Rudy Rucker

"My sense is that, in the long run, Mother Nature always wins. Cautionary note: Mother Nature's win may not include the survival of the pesky human race!"

"Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won't actually change that much—not even in a million years. That's a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we've utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins."

"Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there will only be ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportion of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed."

"I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, conducts outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn't dumb. Every particle everywhere and every when computes at the maximum possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality. Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rain forest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god."

"But, come on, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. Nature embodies superhuman intelligence just as she is."

"In short, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy."

"Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. You experience a release of tension when you notice a glitch. Something was off-kilter, and now you see what it was. The elephant in the room has been named. The evil spirit has been incanted. Perceiving an incongruity in our supposedly smooth-running society provokes a shock of recognition and a concomitant burst of laughter. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests."

"Old age is all about killing time."

"“That’s the problem with immortality,” mused Jack. “You never live long enough to get there.”"

"“How do you remember these things?” “Mathematicians don’t get senile,” he said. “They just go nuts,” I muttered."

"As he mentions this last sin, he looks down my nightgown, which I’m just loving. I press his hand against my warm thigh. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I don’t live in Hell. I live in San Jose.”"

"It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening."

"It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth."

"But Charles was the one who finally realized it was nuts to be walking around inside a sewer with a tweaker leading the way. The fact that Charles figured this out before me makes me wonder about myself. I think I’m spending too much time on my computer."

"“Relax, Wag.” “Relaxing makes me tense!” I scream."

"Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna’s age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long, furry frankfurter cat-snakes."

"He’ll be back. Men always come back when they see you making money."

"Kelso had the kind of slit-eyed street smarts that came only from Berkeley law classes."

"The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness."

"Janna knew full well that the classic dot-com move was to grab that golden parachute and bail like crazy before the investors and employees caught on."

"Tug was fascinated, and not by the money involved. Like many mathematicians, Mesoglea considered money to be one boring, merely bookkeeping subset of the vast mental universe of general computation."

"“Security always soars along with unemployment,” said Pullen, nodding his head at his own wisdom. “We are in a major downturn. I’ve seen this before, so I know the drill. Locks, bolts, Dobermans, they’re all market leaders this quarter. That’s Capitalism 301, girls.”"

"I think of consciousness as a point, an "eye," that moves about in a sort of mental space. All thoughts are already there in this multi-dimensional space, which we might as well call the Mindscape. Our bodies move about in the physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the mental space called the Mindscape."

"Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape. For just as you can physically occupy the same position in the Universe that anyone else does, you can, in principle, mentally occupy the same state of mind or position in the Mindscape that anyone else does."

"Just as a rock is already in the Universe, whether or not someone is handling it, an idea is already in the Mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it. A person who does mathematical research, writes stories, or meditates is an explorer of the Mindscape in much the same way that Armstrong, Livingstone, or Cousteau are explorers of the physical features of our Universe. The rocks on the Moon were there before the lunar module landed; and all the possible thoughts are already out there in the Mindscape. The mind of an individual would seem to be analogous to the room or to the neighborhood in which that person lives. One is never in touch with the whole Universe through one’s physical perceptions, and it is doubtful whether one’s mind is ever able to fill the entire Mindscape."

"In more familiar terms, it is not hard to prove that God is infinite ... but what if you don’t believe that God exists? It may seem hard to doubt that the more impersonal Absolutes–such as “everything,” or the Mindscape–exist, but there are those who do doubt this. The issue under consideration is a version of the old philosophical problem of the One and the Many. What is being asked is whether the cosmos exists as an organic One, or merely as a Many with no essential coherence. It is certainly true that the Mindscape, for instance, does not exist as a single rational thought. For if the Mindscape is a One, then it is a member of itself, and thus can only be known through a flash of mystical vision. No rational thought is a member of itself, so no rational thought could tie the Mindscape into a One."

"In one of our conversations I pressed Gödel to explain what he meant by the “other relation to reality” by which he said one could directly see mathematical objects. He made the point that the same possibilities of thought are open to everyone, so that we can take the world of possible forms as objective and absolute. Possibility is observer-independent, and therefore real, because it is not subject to our will."

