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Rudy Rucker

84 quotes

“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I knew you’d say that. You’re so anal, Fletcher. Too much math.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The government had recently repealed all speed limits in an attempt to boost oil consumption.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, yeah, she told me about that. I think mysticism’s a bunch of crap. All religions are a bunch of crap.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve never seen a religion that wasn’t basically evil.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now that’s a fib, I know,” said the black woman. “Is you folks preachers?”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My roommate says anyone who mails bombs to computer scientists can’t be all bad.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you know computer science?” “I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s only one way that people change the past, Bela. They stop thinking about it. They move on.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?” Reality is made of gnarly computations.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The meaning of life is beauty and love.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Rudy Rucker (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source