Loren Means
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Ylem, Journal of Artists Using Scientists and Technology. San
Francisco, 3/17/2004
Q: I ran across the interview Charles Platt did with you in Lynchburg
in 1984 for Fantasy & Science Fiction (actually, I got the magazine
out of the free bin in front of Green Apple Books, where it had been
placed by a black guy with dreadlocks and a priest's collar). I felt
sympathetic toward the old you . you'd lost your teaching job and
obviously hated Lynchburg. Do you still feel as alienated as you did
back in Lynchburg?
A: I’ve been here in California for eighteen years now. It’s felt like
home from the start. Today at the supermarket, I was thinking how back
in Lynchburg the men would talk about it for a week if they saw anyone
like the blonde, buffed, shades-wearing women we got all over the
place out here. It’s a good deal.
In February my wife and I were up in the Sierras near Carson Pass,
man, there was seven, eight feet of snow. Beautiful back-country
skiing, alone in the woods, the snow-capped knobs like giant mounds of
whipped cream. And if I’m sore from the skiing today, and I go to yoga
class down in the village where I live. California.
I have an interesting job teaching computer science at San Jose State,
and the locals here respect me for working at their city’s university
. that’s another thing about the Lynchburg days, I was unemployed. I’m
the opposite of alienated anymore. I looked up Kit Carson of Carson
Pass on the Web today, he was born in Kentucky, just like me. We made
it to the coast.
This said, I occasionally miss the dawdling small-town pace of
Lynchburg. Linoleum. Space heaters. Oddly enough, my social life there
was richer than it is out here. Everyone lived only a few blocks away.
It was kind of fun being as wild as I was back then, too . at least it
seems that way in rosy retrospect . though in fact I know it was often
a living hell. But I had some good times with the bad. The day Platt
came to interview me was fun. It made me feel like I’d finally
arrived.
Q: Last Monday I saw an interview with Dr. Cynthia Brezeal, the head
of the Robotics Project at MIT. She says that robots can't make viable
decisions without emotions, but that robot emotions might not be the
same as human emotions, any more than dolphin emotions would be. Your
reaction?
A: One of the ideas in AI is that emotions can be viewed as weights
that you assign to certain situations. In the simplest model, you’d
just have a single I_LIKE function that returns values ranging from,
say, minus ten to plus ten. And then when you’re planning what to do
next, you might simulate a half dozen alternative courses of action,
evaluate the I_LIKE function on each of the possible scenarios’
outcomes, and then pick the course of action that leads to the
situation with the highest “I_LIKE” rating. You execute that course of
action . clik, whirr, buzz. then look ahead your new situation and
simulate a half dozen follow-up scenarios and so on. The catch is that
although we can call the I_LIKE function an “emotion,” it seems like a
dry computation without all the visceral hormonal gut feel that goes
with a human being’s liking something.
I_LIKE(You), but do YOU_LIKE(Me)?
I sometimes think that whole logical way of trying to do AI is
hopelessly wrong. AI never really seems to get anywhere, and the
actually existing robots can’t do much. There’s a persistent tendency
for us to very seriously underestimate how much design has gone into
our brains in the course of our beloved Gaia’s yottaflop parallel
computation running on a quintillion processors for several billion
years.
Q: Creativity is induced in computers through the use of randomness,
which you discuss in your Wolfram review. But humans have an
unconscious which contributes to creativity, and I don't think that's
quite the same thing as randomness. Dreams, for instance, probably
have a random neuronal component, but then they are associated with
the dreamer's unconscious memories and desires and fantasies. Is the
unconscious an element of your conception of robots?
A: Why do you keep asking about robots?
Frankly I’m a lot more interested in mollusks from the fourth
dimension. That was a theme in last year’s Spaceland, and there’s a
space cuttlefish in my new galaxy-spanning epic, Frek and the Elixir,
just coming out from Tor Books.
But, all right, these days I actually have been pondering that hoary
old chestnut, that road apple, that war horse, that battle axe, that
turd in a punchbowl, that zit on the butt, that oxymoronic category
mistake, that glistering gallstone, viz., can computers think? I’m
back in this pickedover union hall sweeping together a non-fiction
book on computers and reality, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the
Soul. The mighty fruit of my decades of labor in the dark satanic
mills of Silicon Valley.
Yes, I think any machine intelligence would have what you might call
an unconscious component. But what is the unconscious? You might think
of it as the endless spinning out of computational variants from your
known data. Like a cellular automaton rule scrolling down the
brainscreen.
What seems random in your mind isn’t really random, it’s merely
complex. Computers have access to the same kinds of computational
complexity, so in principle a machine could be acting like a person.
But I don’t think we can build such a machine. Programs are writ by
fools like me, but only God can make a tree.
Q: John Searle says that we can't simulate consciousness in computers
because we don't know what consciousness is. What do you think?
A: John Searle is a likable fellow, but his classic Chinese Room
argument against computational consciousness is dead wrong. It’s just
wishful thinking to prop up a foregone and fondly held conclusion .
it’s like he’s imagining Earth to be the center of the universe, or
denying that humans evolved from the apes, or pretending he’s not
gonna die.
Two years ago I spent a few days with John Searle in Fellini’s home
town of Rimini, on the Adriatic coast in northern Italy. We were there
to get awards from the Italian government, which was amazing and
wonderful. I never got around to arguing with John about his pet
ideas. He’s a hard guy to interrupt.
I have to admit that the remark you quote has a certain kick to it. We
really don’t have any theory of consciousness, not even a bad one, so
there’s some point in saying we can’t simulate it.
My natural inclination is to say that, dude, everything is conscious,
even a rock, so if you get a nice complex program that imitates
people, it’ll be conscious for free, just because it’s a process in
the physical world. But not everyone’s going to satisfied with that
kind of view . which is technically known as hylozoism.
My mad scientist friend Nick Herbert has a more sophisticated way of
saying something like the same thing. (See his brilliant piece on
“Quantum Tantra,” www.southerncrossreview.org/16/herbert.essay.htm)
Following this sage at a respectful distance, I shovel up some
elephant poop and form it into a dialectic triad thus:
(Thesis) Upon introspection we feel there is a mental residue
that isn’t captured by any scientific system; we feel
ourselves to be quite unlike machines. This is the sense of
having a soul.
(Antithesis) But the slowly advancing work in AI, the prospect
of using genetic algorithms, and considerations of degrees of
computability seem to indicate that any clearly described
human behavior can be emulated by a machine . if not by an
actually constructible machine, then at least by a
theoretically possible machine. Where is, then, the missing
soul?
(Herbert’s Synthesis) The “soul” can be given a scientific
meaning as one’s immediate perception of one’s uncollapsed
wave function, particularly as it is entangled with the
uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.
(Two possible conclusions) Either (a) machines, qua physical
objects, have uncollapsed wave functions as well, so they too
have the same kind of “soul” that we have or (b) there is
something so far unique about how we manage to couple our wave
functional experiences with our logical reasoning.
Being a hylozoist automatist, I believe in option (a). Roger Penrose,
on the other hand, likes to argue for option (b), suggesting that
microtubules in the cytoskeleton might be carrying out quantum
computations.
And now, really, that’s enough science. Let’s talk about writing.
Q: One way that Science Fiction tends to differ from the Mystery genre
is that Mystery writers often tend to write about the same protagonist
from novel to novel (and sometimes have recurring villains). Science
Fiction writers tend not to do this. Why is that? I'm thinking about
Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Robert Parker's Spenser and Hawk, etc.
A: You’re right, I can’t think of many science fiction series about
the same character. Unless you count the Star Trek novelizations? In
Germany there’s a series called Perry Rhodan, they say that every
possible SF idea eventually appears in a Perry Rhodan novel. Spider
Robinson has his Callahan’s Bar series.
One reason it’s hard to continue a series of adventures about science
fiction is that very often the result of a novel is that the world at
the end is quite different from the world at the beginning. So it’s
hard to do a reset.
Certainly my Ware novels are a series but, horrors, the characters
change and age and grow, so it’s not quite what you have in mind.
Generally I like to avoid repeating myself, although once in a while,
it feels good to redo a theme just to try and bring it to a new level.
I have written a certain number of transreal novels about characters
something like me, though I tend to always give my heroes different
names. I haven’t done a transreal book since Saucer Wisdom. where the
main character was called Rudy Rucker. Nick Herbert was in Saucer
Wisdom, too, he was one-third of Frank Shook.
I could maybe do something transreal next time out, I’m thinking of a
novel inspired by my experiences among mathematicians and computer
scientists, both in grad school, and then out in the teaching world. A
kind of life story of two characters who keep ending up together. Give
it an SF spin . which is the “trans” part of transrealism. Set part
one at Rutgers in New Jersey in the 1970s, part two in the far future
with aliens, and maybe in part three one of them is an aging computer
science professor in Y2K Silicon Valley.