"Gödel shared with Einstein a certain mystical turn of thought. The word “mystic” is almost pejorative these days. But mysticism does not really have anything to do with incense or encounter groups or demoniac possession. There is a difference between mysticism and occultism. A pure strand of classical mysticism runs from Plato to Plotinus and Eckhart to such great modern thinkers as Aldous Huxley and D. T. Suzuki. The central teaching of mysticism is this: Reality is One. The practice of mysticism consists in finding ways to experience this higher unity directly. 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."

"Is this all there is? Struggle, loneliness, disease, and death ... Is this all there is? Life can seem so chaotic, so dreary, so grindingly hard. Who among us has not dreamt of some higher reality, some transcendent level of meaning and peace? There actually is such a higher reality ... And it is not so very hard to reach. For many, the fourth dimension has served as a gateway into it. But what is the fourth dimension? No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us. Philosophers and mystics meditate upon it; physicists and mathematicians calculate with it. The fourth dimension is part and parcel of many respected scientific theories, yet it is also of great use in such disreputable fields as spiritualism and science fiction."

"The fourth dimension is a direction different from all the directions in normal space. Some say that time is the fourth dimension ... And this is, in a sense, true. Others say that the fourth dimension is a hyperspace direction quite different from time ... This is also true. There are, in fact, many higher dimensions. One of these higher dimensions is time, another higher dimension is the direction m which space is curved, and still another higher dimension may lead toward some utterly different universes existing parallel to our own. At the deepest level, our world can be regarded as a pattern in infinite-dimensional space, a space in which we and our minds move like fish in water."

"Starting with no preconceptions at all, what is the most reasonable model of the world that we can build up? Only two things seem really certain: one exists, and one has perceptions. I may be a meat machine, a soul, an eye of God, a collection of ideas, or who knows what — but I am certain that I exist. I am the thing that writes these words. Of course, you may doubt whether I am real — perhaps you are only dreaming that you read this book — but you do know for certain that you yourself exist. The fact that one has experiences is equally certain; to put it more neutrally, one cannot doubt that perceptions occur."

"What is reality? Take all your perceptions and all of mine, take everyone’s thoughts and all the visions. In an infinite-dimensional space there is room to fit them all together; each is a piece of the infinite-dimensional One, and this One is reality."

"Reality is indescribably rich and complex. Sometimes I forget this, and life goes gray. But the world is alive, and we are living parts of it. Thoughts are as real and important as objects. Every object is an endless source of wonder. We don’t know why we’re here — we don’t even know what we are. But we exist, and the world is going on. Our ordinary notions of space and time are just a convenient fiction. Higher dimensions are everywhere. There’s no need to work for enlightenment; enlightenment is here and now, as close as the fourth dimension."

"The patterns of mathematics can be roughly grouped into five archetypes: Number, Space, Logic, Infinity, and Information."

"People sometimes say, “If the world really has a simple explanation, then where did all the randomness and information come from?” We can think of the information as coming in with the passage of time. Each tick of time increases the depth of the world computer’s output."

"My purpose in writing Mind Tools has been to see what follows if one believes that everything is information. I have reached the following (debatable) conclusions."

"So what is reality, one more time? An incompressible computation by a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions. And where is this huge computation taking place? Everywhere; it’s what we’re made of."

"I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices."

"My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist."

"Not only am I scared of big, strong men, I'm scared of mean little women. It's just little skinny men and nice big women that I get along with."

"I stared down at the object in my lap. A skin-colored sphere the size of a giant beach ball, with breasts on top and a mouth between the breasts. At the bottom were the generous buttocks, a crinkly anus and a vaginal passage containing my rapidly limpening penis. Was this safe?"

"It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right."

"This brought back the sick, ashamed feeling I'd woken up with. I was no better than some geek with a foam-rubber woman's torso like they advertise in Hustler. What a pathetic, twisted version of womanhood: all the "inessential" parts lopped off, nothing left behind but tits and ass and holes. Lifelike washable plastic skin. Greek and French features. But yet, in a way, wasn't the sex sphere always what I'd wanted in a woman? An ugly truth there. "Shut up and spread!" How many times had I told Sybil that, if not in so many words?"

"Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring."

"I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a hypersphere extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere's giant cunt swallowed me I could end up somewhere very . . . different."

"Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book."

"At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a Carousel slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections."

"But after a while, some higher brain-center cut in, and I began being mentally able to fit the wildly changing scenery into a coherent four-dimensional whole. The process was really no more devious than the process by which one integrates the two hundred lines of a TV screen into a single two-dimensional image . . . which in turn is interpreted as a three-dimensional scene. It's just a matter of processing information. Impossible? I saw."

"The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere."

"A person's lifeworm is a tangle of atomic worldlines. A braid. The dotty little atoms trace out smooth lines in spacetime: you are the pattern that these lines make up. there is no one single atom that is exclusively yours. I breathe an atom out, you breathe it in. Your garbage helps my tomatoes grow. And so the little spacetime threads weave us all together. The human race is a single vast tapestry, linked by our shared food and air. There are larger links as well: sperm, egg and umblilicus. Each family tree is an organic whole. Your spacetime body tapers back to the threads of mother's egg and father's sperm. And children, if you have them, are forever rooted in your flesh."

"This is just so typical of you, Alwin, to be in love with a giant ass."

"The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?"

"Was I to be Earth's first casualty in the Attack of the Giant Ass From Hilbert Space?"

"At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schröedinger's Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a coloring in of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs."

"The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A . . . a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause."

"For whatever reason, we find it easier to "read" Hilbert Space patterns in terms of time. Yet the patterns exist outside of time. Thinking timelessly is not some unusual skill; when you remember last night's supper you sense a whole and not a chew-by-chew replay. To know a novel's action is to grasp the four-dimensional spacetime whole described."

"Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?"

"Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles."

"There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not . . . alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here."

"I knew you’d say that. You’re so anal, Fletcher. Too much math."

"The government had recently repealed all speed limits in an attempt to boost oil consumption."

"Oh, yeah, she told me about that. I think mysticism’s a bunch of crap. All religions are a bunch of crap."

"I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace."

"This provender was at a double remove from reality; it was artificially made food that had been further treated in an attempt to make it healthy."

"I’ve never seen a religion that wasn’t basically evil."

"“Now that’s a fib, I know,” said the black woman. “Is you folks preachers?”"

"It’s perfect, isn’t it? It just goes to show that everything I’ve ever said about religion is true. The sky’s the limit when it comes to religious stupidity. Here we have a race of alien invaders, and the evangelical true believers are flocking here to get taken over."

"Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom."

"“I’ll wish for ten million more bucks while I’m at it.” “And immortality?” “No, no. I don’t want to live forever. Death’s the only thing that keeps me going.”"

"The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time."

"“What’s superspace?” I felt around for my body and couldn’t find it. “Thoughtland, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God’s mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White...” “Cut the crap, Harry.”"

"My roommate says anyone who mails bombs to computer scientists can’t be all bad."

"Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts."

"People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.”"

"“Do you know computer science?” “I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”"

"Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control."

"There’s only one way that people change the past, Bela. They stop thinking about it. They move on."

"In a sense mathematics is quite objective: the same deductions can become known to everyone who starts with the same axioms and definitions; the same abstract forms can be universally perceived. So it’s perfectly possible to talk math with a cockroach from Galaxy Z."

"It was odd, odd, odd to see people die. The world rolled on the same as before, as heedlessly as if a person were an ant or a wildflower or a puff of wind. Nature kept on making more and more of everything, and never mind that birth is a death sentence. And now that I’d been to La Hampa, I knew that creation was even more prodigal than I’d ever imagined. There were worlds upon worlds filled with people struggling and swarming like fretful gnats, all of them doomed to vanish into dust while the cosmic dance spun on."

"In the 1970s I even got to meet Kurt Gödel a few times. The king of the logicians. Gödel once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.” By this he meant that pure logic can take you farther than you might believe possible."

"So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?” Reality is made of gnarly computations."

"The meaning of life is beauty and love."

"See the gnarl. The air is a gnarly ocean; the leaves dance on the trees. I’ve always enjoyed watching clouds and water; and now I realize that the computations they’re carrying out are fully as complex as anything in any book I might read. Each flickering shadow is a reminder of the world’s unsolvable and unpredictable richness."

"One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect."