temporal fold, it collapses behind them, leaving us in the quiet embrace of the museum. Carol turns to me, a mischievous grin on her face.

“We did it, Oll. The Warhols are back, and the Aesthernauts have granted us their surreal blessing. Another triumph for Topper and Lady Gray.”

And so, in the enigmatic halls of the museum, amidst the echoes of the temporal fold, our unlikely quartet celebrates a victory that blurs the boundaries between reality and Rudy Rucker’s whimsical imagination.

As we revel in our victorious return of the Warhols, a new twist unfolds within the museum’s surreal corridors. The Aesthernauts’ presence has left an indelible mark on the space-time fabric, causing the artwork to come alive with pulsating energy. The once-static Warhols now exhibit dynamic, animated scenes—Warholian visions that stretch the boundaries of reality.

Jenna, always the inquisitive skink, nudges one of the artworks with her snout, and to our amazement, the scene within the frame spills out into the room. We find ourselves amidst a lively, abstract dance of colors and shapes, a living manifestation of Warhol’s pop art philosophy.

“What have we stumbled upon?” I marvel, as Jenna and Kanka join the animated dance, their rubbery bodies undulating in harmony with the vibrant artwork.

Carol, with her newfound ability to understand the skinks, interprets their joyful chirps. “The Aesthernauts have bestowed upon these Warhols a touch of the fourth dimension. They are now windows into alternate realities, portals to worlds only hinted at in the mind of Andy Warhol.”

Excitement courses through us as we explore these dynamic canvases, stepping into one artwork after another. Each frame leads us to a different surreal dimension—a pixelated dreamscape, a neon-lit cyberpunk city, a psychedelic wonderland reminiscent of a cosmic carnival.

However, the Aesthernauts’ warning echoes in the air. Our meddling with the art continuum has consequences, and the boundaries between the real and the surreal begin to blur even further. Time itself becomes fluid within the animated frames, and we find ourselves navigating through Warhol-inspired realms where past, present, and future intertwine.

As we venture deeper into this kaleidoscopic adventure, the line between observer and artwork becomes increasingly blurred. The Aesthernauts’ enigmatic presence lingers, hinting at the possibility of more unpredictable encounters and mind-bending twists in our quest to navigate the ever-shifting tapestry of art and reality.

[And by the way here’s another painting with skinks, I kind of painted them by accident in I think December, 2023, and that’s how all this started. By the way, ChatGPT has the mistaken impression that my skinks are reptiles although, granted, real world skinks are a kind of lizard.]

ChatGPT Continuation Run Two

(So, okay, this is ChatGPT’s second go at extending my story. And this go is completely different!  ChatGPT doen’t bother repeating itself. It uses a fresh round of ranom choices and comes up with that’s totally different yet always internally consisten. Like I said, I’m flabbergasted. I heard the hype and I didn’t believe it.  But, my dears, it’s true.)

As we soared through the rain-soaked air on our skink steeds, the city lights blurred into a kaleidoscope below us. Carol, clad in her fashionable gray gear, clung to Jenna with a mix of fear and exhilaration. I, in my yellow oilskins, gripped Kanka tightly, my top hat somehow staying put despite the gusting winds.

“Look, Oll!” Carol shouted over the rush of the wind and rain, her voice tinged with a blend of dread and wonder. “The city… it’s like a circuit board, and we’re the rogue electrons!”

I couldn’t help but laugh, the absurdity of the situation mixing with the adrenaline pumping through my veins. The skinks, seeming to sense our mood, accelerated, zipping through the air with a playful agility. Below us, the city was a twinkling grid, indifferent to the bizarre spectacle above.

The two Rudys.

As we neared the Box Farm, our destination seemingly chosen by some unspoken agreement, Kanka and Jenna began to circle, descending in a tight spiral. The Box Farm, a cluster of container homes and artistic studios, looked like a geometric puzzle from above, its residents blissfully unaware of the aerial oddity above them.

