LifeBox

by Rudy Rucker, The LifeBox, the Sea Shell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/ ISBN:1560257229

the LifeBox is not unlike a WebLog/Life Blog/etc. I hadn't originally realized how essential images, videos, and sound clips (Multimedia) would be for the lifebox, but, duh, that's obv, isn't it, especially since writing is, like, hard. The linking issue is the biggie that makes the Lifeblog (LifeStreams), or the regular blog, still not quite like a lifebox. Well, do a first pass by some automated linker, tweak it a little, and then let it loose. Shovelware your lifebox data onto the web and let people Wiki up the links themselves.

• Jan'2013: Les Orchard wrote a nice piece of fiction around this. I've outsourced myself into the cloud... There’s a little bit of programming, a little bit of guided evolution, and a lot of storytelling. It’s been like writing a memoir, only more in-depth – and demonstrably more practical.

Digital Philosophy?

The Meaning Of Life is to create Gnarly Class Four Computation.

• note that Cosma Shalizi's critique of Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science challenges this classification of Cellular Automata (referencing Lawrence Gray's review)

In my new Lifebox book, I rhetorically ask, "Suppose that at some point you find society’s Hive Mind unacceptably hysterical and debased. What can you do about it?" and then I suggest, "You can emigrate internally --- not to another hive, but to a Sub Hive. The idea is simply to put less emotional involvement (Engagement) into the national hive mind and more into some smaller grouping. Without actually leaving the country you can emotionally leave the big hive." (Warrens Vs Plaza, Urban Archipelago)

On the Enlightenment front, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul ends with a discussion of six keys to Happiness, drawn from considerations involving six successively higher levels of gnarly computation. And these will make a nice note upon which to end this article.

cf Mind Clone