Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 29

007. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 7: Consciousness, Nov 17, 2005.

Lecture on the second half of Chapter Four of “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.” Arguing that a computer program can be conscious, and that this will happen within a hundred years. (48.27MB. min.)

006. Philosophy and Computers 6: Neural Nets and the Phenomenolgy of Mind, Nov 4, 2005.

The 6th lecture in my SJSU philosophy course. Covers sections 4.1 to 4.3 of “The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul.” (60.96MB. min.)

005. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 5: Review Chaps 1-3. Oct 13, 2005.

Review session summarizing Chapters 1 – 3 of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. A good introduction to the material. Visuals of the questions I wrote on the blackboards are online. (65.44MB. min.)

004. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 4: Evolution and Artificial Life. October 6, 2005.

The 4th lecture in my Philsophy and Computers course, covering the second half of Chapter 3 of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. Topics: homeostasis, evolution, artificial life, robotics. I recorded this in stereo and equalized the sound with the Audacity program, and I think this one sounds better than my earlier posts. (49.22MB. 60 min.)

003. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 3: Morphogenesis. Sept 29, 2005.

Rudy Rucker Podcast #003. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 3: Morphogenesis. Sept 29, 2005 — The 3rd recorded lecture in my Philsophy and Computers course at SJSU, covering the first half of Chapter 3 of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I talk about self-reproduction, intelligent design, morphogenesis, and ecology in terms of computations. By the way, these Philosophy and Computers lectures are more or less independent of each other. (44.29MB. 1 hr.)

002. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 2: Quantum Mechanics. Sept 22, 2005

Rudy Rucker Podcast 002. Talk: Philosophy and Computers 2: Quantum Mechanics. Sept 22, 2005. The 2nd lecture from my Philosophy and Computers class at SJSU. The lectures are based on my book The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul On the book’s page you can download the Cellab and CAPOW software used in the demos being discussed. I didn’t manage to record the classroom ectures that preceded this meeting of the class. Some of that material appears, however, in Podcast #991 "Gnarly Computation&quot, which I’ve labeled as Philosohpy and Computers 1. (56.94MB. 1 hr 2 min.)

001. Talk. Philosophy and Computers 1. Gnarly Computation. Sept 26, 2005

Rudy’s talk on “Gnarly Computation” at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, September 26, 2005. The slides for this talk are online. And there’s a blog post on the talk. This talk stands in for lecture 1 for my Philosophy and Computers course. (46.93MB, 51 mins).

Lit Crawl: Dark Lords of Cyberpunk—Recap & Podcasts

I organized a reading as part of Lit Crawl in San Francisco on Saturday, October 18, 2014, from 8:30 to 9:30 at Haus Coffee, on 24th Street near Folsom. Many thanks to Erica of Haus Coffee who helped us settle in.

Our session was called FLURB: Dark Lords of Cyberpunk, and was also listed as session #97: FLURB: Astonishing Misfits. Here’s the official Lit Crawl schedule and map.

The readers were me, Richard Kadrey, and John Shirley. We’re all cyberpunks, and we all published stories in the Flurb webzine that I edited and published through 14 issues a few years back. Samples of our work in Flurb are my “Tangier Routines,”, Kadrey’s “Trembling Blue Stars,” and Shirley’s “Bitters.”

[Photo by Wongoon Cha, whose story “Procrastination” was in Flurb as well.]

I read a San Francisco B-movie-type story called “The Attack of the Giant Ants.”

Richard read “Surfing the Khumbu,” about a cyberpunk woman who brings down satellites with her mind…and gets high off this. You can find this story online in Infinite Matrix.

John read the Flurb story “Bitters” mentioned above—it’s about a guy who eats brains to get high.

Here are podcasts of our three readings, each about fifteen minutes long.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my Podcasts page, which runs back to 2005.)

“The Attack of the Giant Ants” is scheduled to appear in print on the webzine Motherboard this month. It was inspired the Blondie song of the same name, and by the vintage movie, Them. Thanks, by the way, to editor Claire Evans for help in bringing the story to a level of full gloss.

Richard Kadrey read a second story as well, a horror tale about a serial killer who’s propitiating an Egyptian god.

John Shirley’s bravura reading / performance was ill, sick, and wondrous.

Many thanks to the enthusiastic listeners who turned out and tuned in. After the readings, they could only formulate one question: “What were you guys like as kids?”

And a closing thanks to the cute and very California-girl Laurie from Lit Crawl who helped coordinate the event.

Lit Crawl: Dark Lords of Cyberpunk: Rucker / Kadrey / Shirley

I’ve organized a reading as part of Lit Crawl in San Francisco on Saturday, October 17, 2014. It’s from 8:30 to 9:30 at Haus Coffee, on 24th Street near Folsom.