Landing softly on a flat rooftop, the skinks unfurled their bodies, allowing us to dismount. Carol and I exchanged glances, a silent understanding passing between us. We were partners in this surreal escapade, bonded by the bizarre.

“The Warhols,” I said, breaking the silence. “We need to recreate them. But how?”

Carol looked thoughtful, her eyes reflecting the neon glow of the city. “The skinks ate them, right? So maybe, just maybe, they can… reproduce them?”

It was a wild idea, yet in a night filled with flying lizards and art-eating escapades, it seemed almost plausible. We turned to the skinks, who chirruped in response, their bodies shimmering with an otherworldly glow.

My photographer nephew, Embry Rucker III.

Jenna and Kanka began to contort, their bodies undulating in a mesmerizing dance. Slowly, images started to form on their scales – vibrant, pulsating recreations of the Warhol portraits they had consumed. Each portrait was a perfect replica, yet imbued with a strange, living essence.

Unknown random baby playing in a grill

“We need to get these back to the museum,” Carol said, awe in her voice. “But how do we explain this? How do we even begin to return them without causing a bigger scene?”

I pondered for a moment, then an idea struck me. “We don’t explain. We just replace them, silently, like art ninjas. Let the world wonder.”

Grinning, Carol nodded. “Art ninjas. I like that.”

As we began to plan our covert operation, the rain ceased, leaving the city bathed in a serene, misty glow. The skinks, now our unlikely allies in this artistic heist, seemed ready for the next phase of our adventure.

In a world where reality bent and twisted like a Salvador Dali painting, we were about to add our own surreal brushstrokes. Tonight, we weren’t just observers of art; we were its creators, its saviors, its silent guardians. And as the first light of dawn began to creep over the horizon, we set off to restore the Warhols, our hearts racing with the thrill of the unknown.

As we embarked on our mission, the city still slumbered, unaware of the peculiar drama unfolding in its midst. The skinks, with their newly adorned Warhol skins, slithered beside us, a surreal parade marching through the deserted streets. Our footsteps echoed in the empty urban canyons, each step taking us closer to our destination.

[RIP Terry Bisson 1942-2024]

The air was still thick with the aftermath of the rain, a misty haze that seemed to warp the edges of reality. Streetlights flickered, casting long, dancing shadows that played tricks on our eyes. Every sound seemed amplified, from the distant bark of a dog to the soft hiss of the skinks moving alongside us.

“Feels like we’re in a cyberpunk fairy tale,” Carol whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of our footsteps.

I nodded, feeling the weight of the moment. We were doing more than just returning stolen art; we were stitching the fabric of reality back together, repairing a tear in the mundane world caused by our extraordinary night.

As we approached the museum, the first challenge presented itself: getting inside without alerting anyone. The building loomed before us, a fortress of culture and history. But with Jenna and Kanka, we had more than just brute force on our side; we had the magic of the absurd.

Paintings by Sylvia and by me.

Jenna fluttered up to a second-story window, her body glowing softly in the pre-dawn light. With a gentle nudge, the window swung open, as if welcoming us back. We climbed through, the skinks following silently, their bodies contracting and expanding in an eerie, rhythmic dance.

Inside, the museum was a labyrinth of shadows and echoes. Our footsteps sounded sacrilegious in the hallowed halls, but we pressed on, guided by the faint memory of where the Warhols had once hung.

Reaching the gallery, we set to work. The skinks, understanding our intent, began to shed their Warhol scales, each one a perfect replica of the stolen art. We hung them with care, replacing the lost masterpieces with these bizarre, living replicas. The task was meticulous, demanding our full concentration, but as each portrait found its place, a sense of accomplishment filled the air.

Finally, as the first rays of the sun began to filter through the windows, we stepped back to admire our work. The gallery was restored, the Warhols back in their rightful place, albeit with a secret only we knew.

“Art ninjas indeed,” Carol said, a smile playing on her lips.

We slipped out of the museum as quietly as we had entered, leaving no trace of our presence. The city was waking up, oblivious to the night’s surreal events. As we walked away, the skinks beside us, I couldn’t help but feel that we had touched something beyond the ordinary, a hidden layer of the world where art and magic intertwined.

