Rudy Rucker

Yep me too. Great to see it freely availible online. IMHO by far the stangest, most mind bending story in it isn't really cybperpunk though but it's still flipping brilliant. Petra by Greg Bear. It's about what happens when God dies... https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/HTML/#calibre_link-28

DFW also wrote Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity -- an uncritical review of Cantor's work, which was absolutely loaded with errors. Rudy Rucker wrote a scathing review here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/wallace_review.pdf I actually read Everything and More and it's probably even worse than that. Though I'll admit that I'm a little bit biased; I'm a sort of Aristotelian Realist or even a Finitist when it comes to mathematics, and I view Cantor's hierarchy of infinities as... well... schizo at best.

Rudy Rucker has Capow, which is pretty great continuous CAs: https://www.rudyrucker.com/capow/

"It is very hard to visualize such a dimension directly. Off and on for some fifteen years, I have tried to do so. In all this time I’ve enjoyed a grand total of perhaps fifteen minutes’ worth of direct vision into four-dimensional space." - Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension https://www.rudyrucker.com/thefourthdimension/

Came here to post this — it's one of my favourite math games. For a really nice introduction to the more advanced uses of geometric algebra in three dimensions, there's this fantastic chapter in a book by Rudy Rucker, which you can read here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/infinityandthemind/#calibre_link-318

And then there's Rudy Rucker's Turing & Burroughs.[0] > What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos? A wild beatnik adventure, compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout. 0) http://www.rudyrucker.com/turingandburroughs/

I'd recommend "The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul" (readable online at [0]). It's wacky at times, and not deeply rigorous, but thoroughly enjoyable. But not a textbook. [0] - http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/

Wow! If you ever get tired of it I will buy it from you. It's impossible to find copies now, and they make great wedding or graduation presents. ;) Just joking, I know you would never part with it! If you were sneaky and transgressive like Aaron Schwartz, you might notice the url of the pdf file is shown in the browser bar in the video, and type in the url to steal the book: https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf <= DO NOT CLICK THIS URL! IT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL RHETORICAL PURPOSES ONLY. Fortunately Norman Margolis has generously given me permission to distribute that pdf file (although I don't know what MIT Press would think about it, but last time I was at MIT I visited their store and they didn't have any copies, so if they would only get their shit together and publish the fucking book somewhere I could buy it, I would already own a pile of them to hand out to tricker-treaters and religious zealots who knock on my door, as brain candy to set them on a better path). He's also given me permission to make interactive versions of any of those chapters, and he said that his favorites were the physical simulations, because they have something to say about nature and physics. That's definitely on my TODO list! I'd really like to do a "KidPix" kind of cellular automata playground, like Rudy Rucker and John Walker did with Autodesk CALab. There's some great stuff from that online, including a web based version of CALab and a fieldbook of many rules in the…

This is one of the many reasons why I love science fiction. Many of my favorite novels center around consciousness and the related technology to assist/enable/enhance it. Reading these in my younger years, many of these novels have shaped my life, especially my career. I may be confusing my authors, but some of the more recent novels I've read (from about 10 years or so ago, it's been a while), I think from Alastair Reynolds, have a wide range of ideas. Some center around the same kind of thing that Elon Musk talks about with Neuralink. Others take a wildly different path... putting an extant brain in a box or cabinet on wheels. On this topic I used to be a huge fan of the concept of uploading. But then I formed the opinion that, if all we're doing is copying state, then the new instance is not the old inshttp://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/tance. It's just another instance with its own state from that point forward. I think it's also a Reynolds book where a person creates a copy of their consciousness and puts it into a very physically small spacecraft in order to travel a maximum speed to a very distance place (I forget the intended task). But upon return the two instances and ended up becoming antagonists due to their different experiences in the meantime. Likewise, I want to say it was a Rucker book, a person is copied, and the copy is not them, just a new instance. That kind of soured me on uploading. However, at the same time, it seems to me that can be akin…

>I asked my classmates whether they had heard of the sci-fi writer Rudy Rucker’s book Rudy Rucker was/is also one of the most prominent cellular automata researchers of recent history. I can highly recommend "Cellab" [1], which I first encountered as CA Lab. You may need to install a virtual machine to get it running properly [2]. [1]: http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm [2]: [In the spring of 2010, the Cellab software became semi-obsolete---in that it won't run under Windows 7. The "good" news is that Windows 7 can in fact run a virtual machine in Windows XP mode, if you download and install some free Microsoft virtual XP software. I tried this just now, and it works pretty well. You get a little window or a full screen which is an XP desktop. And CELLAB runs fine in the XP window—to make it easy to find your files, you drag the CELLAB folder from your normal C: drive (if that’s where it lives) onto the desktop of the XP Virtual machine window.]

also available in mobi and epub formats (for Kindle and other ebook readers): https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/mirrorshades.epub https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/mirrorshades.mobi

I'll shout out his book Postsingular, which is a real head-trip and available under a Creative Commons license here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postsingular