Q: I love the way Berenice and Emul address each other in Wetware, and
I'm taken with the way you float between tenses in the first chapter
of White Light. Do you intend to continue with such language
experiments?
A: I always have fun with the language. People don’t always realize
how great Jack Kerouac was at playing with words . I learned a lot of
that from his work. Often as not, my aliens sound like beatniks. But
not in a gauche kind of way, you don’t want to just ape a few obvious
mannerisms. To make it wild and fun, you have to channel some outré
spirit, get yourself into a whole different frame of mind.
When I was writing Emul’s speeches, I’d in fact flip through a copy of
like Visions of Cody by Kerouac, getting that rhythm going. I enjoy
the style of high academic parlance as well, that’s fun to do. And
old-fashioned literary style. When I was writing Berenice’s lines I
was flipping through the works of Edgar Allen Poe.
Some of my computer science students don’t speak English very well,
and that’s another great input for making characters talk in novel
ways. I love any new kind of youth slang that I can pick up on, though
that’s harder now with the kids grown and moved out. When I’m out on
the sidewalks, I’m all ears.
Picking the person and tense to write a book in is always a big
decision. The easiest default option is first person past tense, which
is easy to write and to read. I wanted to write my Bruegel novel third
person in the present tense, like narrating a movie, but my editors
didn’t like the idea. Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon uses that mode, he
gets away with it, in the supreme master’s hands an odd style doesn’t
obtrude. I may still try and do it myself.
Q: Speaking of style, I sometimes think of you as your writing as
“degree zero.” It’s transparent, almost artless.
A: That’s an effect I try for. It might relate to the fact that I
write non-fiction as well; I like to explain things as simply as
possible. I like for my writing to be absolutely clear. I rewrite a
lot, sometimes it’s like a programmer cleaning up his code.
Not that I don’t like to go for the occasional purple patch or
deranged farrago. As you will have noticed in the course of this
interview!
Q: In your new Frek and the Elixir, you postulate a universal dark
matter throughout the universe called “kenner” that can be crafted by
certain individuals by persuading the dark matter to manifest itself
and assume certain characteristics. I find this conception
fascinating. Could you elaborate on it?
A: In SF there’s a tradition of drawing on little-known new physical
phenomena for special effects. In the 1940s it was radiation and
radio. In the 1980s I myself used quarks a lot. These days dark matter
is what’s strange. While I was writing Frek, I read an article in
Science saying that only about five percent of the mass in our
universe is gardenvariety matter, and all the rest is the so-called
dark matter and dark energy. I was talking this over with my man Nick
Herbert, and he said, “Maybe the dark matter is consciousness.” And
then it hit me that, yeah, I could use dark matter to provide a
parascientific justification for giving my characters the useful
ability to make something out of nothing.
I used the name “kenner” because I have an old friend called Kenny
Turan, and I automatically smile whenever I think of his name. He was
my roommate in college, he was the first Kenny I’d met. Actually, in
high-school, my friends and I for some reason thought of Kenny as a
very strange name, it was a word we’d to shout out of car windows when
we were, like, mooning people. “Kennah!” or “Kennah Bone!” The longer
version came from a Little Richard song where he yells “skin and
bone,” and it sounds like “Kennah Bone!” There’s the Ken and Barbie
vibe too. you might remember that in Wetware I had this evil robot
-controlled human character called Ken Doll. Also, of course, Kenner
is the name of a toy manufacturer, which fits in with cosmic
superstuff that you can playfully craft into anything you want.
Face it, dark matter kenner sets off a richer chain of associations
than does a phallic magic wand . although, come to think of it, I have
wand-like things called “allas” in my books Saucer Wisdom and
Realware. The alla-wands work via something I call femtotechnology. By
turning neutrons into protons or vice-versa, they can transmute matter
and turn, like, straw into gold. But crafting kenner is better . you
don’t even need any regular matter to start with. Instead you’re
rotating the invisible dark matter though a higher dimension to make
it real.
I’m an SF writer, and part of my game is to always have some kind of
cock-eyed science explanation, no matter what I do. And always
remember that B.S., M.S., and Ph. D. stand for “bullsh*t,” “more
sh*t,” and “piled high and deep!”