And as the city came to life around us, I knew that this adventure would forever color our perception of the world. In the ordinary, we had found the extraordinary, and in the mundane, the magical. The skinks, now part of our strange journey, slithered away, disappearing into the waking city, leaving us with memories of a night where reality was not just bent, but joyously broken and beautifully remade.

That’s all, folks!

We keep getting closer to simulating a human being by running a process in a computer. On the street, the dream is that we might get software immortality. And I predicted it forty years ago.

[Photo credit: Bart Nagel]

How does it work? You start with a large data base on what a given person was like: what they said and wrote, how they talked, and what they did. This is what I have named a lifebox. Once you have a lifebox, the task is to equip it with an interface that allows people to talk to it. And next we want the lifebox to begin generating original material. The big surprise is that large language models and wares like ChatGPT seem to be making this happen—or at least getting a step closer. So there’s a lot of buzz.

It’s not very well-known that, starting in 1980, I was one of the very first people to talk about software immortality. By virtue of hindsight, people like to imagine that these ideas were obvious or “in the air.” They weren’t. The very word “software,” was little known.

I developed my ideas in the early 1970s during discussions with no less a man than Kurt Gödel at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study—and while writing my Rutgers University Ph. D. thesis on mathematical logic. I further refined my ideas of software immortality while studying and lecturing at the Mathematics Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, on a Humboldt Foundation grant from 1978 – 1980.

I wrote my novels White Light and Software in Heidelberg. And while I was in Heidelberg I further developed my notion of a software mind in my nonfiction book Infinity and the Mind, which is still in print from the Princeton University Press.

Infinity and the Mind has some material on my conversations had with Gödel about what I was then calling robot consciousness.

The last time I spoke with Kurt Gödel was on the telephone, in March 1977. I had been studying the problem of whether machines can think, and I had become interested in the distinction between a system’s behavior and the underlying mind or consciousness, if any.

What had struck me was that if a machine could mimic all of our behavior, both internal and external, then it would seem that there is nothing left to be added. Body and brain fall under the heading of hardware. Habits, knowledge, self-image and the like can all be classed as software. All that is necessary for the resulting system to be alive is that it actually exist.

In short, I had begun to think that consciousness is really nothing more than simple existence. By way of leading up to this, I asked Gödel if he believed there is a single Mind behind all the various appearances and activities of the world.

He replied that, yes, the Mind is the thing that is structured, but that the Mind exists independently of its individual properties.

I then asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to being localized in the brains of people.

Gödel replied, “Of course. This is the basic mystic teaching.”

Deep stuff. And the point I’m making here is that the notion of software immortality was not some trite, obvious thing that anyone at all could have written about. I had to dig deep and think hard to work it out. It was new.

This said, I have to admit that the Wikipedia entry on “Mind Uploading in Fiction” mentions some earlier SF about the topic, and yes, it does mention my novel Software. But I want more! I do feel I can say I was the first to write about software immortality in a semi-realistic way that matches our current technology.

Three or four years after publishing Software, I expressly introduced the notion of a lifebox, and I’ve continued writing about this for forty years.

But as I say, I don’t  seem to get much credit in popular articles, and usually not even a mention. As fellow cyberpunk Bruce Sterling would say, that chaps my ass. 

Today’s post is designed to build up my case. I’ll include extended quotes from my writings, accompanied by comments, and as usual I’ll toss in some random images I’ve made. As I always say, at the surreal, transreal, synchro level, any image goes with any text.

My involvement with lifeboxes goes back to my Phillip K. Dick-Award novel Software, written in 1980 and published in 1982. A race of intelligent robots called boppers have evolved on the Moon. And the boppers want to confer immorality on their designer, Cobb Anderson. To achieve this, they extract the software from Cobb’s brain—by, in effect, eating it and analyzing the contents. And then they put the Cobb software in control of a robot body.

Here’s Cobb’s reaction when he comes to.

