Rudy Rucker Quotes
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If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!
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I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere.
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It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.
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I like to do things that are surprising and different.
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Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?
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When I see an old movie, like from the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s, the people look so calm. They don’t have smartphones, they’re not looking at computer screens, they’re taking their time. They’ll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we’ll find our way back to that garden of Eden.
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For me, the best thing about cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just pretend that the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.
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We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves
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Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.
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A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.
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All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.
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A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.
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Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
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It's a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can't predict and we can't control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.
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It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.
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The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.
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Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.
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Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.
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I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.
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Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.
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Lately I’ve been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
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At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.
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What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?
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In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.
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Our bodies are the time machine.
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But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.
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The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.
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If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.
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Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.
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The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.
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