Rudy Rucker recently released Mirrorshades for free on his website: https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/ I have a work-in-progress PDF edition of it on GitHub here: https://github.com/jdonland/mirrorshades

Oh, maybe? Sort of ambiguous, given the context is writing advice. If so, then there's an obvious rebuttal: the point isn't to keep you riveted, it's to communicate an idea. The uncle example is inapplicable because the problem with the uncle is that he is telling you an idea you don't care about, not that he's delivering true useful information in a boring way. EDIT: Also, Wikipedia links to some damning reviews of the David Foster Wallace book, including this one (yikes): http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/wallace_review.pdf

> "The One has variously been called the Good, God, the Cosmos, the Mind, the Void, or (perhaps most neutrally) the Absolute. No door in the labyrinthine castle of science opens directly onto the Absolute. But if one understands the maze well enough, it is possible to jump out of the system and experience the Absolute for oneself." http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-godel/

Charles Howard Hinton is actually a very prominent figure in the history of eccentric mathematicians. Anyone who read Rudy Rucker's book about the fourth dimension in the 90s knew about the earlier Hinton's bigamy and superstitions. https://books.google.ie/books?id=8J0djs-FK_8C&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65… http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2009/06/08/alicia-boole-charles-hinton-…

Reminds me of an old Rudy Rucker story, 'A New Golden Age': http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_Toc05

Gödel had an interesting argument that I encountered via Rudy Rucker's blog; “There is no contradiction between free will and knowing in advance precisely what one will do. If one knows oneself completely then this is the situation. One does not deliberately do the opposite of what one wants.” http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-godel/

This was a establishing plot point in Rudy Rucker's short story Hormiga Canyon, published in Asimov's August 2007 issue. He also included the benefit of voice recognition on any node :) You can read it here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_Toc53 (warning: Rudy's stories are... zany)

Here is a scifi short story in which a machine is built that allows anyone to directly perceive mathematics similarly to music. The mathematician inventors hoped that this would increase the popularity of math but the opposite was true: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_Toc05

My money's on 69. Rudy Rucker had some interesting conversations with Gödel about a deterministic universe in which (because time is illusory) backward time travel exists: http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-godel/

Yes, that is an uncredited photo of my CA rule, also known as Rudy's Ranch. By the way, if you want the "real" story on Turing, check out my SF novel, TURING & BURROUGHS, of 2012, available in paperback, ebook, and free CC ebook. http://www.rudyrucker.com/turingandburroughs/

Rucker made the Ware books available free online under a Creative Commons license: http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/#waresdownload if anyone wants to check them out.

I really liked Mirrorshades, if for no other reason that it showcased a variety of styles. It's been a while since I read it but I recall thinking it pretty good. It might have been what got me to read Rudy Rucker's stuff. You can read all of Rucker's short stories (which I find to be better than his novels) here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/

'The lifebox, the seashell and the soul' by Rudy Rucker. http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/ It has the same sort of feel as GEB, he riffs about cellular automata etc, its not too demanding while still giving enough to meditate on for a few days.

Rudy Rucker: https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/ Gnarly!

Do I have any scientific research on it? No. :-( I'm actually dismayed that there isn't more scientific research on this sort of thing. But it makes sense: merging consciousness is a deeply personal thing, far beyond physical nakedness. Without a proper context ("set and setting") one's own inhibitions will prevent it, or prevent one even thinking about it. I learned about it from (and I swear I'm not making this up) a pamphlet I ordered by mail out of the back of a comic book on "How to Read Minds". Much to my surprise, the simple technique it described worked. It turns out that thoughts are in a kind of space around us and the same faculty that we use to perceive "our own" thoughts can just as easily be used to perceive the thoughts "of others". In fact we don't have thoughts of our own, no one does, no more than a TV set has TV shows. Your brain has an ability to "tune" thoughts in and out, but they exist separately from us ourselves. Cf. Kurt Gödel's description of how to "perceive pure abstract possibility" in http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-godel/ Now the sharing of thoughts deliberately (forming a thought and "sending" it to someone who is primed to receive it) aka "telepathy" is different than the merging of two consciousnesses into one consciousness. In fact there is only one consciousness, it is unitary, and the belief in separate identities is a perceptual structure founded in the ambient thought-forms. Separate identity is…

http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/09/10/what-was-alan-turing-like/ > 1942, age 30. [Alan] Turing joined the Home Guard so he could learn to shoot. “[Turing] had to complete a form, and one of the questions on this form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Well, Turing, absolutely characteristically, said: There can be no conceivable advantage in answering this question ‘Yes’ and therefore he answered it ‘No.’ … And … he was duly enrolled, because people only look to see that these things are signed at the bottom.” He learned to shoot, but he refused to attend parades, and the apoplectic chief officer confronted him, and Turing said, “You know, I rather thought this sort of situation could arise…If you look at my form you will see that I protected myself against this situation.” He’d decided on the “optimal strategy if you had to complete a form of this kind. So much like the man all the way through.”