It was still sinking in. Intellectually he had always known it was possible. A robot, or a person, has two parts: hardware and software. The hardware is the actual physical material involved, and the software is the pattern in which the material is arranged. Your brain is hardware, but the information in the brain is software. The mind… memories, habits, opinions, skills… is all software. The robots had extracted Cobb’s software and put it in control of this robot body. Everything was working perfectly, according to plan. For some reason this made Cobb angry.

“Immortality, my ass,” he said, kicking the bathroom door. His foot went through it.

The thing that bothered Cobb the most was that even though he felt like he was all here, his brain was really inside a computer somewhere else. Where?

Suddenly he knew. The Mr. Frostee truck, of course. A super-cooled bopper brain was in that truck, with Cobb’s software all coded up. It could simulate Cobb Anderson to perfection, and it monitored and controlled the robot’s actions at the speed of light.

You’ll notice something odd here. Rather than having his software running on a device inside his body, Cobb’s software is running on a large supercooled computer inside a nearby ice-cream truck! This was my early 1980s substitute for having the process run on a microprocessor in Cobb’s robot body—or have the software be running in the cloud. But for the sake of a good cyberpunk tale, it was kind of cool to have a large, slightly evil ice-cream truck following Cobb around.

In my follow-up novel Wetware of 1988, also winner of a Phillip K. Dick Award, things get gnarlier. Rather than running your personality software on an old-school electronic computer, you run it on something called a Happy Cloak. (This name was, by the way, lifted from a William Burroughs novel.) A Happy Cloak is a chunk of moldy piezoplastic that acts as a big computer. So one way to achieve software immortality might be to transfer your personality onto a Happy Clock, and then let the Happy Cloak ride around on a meat clone of your old body. And in Freeware and Realware, things get still weirder. You can read all about it in the Wares.

But let’s stick to the basic idea of modeling a human personality with software. I clarified this in my 1986 story, “Soft Death,” which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I think this is the place where I coined the word lifebox. The main character in the tale, one Doug Leckesh, has signed up with a company called Soft Death—who promise him immortality. He’s in the care of a tech named Lo Park.

Photo of Bruce Sterling here just for kicks. My fellow cyberpunk from the start.

Lo took a device the size of a cigarette-pack out of her desk. It had two little grilles, for microphone and speaker. “We call this a lifebox. Basically, I want you to tell it your life story. Tell everything. It takes most people a couple of weeks.”

“But…I’m no writer.”

“Don’t worry; the lifebox has prompts built into its program. It asks questions.” She flicked a switch and the lifebox hummed. “Go on, Mr. Leckesh, say something to it.”

“I…I’m not used to talking to machines.”

“What are some of the first machines you remember, Doug?” asked the lifebox. Its voice was calm, pleasant, interested. Lo nodded encouragingly, and Leckesh answered the question.

“The TV, and my mother’s vacuum cleaner. I used to love to watch the cartoons Saturday morning—Bugs Bunny was the best—and Mom would always pick that time to vacuum. It made red and green static on the TV screen.” Leckesh stopped and looked at the box. “Can you understand me?”

“Perfectly, Doug. I want to build up a sort of network among the concepts that matter to you, so I’m going to keep asking questions about some of the things you mention. I’ll get back to the vacuum cleaner in a minute, but first tell me this: what did you like best about Bugs Bunny?”

For the next couple of weeks, Leckesh took his lifebox everywhere. He talked to it at home and in the club—and when his wife Abby and his friends reproved him for ignoring them, he began talking to it in a booth at Yung’s bar. The lifebox was the best listener Leckesh had ever had. It remembered everything he told it, and it winnowed the key concepts out of his stories. Leckesh would respond to its prompts, or simply go off on tangents of his own. He hadn’t had so much fun in years.

Lecckesh by the way is a near-anagram of Sheckley, as in Robert, my hero and mentor from age thirteen on.

