So today I’m posting some more about The Big Aha, and I’ll be using images from Brussels and some older images from Point Reyes. As I mentioned, the reason I was in Brussels was to give a TEDx talk.

And here, once again, is a YouTube video of that talk. I felt like it went really well. It’s kind of a preview of the ideas on my autobiography, Nested Scrolls.

Anway, back to my Big Aha rap. The idea is that I’m interested in some kind of quantum-computation-related type of higher conscoiusness that will put us into something like telepathic contact with the world around us.

And it’s not that I expect this to actually happen anytime soon, it’s that I’m looking for an idea for an SF novel. And, okay, yeah, I’m also, as always on the search for peace and enlightenment. So how do I get to the Big Aha?

One scenario is a Henry Kuttner-type flaky scientist/inventor coming up with an oddball physics device. He can stay in the smooth mind groove without having to collapse his consciousness. We don’t get into any multiple universe angles, we play it straight, a person is expanding their mind by getting their particles into an unusual state.

And then—using entanglement and hylozoism—they can edit the physics of the objects around them. Talk to the objects, make them act weird. Wacky matter. You don’t get high, your house gets high for you.

If you’re a close student of my web activity, you’ll noted that some of the material appeared on my guestposts on Charles Stross’s blog recently. But I’ve re-edited them a bit, and they’re illustrated here.

[John Shirley speaking at TEDx Brussels.]

The action of the Big Aha might be like a deeply intoned Om that reaches down to the attometer level. The aethereal vibration. The faint squeak of the Pigg Boson’s curly tail. But it’s not meditation and it’s not drugs. It’s physics.

I see a subcultural group growing up around the Big Aha. I’d rather not see them become stock market wizards like the guy in that movie Limitless. And I don’t want them to be like acidheads. Some other kind of oddness. They have weird senses of humor.

My precise flimflam physics recipe for achieving the Big Aha is still not quite clear to me. I’ll get there. And then in retrospect it’ll be “obvious.”

[Student beer party in Petit Sablon Square outside our hotel window. Even the women were peeing on the ground. Peter Bruegel would have loved it.]

So I keep asking myself how. How would it be to think in an entirely new way? What routes might take you there? Can you stop collapsing the states of your mind?

And—what powers do you get once you have the Big Aha?

One idea is that some higher being is the observer in the quantum interaction. The cosmos, a giant jellyfish, the Big Pig as I called it in Hylozoic, or simply the One. The One is also the observer in our lives. Many of us have problems with this notion because each of us is conditioned to think there is an “I” that is running “my” life.

I can teep you if we both merge into the One.

In conversation, my friend Nick Herbert made two related remarks about contact with the One, or with the universal wave function.

(1) The soul might perhaps be given a scientific meaning as one’s immediate perception of one’s coherent uncollapsed wave function, particularly as it is entangled with the uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.

(2) Synchronicity might be evidence that we’re all parts of some higher being. And the higher mind’s ideas filter down into remote links.

It’s definitely interesting to suppose that you can, by some physical change, get your brain into a state where you are in fact in a continuous-mode, uncollapsed all-is-one, highly entangled, super-empathy-possessing mind state.

So, again, how do we get there?

Certainly it’s true that an advanced meditation technique might get you there—the accomplished masters are said to have siddhis, or special powers, which might be akin to direct access to the uncollapsed universal wave function. But for an SF novel, I want something with a little more bling to it.

How about a quantum computing gadget that fits into a small case attached to a head band, and the band has circuitry in it that entangles the gadget and some part of the brain. (One of my commenters, Brucecohenpdx, suggested this idea and said the device might use TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation, although I’m not sure I’ll use such a potentially time-bound notion.)

The head band makes me think of the “brain toys” they used to advertise in the pages of magazines like Mondo 2000. What if someone made one of these that really works? In this vein, I’m thinking in terms of, why not, the old strobe approach—a brain toy headband that pulses lights into your eyes, getting your brain into an unusual state. Light itself is, after all, a type of quantum-computational input/output channel. The gizmo would use a sophisticated quantum computation to key the proper pulsation rates.

Or, kicking it up a level, maybe I use a biocomputation, to make it cool. A cunning cuttlefish pet sits on your shoulder, directing the pulsations. Maybe you don’t have any old-school LED lights, and the cuttle pal simply flickers at a nice rate in the tips of two tentacles.

Even better, the tentacle tips are suckered right over your cornea till you achieve lift-off. Users might be called squidders.

And we might as well include music or a warbling hiss in the squiddy Big Aha stimulation biodevice. And maybe even smells and shudders. The more senses you tickle, the more vivid is a fictional scene.

The efficacy of a given Big Aha routine might wear out—a bit like a sex fantasy or one’s joy in a particular song. And you have to keep tweaking the process to be able to get off. A media biz in new improved Big Aha trips.