You know, it’s funny how I keep quoting Nick Herbert in this
interview. I guess he’s one of the few people I know who says
unexpected things. How rare that is, really. We imagine that we’re
creative and original, but most of the time we’re just picking, like,
Opinion (K) on Issue (3) from the media-mediated monocultural menu. If
I don’t watch myself, I do it too. The deadness of monoculture is one
of my big themes in Frek and the Elixir. I’m hoping that young people
will read the book and love it and maybe absorb a little of that
message.
Q: In his Trillion Year Spree (1986), Brian Aldiss calls you “a former
cartoonist.” Is there any truth in that?
A: I’m surprised he would have mentioned me, so that’s nice to hear.
I’ve been an outsider for so long that I always imagine nobody’s heard
of me.
In the 1970s, I thought being an underground cartoonist was the
coolest thing anyone could ever be. I couldn’t believe how great the
Zap Comix were, they were simply the funniest, most relevant, most
liberating literature I’d ever seen. I read them over and over,
memorizing every frame.
And when I couldn’t get my hands on new comix fast enough, I was
inspired to get some Rapidograph pens and begin drawing an occasional
strip of my own called “Wheelie Willie”. It used to appear in the
student newspaper at Rutgers, The Daily Targum. Sex, politics, drugs,
and infinity. Some of the staff didn’t want to print it, but I
wouldn’t let up until they did. My career in a nutshell.
Wheelie Willie has a cameo appearance as a character in my novel The
Sex Sphere¸ and he even works as a science popularizer in two fullpage
spreads I put into my non-fiction book Infinity and the Mind.
One of these days I might scan all those old strips and make a zine.
or maybe just put them on-line. No wait, one of these days someone
should pay me to do that. The web is a black hole where I end up doing
too much work for free.
Q: In your recent interview for the San Jose Metro, you say “I'm
trying to sell a proposal for a nonfiction book about computers and
the mind...Today it's The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.” How is
that project going?
A: I’m almost half done writing The Lifebox, the Seashell and the
Soul, and it’s going very well. I’m folding in a lot of my older
ideas, but also I keep coming up with interesting new stuff that
surprises me. which is what I always hope for when I write non-fiction
book. To have the feeling that I’m finally figuring out how things
work.
The book is under contract to Four Walls Eight Windows, a medium-sized
press who published my essay and story collections Seek! and Gnarl! I
got a fairly nice deal with them, although it wasn’t anything like the
kind of deal I’d been dreaming of.
In my vanity, I’d figured that since (a) I’m such an expert on
computation and reality, and (b) Everyone loves my writing, and (c)
The notion of reality as a computation is such a vitally important
topic, that (d) I would pull in a huge advance and I’d be able to pay
off my mortgage and retire from teaching. I even switched to a new
agent, John Brockman, to make the deal. He’s like a specialist at
getting big advances for science books.
But none of the big houses wanted to publish my book at all, let alone
drop a couple of hundred K on me. I still don’t fully understand that.
it doesn’t fit at all with my model of how the world is supposed to
be!
Maybe my proposal was too complicated. Maybe I’m like this robot
running out of a hole in the wall and my voice is a scary high chirp
like the sound of a furious bird or a hysterical insect, and meanwhile
I’m imagining that I’m coming on all reassuring and philosophical.
Waving my byte-stained pincers and feelers. Proffering filthy pictures
of cellular automata. And the thirty-something English-major yuppie
-hipster corporate publishing types are, like, backing out the door.
“He’s old, isn’t he? And crazy. What the hell was that even about?”
Four Walls Eight Windows has the great virtue of not being part of a
conglomerate. It’s owned and run by one guy, John Oakes, who, long may
he prosper, thinks I’m an important writer.
And I do think The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul is going to be
an important book. Maybe the proposal was hard to understand, but
that’s because of my working methods. In all honesty, I have a lot of
trouble figuring out in advance what I’m going to say. My books
gestate, they grow, they emerge. I’ll be done with Lifebox in about a
year. It’s probably going to be the last non-fiction science book I
write, and I’m trying to make it really fun and interesting and full
of amazing ideas. Putting in all the wild stuff I learned and saw over
these last twenty years in Californee.
And when that’s done, I’m going to write another SF book, maybe that
transreal thing about crazy mathematicians and computer scientists
with time travel and intergalactic aliens thrown in to crunk up the
mix. And if Frek sells well I could do a sequel to it. We’ll see. I’m
hoping to keep writing until I can’t remember any more, um, you know
- words.