I have another treatment of the “dictated lifebox” theme in my book Saucer Wisdom. This was an odd book. It was in fact a novel starring a character called Frank Shook. Supposedly Frank Shook was a frequent saucer abductee who’d arranged for a ghost writer to produce a non-fiction volume of Shook’s experiences. The name of the ghost writer character? Rudy Rucker. I told you this was an odd book!

To make things even odder, my old writer friend Gregory Gibson) shown above in full Frank Shook mode) helped me get a book deal with Wired for my Saucer Wisdom book. Wired wanted to expand from being a magazine to publishing books as well. I took Greg to a meeting with the Wired editors and convinced them that Greg really was the saucer abductee Frank Shook, and that my book was in fact non-fiction and not a novel at all. Good times.

If you read the book, you’ll figure it all out… It has several useful prefaces and introductions, two of them by Bruce Sterling.

In any case Saucer Wisdom has a very clear discussion of the lifebox notion.

The aliens show Frank Shook a mid-twenty-first-century commercial for something called a lifebox. The slogan is Remember Me. The lifebox is a little black plastic thing the size of a pack of cigarettes and it comes with a light-weight headset with a pinhead microphone, like the kind that office workers use. The ad suggests that you can use your lifebox to create your life story, to make something to leave for your children and grandchildren.

Frank gets the aliens to find an old man who is actually using a lifebox. His name is Ned. They watch Ned from the saucer. Somehow the saucer can use dimensional oddities to get very close to someone but still be invisible to them. The aliens have control over their size-scale and refraction index; they can make the saucer as tiny and transparent as a contact-lens.

White-haired Ned is pacing in his small back yard—a concrete slab with some beds of roses—he’s talking and gesturing, wearing the headset and with the lifebox in his shirt pocket. The sly saucer is able to get close enough to hear the sound of the lifebox: a woman’s pleasant voice.

The marketing idea behind the lifebox is that old duffers always want to write down their life story, and with a lifebox they don’t have to write, they can get by with just talking. The lifebox software is smart enough to organize the material into a shapely whole. Like an automatic ghost-writer.

The hard thing about creating your life story is that your recollections aren’t linear; they’re a tangled banyan tree of branches that split and merge. The lifebox uses hypertext links to hook together everything you tell it. Then your eventual audience can interact with your stories, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox is almost like a simulation of you.

Frank Shook gets the aliens to skip forward in time until past when Ned has died. They observe Ned’s grandchildren, little Billy and big Sis. They’re playing with one of the lifebox copies that Frank left. The kids call the lifebox “Grandpa,” but they’re mocking it too. They’re not putting on the polite faces that kids usually show to grown-ups. Billy asks the Grandpa-lifebox about his first car, and the lifebox starts talking about an electric-powered Honda and then it mentions something about using the car for dates. Sis—little Billy calls her “pig Sis” instead of “big Sis”—asks the lifebox about the first girl Grandpa dated, and Grandpa goes off on that for a while, and then Sis looks around to make sure Mom’s not in earshot. The coast is clear so she asks some naughty questions. “Did you and your dates do it? In the car? Did you use a rubber?” Shrieks of laughter. “You’re a little too young to hear about that,” says the Grandpa-lifebox calmly. “Let me tell you some more about the car.”

Frank and the aliens skip a little further into the future, and they find that the lifebox has become a huge industry. People of all ages are using lifeboxes as a way to introducing themselves to each other. Sort of like home pages. They call the lifebox database a context, as in, “I’ll link you a link to my context.”

Not that most people really want to spend the time it takes to explicitly access very much of another person’s full context. But having the context handy makes conversation much easier. In particular, it’s now finally possible for software agents to understand the content of human speech—provided that the software has access to the speakers’ contexts.

I got very heavily into discussing lifeboxes in my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, published by Thunders Mouth Press in 2005, and now available from Transreal Books. If you go the book page you can buy print or ebook copies or read it for free online.

By the way, the idea behind the title is that the Lifebox is a digital representation of a human, the Soul is the idea of a fully analog ethereal person, and the Seashell relates to Stephen Wolfram’s idea of generating gnarly patterns by using cellular automata rules akin to those that generate the surface patterns on cone shells. The image shown here was drawn by my daughter Isabel Rucker, who did the illos for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

And here’s part of the discussion of lifeboxes in that book, preceded by a photo of me and the three kids one Easter morning in the early Seventies.

