Another law of nature

Poincare Halfplane by Claudio Rocchini

Rudy Rucker has a post on finishing his memoir.

...thanks to the chapter I wrote about society as a kind of computation in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I’ve finally came to accept that writers’ sales obey a scaling law that’s technically known as an inverse power law distribution. You’re not getting lackluster book advances because someone is actively screwing you. It’s the scaling law.

The scaling law applies across the board—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books. There’s no getting around it. Thus, if you’re the hundredth-most popular writer, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand bucks. That’s how nature is. It’s not anyone’s fault. [more]

About the same time I read that I saw John Gray's review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton [which I haven't read], and this passage jumped out:

One episode covers the time the author spent with a career counsellor, “a professional dedicated to finding ways of ensuring that work will be synonymous with fulfilment”. Describing a session with Carol, a private client, “37 years old, a tax lawyer, in charge of a department of 45 in an office near the Bank of England”, de Botton recounts how Carol suddenly stared to sob as the counsellor “watched her with his kindly eyes, and outside, the neighbour’s cat took a stroll round the carp pond”. The counsellor has dedicated his life to the belief that work is a quest for self-enactment, a way of becoming who we really are. The trouble is that, like many of his clients, Carol seems perplexingly diffuse in her interests, and it is not clear whether there is a self concealed somewhere within her that is waiting to be enacted. Worse, it is unclear whether, if such a self does emerge, anyone will have any interest in it. These uncertainties extend to the counsellor himself who, in return for allowing de Botton to sit in on the sessions, asks to be referred to a literary agent who could promote a book on which he has been working. Twelve agents are contacted, and each replies with polite enthusiasm. The book remains unpublished.

Commenting on this episode, de Botton writes: “For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary projects or organisations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood.” [more]

I don't have these anxieties anymore, but that might be due to a lack of imagination or effort. This week is the first for a long time [four weeks, more?] when too many deadlines to reasonably handle have not been trailing me. I spent today [Monday] sleeping in, worked a little, scootered around town, collected cash from some clients, came home, cooked, read, took out the trash, bought some coffee and settled down for an hour or two's work ahead of a swim, and then came home to this. I don't have a boss, and work in my study or anywhere else I set up my notebook. I know how lucky I am, but I also know my story, although I almost never think about it.

Power laws and the failures necessary for success were also explored in this earlier post: The myth of 1,000 true fans

Anonymity

rudy rucker also takes pictures

There's something good about being the secret hero of the story, an unknown agent for your own cause in the world.

Like almost everyone I live in anonymity, one of the supposedly dull masses that everyone - the masses - scorns to a certain degree. And that's cool, it's like how most things seem plain until you look at them with your perception cleansed. Certain people are dull not only because they and we lack imagination, but also because few people see what's actually there.

Pattern recognition

Turing Patterns, "somewhat orderly chaos" in nature

Everything is Alive, a paper by Rudy Rucker, turned up in Google Reader today. It's seven short pdf pages, and here's a few excerpts.

Every object or process is a computation. My name for this thesis is Universal Automatism. Universal Automatism says the world is made of computations. [...]

In order to make Universal Automatism more believable, I have to use a very inclusive notion of computation. So I say that a computation is any process that obeys finitely describable rules.

Do note that, rather than saying the world is one single computation, I prefer to say that the world consists of many computations—at high and low levels. There need not be any single underlying master computation—no robot voice reciting numbers in the dark. Instead we are a seething swarm of little computations made of yet smaller computations. [....]

[My claim is] that naturally occurring computations can in fact have the richness of consciousness, for the reason that they are gnarly computations [or “somewhat orderly chaos”]. Furthermore, I argue that all naturally occurring processes are in fact complex enough to be gnarly computations. [....]

Every object or process is a gnarly computation. In many cases it's intuitively clear that nature is performing a gnarly computation: think of swaying trees, a flickering fire, the cracks in drying mud, flowing water, or even a rock. A rock? To the human eye, a rock appears not to be doing much. But viewed as a quantum computation, the rock is as lively and seething as, say, a small star. At the atomic level, a rock is like a zillion balls connected by force springs, and we know this kind of compound oscillatory system behaves chaotically.

Order and total predictability are boring, i.e. they contain little information and can be summarized very briefly. Total chaos contains too much information, and thus resists summarization. The boundary between order and chaos - "somewhat orderly chaos", in Rucker's term - is where there's enough information to be interesting, but not too much that it can't be summarized. In this passage, a summary can be taken to be an algorithm, which brings us neatly back to two posts ago.

The idea for the next few days is to observe and feel this boundary closer, surrendering to it when opportunities arise.

Intractability vs Evolution

On the train to Taipei listened to an interesting talk about algorithms in nature from Princetown's lunch'n'learn series, which tied up various things that have been floating through my head. In brief, there are certain problems, such as folding proteins, that for humans [and their computers] seem to be intractable, but for nature are easy, instantly done.

Rudy Rucker maintains that everything is computation, that when the wind hits trees reality is the result of calculations that takes place.

Craig Venter is not trying to make something entirely new, but rather to find / decode what nature has produced and then to put the parts together in a different way.


The world has been evolving for a long time, and nature is really, really smart. It knows what works, it gets things done.

Beyond me

Been listening to various Rudy Rucker podcasts and reading his blog, so picked up Infinity and the Mind online, without being able to browse. A mistake, as the math is beyond me. Anything that can't be done on a cell phone calculator leaves me baffled. So far I've been skipping all the pages full of symbols, but maybe I'll sit down and try and find out what they mean. I can probably get only 10% of the whole thing into my head.

Fortunately, 10% of infinity is still infinity.

He quotes Benjamin Blood, who [working before William James] would hold a cloth soaked with ether to his face and slip into unconsciousness, then as his hand fell away he would come to again, moving from trance to full awareness, which in this quote he refers to as sanity:

I think most persons who have tested it will accept this as the central point of the illumination: i) that sanity is not the basic quality of intelligence, but is a mere condition which is variable ... ii) and that only in sanity is formal or contrasting thought, while the naked life is realized outside of sanity altogether; iii) and it is this instant contrast of this 'tasteless water of souls' with formal thought as we 'come to' that leaves the patient an astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the absurd are of equal dignity. p217 [my bold]

The problem with transcendent experiences is the difficulty of integrating what's been felt with everyday life. What I like about the line above is that it says that both sides of the experience are equally valid, and that it's in the moment of crossing from one state to the other that something useful is learned. In Rucker's case this is the moving from awareness of the infinite - the one - back to the everyday - the many.

We have to live in the everyday world - get a job of somekind, turn up and perform, ideally with good health and the desired level of human contact. Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent, says this is what he learned from shamans:

...do what you can for those around you (including plants and animals), but don't make a big deal of it. ... I spend my time promoting land titling projects and bilingual education for indigenous people, and thinking about how to move knowledge forward and how to open up understanding between people; I also spend time with my children, and with children in my community (as a soccer coach); and I look after the plants in my garden, without using pesticides and so on. But I do this because I think it needs doing, and because it's all I can do, but not because it's "spiritual."

The challenge is in not getting blitzed on transcendence as an escape from everyday situations that it's possible to overcome or do away with, and instead to use those moments out of time to work toward the change.

The week-long vacation for Chinese New Year starts in 20 hours, and I'll be getting blitzed.