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Rudy Rucker
84 quotes
“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!”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Old age is all about killing time.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s the problem with immortality,” mused Jack. “You never live long enough to get there.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do you remember these things?” “Mathematicians don’t get senile,” he said. “They just go nuts,” I muttered.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relax, Wag.” “Relaxing makes me tense!” I scream.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’ll be back. Men always come back when they see you making money.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kelso had the kind of slit-eyed street smarts that came only from Berkeley law classes.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The patterns of mathematics can be roughly grouped into five archetypes: Number, Space, Logic, Infinity, and Information.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is just so typical of you, Alwin, to be in love with a giant ass.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Was I to be Earth's first casualty in the Attack of the Giant Ass From Hilbert Space?”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source