One of the most venerable dreams of science fiction is that people might become immortal by uploading their personalities into some kind of lasting storage. Once your personality is out of your body in a portable format, it could perhaps be copied onto a fresh tank-grown blank human body, onto a humanoid robot, or, what the heck, onto a pelican with an amplified brain. Preserve your software, the rest is meat!

In practice, copying a brain would be very hard, for the brain isn’t in digital form. The brain’s information is stored in the geometry of its axons, dendrites, and synapses, in the ongoing biochemical balances of its chemicals, and in the fleeting flow of its electrical currents. In my 1982 cyberpunk novel Software, I wrote about some robots who specialized in extracting people’s personality software—by eating their brains. When one of my characters hears about the repellent process, “[his] tongue twitched, trying to flick away the imagined taste of the brain tissue, tingly with firing neurons, tart with transmitter chemicals.”

Let’s look at a much weaker form of copying a personality. Rather than trying to exactly replicate a brain’s architecture, it might be interesting enough to simply copy all of a person’s memories, preserving the interconnections among them.

We can view a person’s memory as a hyperlinked database of sensations and facts. The memory is structured something like a Web site, with words, sounds, and images combined into a superblog with trillions of links.

I don’t think it will be too many more years until we see a consumer product that makes it easy for a person to make a usable copy of their memory. This product is what I call a lifebox.

My idea used to be that your lifebox will prompt you to tell it stories, and it will have enough low-level language recognition software to be able to organize your anecdotes and to ask you follow-up questions. As you continue working with your lifebox, it builds up a database of the facts you know and the tales you spin, along with links among them. Some of the links are explicitly made by you, others will be inferred by the lifebox software on the basis of your flow of conversation, and still other links are automatically generated by looking for matching words.

[As of 2023 it’s evident that, instead of interviewing the person, you can use an “unsupervised learning” approach, and evolve a neural net algorithm that examines all of the target person’s written and spoken outputs, and evolves a pattern of weights for a neural net to match the arrangements of words.]

And then what?

Your lifebox will have a kind of browser software with a search engine capable of returning reasonable links into your database when prompted by spoken or written questions from other users. These might be friends, lovers, or business partners checking you out, or perhaps grandchildren wanting to know what you were like.

Your lifebox will give other people a reasonably good impression of having a conversation with you. Their questions are combed for trigger words to access the lifebox information. A lifebox doesn’t pretend to be an intelligent program; we don’t expect it to reason about problems proposed to it. A lifebox is really just some compact digital memory with a little extra software. Creating these devices really shouldn’t be too hard and is already, I’d say, within the realm of possibility—it’s already common for pocket-size devices to carry gigabytes of memory, and the terabytes won’t be long in coming.

There is a sense in which saving only your memories is perhaps enough, as long as enough links among your memories are included. The links are important because they constitute your sensibility, that is, your characteristic way of jumping from one thought to the next.

My expectation is that in not too many years, great numbers of people will be able to preserve their software by means of the lifebox. In a rudimentary kind of way, the lifebox concept is already being implemented as blogs. People post journal notes and snapshots of themselves, and if you follow a blog closely enough you can indeed get a feeling of identification with the blogger. And blogs already come with search engines that automatically provide some links. Recently the cell phone company Nokia started marketing a system called Lifeblog, whereby a person can link and record daily activities by using a camera-equipped cell phone.

I like the idea of a lifebox, and I’d like to have one. I envision a large database with all my books, all my journals, and a connective guide-memoir—with the whole thing annotated and hyperlinked. Eventually I’d want to throw in some photographs—I’ve taken thousands over the years. And it should be feasible to endow my lifebox with interactive abilities; people could ask it questions and have it answer with appropriate links and words. My finished lifebox might take the form of a Web site, although then there’d be the thorny question of how to get any recompense for the effort involved. A commercial alternative would be to market it as a set of files on a portable data storage device of some kind.