Today I’ll post some more pictures of Brussels, with comments. And in the main text I’ll put some notes towards a novel I’m trying to start. The book’s title is probably The Big Aha. I’ve blogged some of this material before, but I’ve been polishing and recofinguring it, so here we go.

[“Avis” means announcement. The message of the skull.]

A certain kind of advance could lead to a discontinuous jump in ordinary human’s intelligence. I’ll be calling this advance The Big Aha.

There’s a tantalizing dream of AI workers that there may yet be some conceptual trick that we can use to make our machines really smart. The only path towards AI at present seems to be beating problems to death with evolving neural nets working on huge data-bases. We get incremental progress by making the computers faster, the neural nets more complex, and the data bases larger.

The SF dream is that there’s some new and exciting angle, a different tech, a clear and simple insight, a Big Aha?

And—the kicker—the aha would work for human brains as well as for machines. I’m in fact thinking of us finding the Big Aha for human brains, and then transferring it down to the computers. Intelligence augmentation, then artificial intelligence. Not that the AI really matters that much if we can really kick our own minds into a higher gear.

So what’s the Big Aha that I have in mind?

I’m liking the ideas having to do with quantum computation. At one point SF writers used radio as an all-purpose Maguffin, then it was radiation, then black holes, space warps, chaos theory, quarks…these days I’m liking quantum computation as a magic wand.

Every object supports a very intricate quantum computation. Think of a septillion or so particles hooked together by intricate forces, all of them vibrating. Clearly any object is a universal computer with a very rich range of readily accessible states.

[With John and Mickey Shirley in the Mort Subite (sudden death) bar in Brussels.]

Let me start thinking of my mind as a quantum computation. After all, my thoughts aren’t at all like a page of symbols—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations. Is there any communicable way to truly describe your real mental life?

Go back to the notion that your brain, like any physical object, is a quantum system. Quantum systems can evolve in two modes:

You’re in the smooth mode when you gaze idly at a menu, and you collapse to the chunky mode when when you decide what to order.

[The mascot or logo of the Mort Subite bar, the name is also a type of beer. The image is bit like the Tarot card of the Fool.]

Introspection tells me that this distinction is accurate. I do feel the continuous and the discrete modes of thought within my mind. Although, admittedly, it may not be that the sensation really results from my mind being a quantum computer, this is an interesting model to use. Quantum effects could indeed be active in my brain. After all, the nerve cells have nanometer-sized structures, which are well within the range dominated by quantum mechanics.

Since I don’t want a branching universe or a multiverse, we have various minds or objects whose wave functions are either spread out or collapsed, not at all in synchronization with each other.

I get a visual image of something like a macramé. A tapestry made up of state functions that I see as being at some moments like spread-out ribbons and at other moments like narrowed down threads.

Although you may be in some peculiar eigenstate, I might be spaced out and mellow. But then it may be that one of us changes. A dance of pulsating wave function ribbons.

Where does the Big Aha lead us? I want to imagine learning to program objects directly. And we’ll call this hylotech, which relates to the word hylozoic that I talk about sometimes.

Hylo+zoic = matter+alive. I’ve been a hylozoist for many years now—believing that every object is at some level alive and conscious.

It feels good to accept that a rock or a chair is alive and conscious. And then we’re not lonely fireflies of mind in a vast dark warehouse of dead machinery.

How do you really know, after all, what the internal life of a rock is like? The rock might be thought of as a fully ascended Zen master! Maybe it can in fact simulate my presence by using quantum computation and entanglement. But we don’t need to burden the rock with a quirky personality.

Here’s an edited and adapted passage where I discuss hylotech in my old book Saucer Wisdom.

Once hylotech takes hold, most of the objects in a person’s home can talk a little bit, and each piece of furniture has the intelligence of, say, a dog. They get out of the way if you’re about to bump them. They adjust their shape to whatever you say. They can change their patterns to match any design that you show them. But smart hylotech furniture has some drawbacks.

There’s a story about how a photographer’s family came home from a week’s trip to find that the furniture has been bouncing around the house laughing and bathing its tissues in the studio’s klieg lights, breaking all the dishes and running up a huge electrical bill.

The photographer steps into his harshly lit studio and catches his furniture going wild. A rambunctious over-amped armchair is howling like a coyote, the sofa is galumphing around in pursuit of a long-legged tea-table, the side-board is dancing a tarantella on shards of broken crockery, and six dining-chairs are clambering on top of each other to form a pyramid. He loads the rogue furniture into a truck and hauls it off to Goodwill.

In another home, a young woman’s disgruntled suitor kicks one of her chairs across the room — and the chair runs back and breaks the guy’s leg. A cat sharpens its claws on a couch, and the couch flings the tabby out the window.

Out for a walk with two of my fellow TEDx speakers. Programmer-entrepreneur Ken Haase and SF author David Brin.

More to come on The Big Aha!