Yesterday I found a link on boingboing.net to a video of Bruce Sterling giving a talk in Munich.

So I pissed away a rather enjoyable hour watching it.

It's kind of hard to sit in your computer chair and not do anything for an hour, so I got my yoga mat and lay on the floor for most of it. I ate some cereal out of a dish on the floor like a dog. At the feet of the Ascended Master of Industrial Design.

He's talking about what he calls spimes, he spoke on this at SIGGRAPH as well. BoingBoing has the text of this speech online.

The flash is that every object CAN have an URL address. The realworld tech for this is something called an RFID (pronounced Arfid] a little chip that sings out an ID number when scanned by an RFID reader within about ten meters. No more lost glasses.

[My addition: The scifi way to do it would be to have an intrinsic ID based on an object's measurements and quantum state. If the scifi case, a spimeID reader would be something you'd have to pick up outta the universal wave fuction.]

A big practical nearterm downside of RFID Bruce mentions is if Americans have to put them in their passports, as has been proposed. Duh? Another downside Bruce mentions is the the Beagle Boys skimming data to find where the expensive loot is.

He ends the talk with what he's been know to call “the standard SF move of transcendence.” Now each object has a life history, like a person. And therefore a soul? Dear objects!

Of course objects always did have a spacetime trajectory that God/the cosmos can see. But now it's a humanized soul. I think of the story of Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow.

Might one write a story from the point of view of two objects? A two-cans story instead of a two-guys story. In this context, forget not Phil Dick's “The Short Happy LIfe of the Brown Oxford.”

Or a hive mind could emerge from the objects? Stealthy scuttling of an empty sardine tin.

Or we discover what I've always suspected, that objects ARE regularly disappearing into the fourth dimension, and now it becomes known. Big Act One reveal for that.

It was a good show, always a pleasure to see Bruce in action. His delivery is such that he continually sounds like he's making fun of what he's saying, mocking it, wrapping it in irony, and by thus throwing the listener off balance, he keeps the upper hand. A rhetoritician sublime.

Here's an excerpt from section 4.7 of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul which I was revising yesterday. The book will be out in Fall, 2005.

Consider the following bit of dialectical analysis.

• Universal automatism proposes a thesis:

Your mental processes are a type of deterministic computation.

• Your sense of having a free will entails a seeming antithesis:

Your thoughts and actions aren’t predictable.

• Wolfram advocates a beautifully simple synthesis:

Your mind’s computation is both deterministic and unpredictable.

The synthesis is supported by the following conjecture, implicit in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

• Principle of Computational Unpredictability (PCU). Most naturally occurring complex computations are unpredictable.

The workings of your mind are unpredictable in the sense that, when presented with a new input of some kind, you’re often quite unable to say in advance how you’ll respond to it.

Someone offers you a new job. Do you want it or not? Right off the bat, there’s no way to say. You have to think over the possibilities, mentally simulate various outcomes, feel out your emotional responses to the proposed change. Someone shows you a painting. Do you like it? Hold on. You have to think about the image, the colors, the mental associations before you decide. Someone hands you a menu. What do you want to eat? Just a minute. You need to look into your current body feelings, your memories of other meals, your expectations about this particular restaurant.

We say a computation is unpredictable if there is no exponentially faster short-cut for finding out in advance what the computation will do with arbitrary inputs. When faced with an unpredictable computation, the only reliable way to find out what the computation does with some input is to go ahead and start up the computation and watch the states that it steps through.

Once again, suppose I’m presented with some new input. Since my thoughts are unpredictable, the only way to find out what I’m going to end up thinking about the input, is to go ahead and think until my mind is made up. And this means that, although my conclusion is in fact predetermined by how my mind works, neither I nor anyone else has any way of predicting what my conclusion will be. Therefore my thought process feels like free will.

I seem to be a fluttering leaf.

That Slow Time entry was kind of a downer. So let’s put on a fresh layer of reality paint. Nothing’s going on today, except that I’m revising Lifebox, so, hmm, I’ll reach into the picture archives to find something to post.