[I included some of this material in a paper with Leon Marvell, “Lifebox Immortality & How We Got There.” And Marvell adds some further speculations.]

[Photo credit: Bart Nagel]

I have in fact made a crude lifebox in the form of an online search engine that finds user-selected target phrases in my collected writings. See Rudy’s Lifebox online. My first stab at a personal pyramid of Cheops!

Use case: I used the Rudy’s Lifebox tool to search for “lifebox,” and I found, aha, a great blog post I posted in 2019, “Talk on Lifebox for Telepathy and Immortality.” Check it out! You might think of the 2019 post as a missing addendum to today’s post, also it links to a podcast. Convenient invention, this lifebox…

And, as I said earlier, the cool thing happening now is that the chances of animating our lifeboxes into something like interactive AI are going up, thanks to Large Language Models and such tools as ChatGPT. (As mentioned above, John Walker and I posted about these new tools last month.) We’re not there yet, but it’s a big step.

In my latest novel, Juicy Ghosts, I visualized how the business of software immortality might actually play out. Here’s a scene where a woman named Mary has died on Earth. A con-man named Carson Pflug has helped Mary to set up a lifebox of herself on a server farm called Skyhive. The lifebox storage is “free.” If you agree to certain conditions…

Mary is in her lifebox self. She’s an AI, programmed in Spork, and coupled to her laboriously assembled data-base. She wears a sim that’s a texture-mapped wire-frame model of a woman living in a jive-ass virtual reality generated by the Skyhive server. Not that her AI mind thinks of it that way. To her, the scene feels authentic, in a bland way. Like being on tranks in an airport lounge.

Her room in the Skyhive cliff city is still very plain. A wooden chair, a gray floor, white walls. She goes to the balcony. Some of those so-called storks flap by. And then she sits in her chair for a very long time, thinking things over and, frankly, resting. She hasn’t had a rest like this for years. Twelve hours go by, or maybe thirty-six. No easy way to judge time here. There’s no clocks. And her virtual body never gets sore from sitting in one place.

“Would you like to personalize?” says a voice, finally interrupting Mary’s reverie. A woman’s voice echoing in her head. “Anything you want!”

“What are you?” says Mary.

“I’m your room,” says the voice. “Let’s pick some pleasant images for your walls. And I can copy furniture from your home in San Lorenzo.”

“Why bother,” Mary tells the room. “Pretty soon I’ll be in my clone.”

“No peripheral is currently registered to your account,” says the room.

Mary feels a pang of fear. Did Carson Pflug double-cross her? She wouldn’t put it past him. But she’s not gonna discuss this with the perky voice of her room.

“I think I’m getting a body soon,” says Mary. “But can I go out and look around? Just in my virtual body?”

“Feel free,” says the room. “Explore our fine amenities. And—would you be willing to answer a short survey about my service thus far?”

Mary walks to the balcony railing once again. She notices now that the cliff slants back a little, like giant stairs with really tall steps. She sees a piazza about a hundred meters down, with lifebox people walking around in sim bodies, some of them standing by a pickup truck. Might be worthwhile to find out what’s going on. So, what the hell, she jumps off the railing. It’s not like she can die, right?

Right. Although she picks up a certain amount of speed, she lands in the piazza unscathed. A crouch and a bounce. A thin lifebox woman nearby looks at her. Mimes a salute.

“Welcome to the labor pool,” says the woman. She’s awkward, with lank hair and a crooked mouth. Black narrow pants and a striped shirt. A geek.

“How do you mean?” goes Mary.

“Are you rich?” the woman asks. “Did you endow a trust fund to pay your monthly fee?”

“A friend got me in here,” says Mary. “Carson Pflug. He’s a Skynet exec. He says he’s going to get me a clone.”

“Carson!” says the woman with a laugh. “And he told you it was a one-year free trial, right?” A hole appears in the woman’s sim-body chest. “People say I’m heartless, but I’m not,” she continues, pointing out a cartoony, dark red heart inside. “I nurse a secret passion, hmm? My name is Leeta Patel.”

