Walking down the street, I was thinking, “What really do hypothetical thousand-times-as-capacious brain-like systems have that I don't have, walking down this street looking at the trees?” They can look at the trees from more angles at once, they can analyze the motions in more depth.

By the same token, what do I have in my perception of a scene that’s all that much richer than the perception of a crow perched in the tree? Assume for the sake of argument the crow sees in color and has good visual acuity — actually I think birds do see very well, so as to be able to swoop down on bugs and other small prey. Pushing it further, might not a colony of ants on a tree also have a very rich model of the world? (Note that I speak of the colony and not of an individual ant, as the ant-mind is indeed a distributed intelligence.)

And then I saw the entrance to the Mirrorbrane.

I found some cheap Mirrorcalifornia real estate, with a starter car included.

I moved right in.

Nice thing is, in Mirrorbrane, something’s always on the braneware TV.

The sand is filled with gnomes, the flames with salamanders, the wood with dryads, the ocean with undines, the air with sylpyhs, the dogs with dog. Each uses the bulk-space’s Higgs field for memory storage.

Although my Mirrorbrane superpartner appears human to our eyes, he is made of superpartner particles: squarks, selectrons, photinos. Earth, air, fire, water are replaced by wood, cuttlefish, mathematics, and dog.

My Mirrorbrane house burns down with Mirror-me inside it, the sylphs scatter my superpartner’s ashes.

Eadem mutata resurgo;

The same, yet altered, I rearise.

Flying into the sun.

Left for the gnomes is the mesh of plumbing that was my Mirrobrane meat body for lo unto sixty years in sixty minutes. And now I am a little child.

I’ve been having some email with John Walker about his article, “Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life,” which I discussed on my blog yesterday.

And I realized that my goal in my novel(?)-in-progress is to have wind, leaves, water, clouds really be computing conscious mind stuff. I want to migrate the beezies to nature instead of doing the opposite. I have this anti-extropian bent, you see, my goal is to sort of deflate the Singularity which is in many ways hype and a category mistake. I want the computers to shrivel away. And I want Nature to wake up.

QUESTION: How SFictionally can I tweak nature to achieve this?

Walker’s suggested obstacle to doing this is, again, that even if a fluttering leaf is capable of class-four universal computation, it doesn’t seem like it gets all that far, as, after all, we don’t see vast innovations coming from the leaves. He feels they don’t get that far because they don’t have reliable long-term memory. The leaf doesn’t “remember” what it was fluttering yesterday or even ten minumtes ago. Even when in a continuous flutter mode, past states are lost to friction and averaging.

So let’s find all-purpose RAM to plug into any old thing. Where to find it? I figure in a parallel brane, or in the subdimensional network architecture of pre-geometry. A little supersymmetric 11-dimensional brane patch, hey?

I’m finding some possible tools for this in a new popular science book by Harvard/MIT professor Lisa Randall.

[Chief Execs of Monkeybrains, Inc., spotted at Fringale in San Francisco.]

Wondering about the relationship between humans and the net-based super-AI beezie beings, I’ve been thinking about an article by John Walker, “Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life”. He argues that life (and presumably intelligence) requires “digital storage”. Examples of what he calls digital storage in nature are: DNA, the human brain’s neural net, and the immune systems of vertebrates.

In Walker's words, “The fluttering of leaves in the wind, the ripples of water in a stream, the boiling of clouds over a mountain range, the intricate N-body ballet of stars orbiting the centre of mass of galaxy, all have no storage apart from their instantaneous analogue state space–they have no way to store and retrieve information in a robust and reliable digital form. Hence … these are not universal computations. They may be chaotic and unpredictable, but they can't be used in any manner to emulate any other computation, and therefore cannot be said to be equivalent to other computations or universal.”

[This shows a glass stomach made by artist Kiki Smith, part of her cool show at SFMOMA.]

I think it’s an interesting and suggestive argument, but I don't really think it's absolutely true. I tend to think that, e.g., sunspots could be alive, and reproduce, and eat each other, and even behave adaptively (as in Frek and the Elixir). But maybe in those sunspot tubes, there were certain long-lived vortex knot patterns functioning as a digital storage form, in which case Walker would still be on safe ground.

This picture, taken at one of my favorite resting spots in Yerba Buena Gardens in SF the other day, has several interesting features. The couple might be my characters Kittie and Sonic. I like the hairstyle of using enough gel to digitize your hair into a small number of distinct peaks. Check out the cool skull that the guy has hand-painted onto his wool suit jacket

And note the bumps of water meandering back and forth at the lip of the waterfall. I see these bumps as a class-four computation. And it seems like you could make them universal (assuming you idealized to make the waterfall arbitrarily wide) by forcing some bump pattern in and watching what happens. It's just a matter of emulation, innit? So I think you can have universality without digital storage, at least not in an obvious form. Although here, again, the info can be viewed as stored in the form of glider-like patterns of wave-bumps moving left and right.

Looking ahead, I’d like to think of the beezies as migrating out of the web and into the actual paracomputation of the world. Whether or not Walker is right in an absolute sense, he’s certainly right in the more limited sense that the computational speed and power of a natural process could be improved by somehow integrating RAM. I’m thinking of some string-theory method of attaching a little bit of RAM-brane to, like, streams and clouds. Animism made real.

[Totally gnarly piece by Kiki Smith called “Tale.” Funny for a novelist to see; thinking of how one crawls along, eating one’s way through life, extruding the long tale. But — ugh. Gotta hand it to women, they really can be gnarlier than men!]

Of course my all-purpose Presidential villian Dick Too Dodd (known as Joe Doakes in Mathematicians in Love) will want to damp all of this down. He claims he’s for a return to the old pre-orphidnet ways, but really, he wants to smash Earth into a Dyson Sphere of computronium where he can reign as a God.

As my character Kittie might put it, “Capitalists want people to be like sheep, and easy to fleece. Therefore they are against personal freedom, against quirky indigenous cultures, against self-expression, and against any non-goal-directed education. They want mass mind they can mass process. Like firm, tasteless, easy-to-harvest tomatoes.”

I went walking at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz with my fellow logician-turned-computer-scientist friend Michael Beeson.

The waves were still pretty big from the storms earlier this week. I love that instant when a wave’s smooth flow breaks into chaotic non-linear unpredictable spray.

I used to see that in my CA wave simulations, when for certain values the simulation becomes unstable and spits out scuzz. But here, in the lovely real world, it’s not really scuzz, it’s a different regime of computation with its own set of orbits and attractors, a computation so gnarly as to lie beyond the comprehension of anyone but the Big Pig, and maybe even beyond his/er full understanding as well.

As I say in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, “My sense is that most complex physical processes are strongly unpredictable in the sense that they represent computations that can’t be run any faster at all. Think of surf hitting a rock and shooting a plume into the air. Those incredibly intricate little bumps and wiggles in the foam — no way will anyone ever be able to produce a detailed, accurate, long-term emulation of a wave by any means short of making a physical copy of the wave.”

Being physical is a big thing that AIs are lacking, you wave.

I already did a few corrections and revisions on the fictional passage I posted yesterday, by the way, but let it stand as is, a raw sample of the work in progress.

I’d been thinking of having my Big Pig Posse track down the Heritagist spammers hunched over PCs in a trailer park and gun them all down. I once read that most spammers and telemarketers are clustered in a single trailer park near Boca Raton, Florida, and I always like to imagine the Terminator showing up there to wreak hideous vengeance.

But Michael pointed out that people wouldn’t likely be using PCs after the Singularity, also that my heroes would lose the readers’ sympathy if they become hitmen.

So now I’m thinking maybe the Heritagists have enslaved some people and are using them as “devices” to pump out the spam. And the Pig Posse can liberate them.

Michael and I watched the surfers for awhile; I was proud that I actually knew one of them.

Mathematicians that we are, rather than surfing ourselves, we analyzed the mechanics of how surfing works. (a) You’re sliding down a hill of water that moves, and (b) Because you’re sliding, you have the ability to move the board to the left or right beneath your center of gravity (by steering it), also the board will have very little tendency to move backwards, with the upshot that it’s easier to balance on a moving board than on a still one.

I said one thing that made Michael laugh a lot: “Sitting in front of your computer and using a web browser — calling that surfing is like balancing a shared checkbook and saying you’re f*cking.”