Three pictures of mirrors! The first is a window in a parking lot in Wyoming.

The second is caustics on the surface of a brook in Big Basin in Santa Cruz Country.

A reflections quote, from my journals, this fall.

“I went camping in Big Sur; it was a hot day, and I had the chance to stand in the cool clear flow of the Big Sur River, up to my neck in a big pool that accumulates right before the river flows across a sand bar into the Pacific. Standing there, I closed my eyes to savor the sensation of water and air. My arms were weightless at my sides, my knees were slightly bent, I was at perfect equilibrium. Each time I exhaled, my breath would ripple the water, and reflections of the noon sun would flicker on my eyelids. Exquisite.”

“I was all there, fully conscious, immersed in the river. And I became powerfully aware of a common sense fact that most people will have known all along.”

“'This isn’t a computation. This is water.'”

A third picture, an office building in Denver, erstwhile home of Neal Cassady.

Working with computer graphics has enhanced my appreciation of the natural world. Though I think painting does the same thing.

Here’s a quote along these lines from David Kushner, Masters of Doom, (Random House, 2003) p. 295. Kushner is describing the programmer John Carmack, who developed most of the code for the first-person-shooter computer games Doom and Quake.

“…after so many years immersed in the science of graphics, he [John Carmack] had achieved an almost Zen-like understanding of his craft. In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. ‘These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works. I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.’”

The other day, I was noticing how slowly time seems to go these days.

In a bad way, I can look ahead at an afternoon or an evening and think, “I’ll never make it through this.” In a good way, I can think, “I’ve got all the time I need. I can relax.”

The other day, I had a feeling of being into a just endlessly expandable kind of mental time. I’d rather think of this as a good thing. After all, the faster you time goes, the sooner you die. My neighbor Rita, who’s in her 80s, was bemoaning this the other day. “You say Christmas is in two weeks? I feel like last Christmas was just two weeks ago. I feel like I’m on a express train to the graveyard.”

My time slowdown is happening — why? I can think of three possible causes.

(1) Idleness. I’m not teaching, and don’t have the concomitant mental check-list: do this, do that, do the other thing, etc. I’m still adjusting to retirement.

A job makes time pass because you carry with you a mental check-list that makes the time melt away. Plus there’s the commuting to help kill the day. Even now, when I read, or write, or when I work on my blog, the time melts away. A hobby, like a job, is a “pastime”.

TV is a pastime, too, but to me, watching TV almost always feels like I’m being robbed. I think I’d rather spend my time staring at my shoe.

I do have more empty time than before. I have to fight the capitalist, puritanical fear of empty time. Slow, empty time is a good thing.

(2) Thoughts per second. Another factor in the time slowdown could perhaps be that, thanks to thinking about philosophy so much as I work on my Lifebox book, the world is starting to seem denser and stranger to me. Trippier.

I’ve always thought that the speed at which I perceive time to be flowing might relate to the rate at which I’m having thoughts. So if you’re having a billion thoughts per second, then, yeah, a second seems like a long time. And if you settle in on the zombified gerbil wheel of TV programming, with a thought every five minutes or so, then yeah, the whole evening is gone in a flash.

But I'm not really sure I'm thinking that much more than I ever did.

(3) Isolation. Talking to people passes the time. Now that I'm retird, I’m spending more and more of my time alone.

The idea that conversation speeds up the perceived passage of time doesn’t really dovetail with the “thoughts per second” idea that time goes faster when you have fewer thoughts. Because it seems like you’d be having more thoughts rather than fewer thoughts if you’re having a lively conversation, so it would seem that the conversation should seem to make time go slower rather than faster.

I think the reason conversation speeds time up is that it takes me out of myself. If I’m continually monitoring my personal state, navel-gazing if you will, then the time will seem to go slower because I’ll have a lot of memories of wondering what time it is. Nothing slows time down like looking at your watch every thirty seconds, like when you’re waiting for a work day to be over. Or in the back seat of your parents car asking, “Are we there yet?”

What time is it now? Is that all?