Mary knows she’s recently heard that name, but just now it doesn’t click. She’s still not over her death experience. “I’m Mary,” is all she says.

“And, yes, it’s true that your first year is free,” says the woman. “But eventually everyone in Skyhive pays rent, and if they don’t have it, they do gigwork, no matter how they got here. You probably didn’t read your full end-user license agreement?”

“Did you read yours?” challenges Mary.

“Nobody’s ever read it,” says Leeta with a little laugh. “Nobody ever will. It’s a hundred million words long. Written by hateful lawyer bots. And do you trust Carson Pflug? Hah. You’re a standard Skyhive client, that’s all.” She points to a group of lifebox people around the pickup truck. “Let’s see what kind of gigs are on offer today. To help you understand what’s in store.”

The sim in the back of the pickup truck isn’t even bothering to look human. He’s a squat cube like a foot stool, with a speaker grill for a mouth. As he rattles off a list of available jobs, day-workers hop into the truck one by one. The truck’s capacity seems endless.

The workers: Winged woman with a cane. Stout man with checked pants and pinwheel eyes. Jittery fashion-model lady with green skin. Sniggering, pimply teen in a clerical collar. Spider with a woman’s head. Twelve-foot-tall man in a stovepipe hat. Talking dog. Velvet-clad lady wearing jeweler’s loupes. Hieroglyph person with an ibis head. School-marm with a fat text-book. Vagabond cupping a blue glow in his hands. Dancing man with gem-crusted skin. A bowling ball with three pale-blue eyes.

The jobs: Dragonfly drone. Slime sculptor. Teep tweaker. Non-sex worker. Spam amp. Ant herder. Rind design. Spork coach. Flicker cladder. Tuba tamer. Art emulator. Rhino horner. Dream dupe.

A chime sounds in Mary’s head. It’s Miu Miu in San Lorenzo. Miu Miu is a so-called psidot, that is, a piezoplastic device on the back of the neck of a human-body clone of Mary’s old body. Yes. It’s going to work. The psidot sends and receives signals from Mary’s lifebox, and feeds them into the clone.

“Back in action,” Miu Miu the psidot signals to Mary’s lifebox. “Your clone is ready!”

“Bye,” Mary tells Leeta. In the never-never land of the Skyhive cliff, it’s no great effort for Mary to hop a hundred meters straight up—to her flat’s balcony. She takes a seat in her wooden chair.

“Ready,” she tells Miu Miu.

And now she’s linked to her cloned body, and—what?

She’s in her house with most of the lights off—alone with Carson Pflug. She’s sitting on the couch and Carson is standing over her, taking off his shirt. It’s quite dark outside and it’s raining heavily. Mary can see her jeans and sweatshirt on the floor. She’s naked. Her body looks good. Her clone is high-end.

So, okay, lifebox Mary is processing clone-Mary’s inputs, deciding what to do next, and sending signals to her psidot device Miu Miu, who controls the clone body’s muscles. Feel, think, do. Juicy ghost.

Carson leans down to touch her. No. Mary pops to her feet and shoves Carson in the chest: a swift, implacable, abrupt, and precisely calibrated impact, pre-computed by lifebox Mary in the cloud. Carson thuds to the floor like a sack of cement.

“No sex with you,” Mary tells Carson. “Never.” She dons her jeans and sweatshirt from the floor. They’re a bit tight. Clone Mary is more turgid than wasted old Mary was.

“I don’t know why you have to be like that,” says Carson, awkwardly regaining his feet and straightening his clothes.

“Men like you never do know,” says Mary. “Shut up and let me think.”

And don’t forget: When it comes to digital immortality, Rudy Rucker got there first!

I wasn’t kidding when I wrote these stories and books. Yes, I was laughing and having a good time, but I was serious. And now it’s all coming true.

So give me some credit.

In memory of Sylvia Rucker, February 8, 1943 – January 6, 2023.