Our session is called FLURB: Dark Lords of Cyberpunk, and it’s also listed as session #97: FLURB: Astonishing Misfits. Here’s the official Lit Crawl schedule and map.

Richard Kadrey

The readers are me, Richard Kadrey, and John Shirley. We’re all cyberpunks, and we all published stories in the Flurb webzine that I edited and published through 14 issues a few years back. Samples of our work in Flurb are my “Tangier Routines,”, Kadrey’s “Trembling Blue Stars,” and Shirley’s “Bitters.”

John Shirley

For our Lit Crawl at Haus Coffee on Saturday, Oct 18, I’ll be reading a San Francisco B-movie-type story called “The Attack of the Giant Ants,” Kadrey will be reading some short-short stories, and Shirley’s act is as yet undetermined, but surely it will be ill, sick, and wondrous.

Rudy Rucker

See you there!

At Loose Ends

I’m kind of at loose ends these days. I have some ideas for a novel with the working title Wacker World, and I’ve been moving those around in my head. And I’ve written a lot of notes. But somehow I’m not quite ready to start the actual book. It’s like staring into the sun, and I keep flinching away.

I’ve been working in parallel on my giant 400,000 word Journals 1990-2015, hoping to get that finished and published early next summer.

I watched a graffiti artist at a big art festival in San Jose a few weeks back, it was called “Anne and Marc’s Art Party.” It was nice to see how this young man worked.

It’s nice when you get into a work of art, or a work of literature, and you forget your self. The muse gets into your head. In a lesser way, when you’re holding a camera, sometimes you see what you think are pictures amid the clutter around you. These are the backs of some signs at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park.

I was part of a reading at Kepler’s about a month ago, we were promoting an anthology called Hieroglyph. The best-selling author Neal Stevenson was part of the project, and there was a huge crowd at Kepler’s. This photo is of two of my fellow lesser-known authors, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. They have pieces in that antho and were on the panel as well.

Kepler didn’t have a single book of mine for sale, which kind of made me wonder why I keep bothering to write them.

Somehow I picked up a cold virus around the time of that reading, and it stayed with me for a month. By the end, I had what you might call postviral depression—it’s when, like, you’re feverish and coughing and in a bubble week after week, and you feel like you’ll never be well. The photo above is one I took just the other day, when I started feeling reasonably cheerful again, it’s of my writer friend Michael Blumlein in San Francisco.

Not that Blumlein looks especially cheerful here himself. Here’s a zoom in on his face. What is he thinking? Hard to tell. Being a writer is hard.

On the art front, the other day my daughter Georgia sent me a jpg of this “cornball fall painting” by former Los Gatos artist titan Thomas Kinkade, and she suggested that I liven it up. So I Photoshopped an alien “gub” from my novel The Big Aha, plus the rather dangerous hyperdimensional creature Babs, from my novel The Sex Sphere. Always fun to be busy doing nothing.

Another fun thing this month was going down to Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur with Sylvia. There’s this wonderful big rock there with what I call the Magic Door, a square hole where the surf surges through. The Magic Door plays a big role in my old novel Mathematicians in Love.

There’s as second, less clearly-cut magic door in that rock, over near the left end, and some guys were standing inside it, like on the threshold. I like the weird plants that grow in there as well. Truly science-fictional.

And what else? Sylvia and I went to see the latest ballet by Mark Morris and his company, at Zellerbach Hall in Berzerkistan. I like the side wall of the theater, it’s like abstract art. Telegraph Avenue seems ever shabbier. When you lose a big bookstore like Cody’s you lose a lot. But I suppose Berkeley students aren’t buying books like they used to.

Just this week I was up at Castle Rock Park. I like to walk through the park to a ridge that overlooks a big basin of trees, with the Pacific visible in the distance. Interestingly pocked rocks called tafoni in the park. Some of them with loud people climbing on them—they weren’t there twenty years ago. Nature still doing her thing anyhow anywhen anywhere. This photo of some red bark on a manzanita tree.

A stone whale or turtle surfaces, astounded. A-stone-aged.

And I’m happy by a sun-outlined bundle of laurel branches.

[image error]

So, like I said, I had some good ideas for Wacker World, but today I was working on Journals 1990-2015. Fun / nostalgic / wrenching going down those mazes of memory lanes. I see publishing it one large volume—as well as, of course, the tractable ebook format.

One last image, it’s a detail of Alma Baptizes in the Waters of Mormon, by Arnold Friberg. For whatever reason, my friend and fellow-writer Thom Metzger became obsessed with this painting while writing his highly entertaining journal/memoir Undercover Mormon: A Spy in the House of the Gods which I’ve been reading this week.

I was Thom Metzger’s math / philosophy teacher, back at Geneseo State College in upstate New York in 1977. Tick, tick! The two clocks are in synch.

Or maybe not. Blumlein asks: “What time am I? Is it 9:00, or quarter to midnight? Early or late? The beginning, or the end?”