Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Looking at a video of a tree branch waving in the wind, you’d be hard put, in our world, to say when the video was made. Not so if you look at a video of a person talking. Or at the genome of a bacterium.

  With a memory, history has a direction. Might natural processes acquire a memory and wake up?

  Stephen: Maybe I’ll get back to you on that.

  * * *

  Note on “Dialogue with Stephen Wolfram”

  Written in February, 2006

  Unpublished.

  As I mentioned in my essay, “Cellular Automata,” I first met Stephen Wolfram in 1985. He made a tremendous impression on me. It’s very rare that I get to know someone whom I consider to be truly intelligent, and Wolfram is one of those rare birds. It was largely thanks to meeting him that I switched careers at age forty and become a computer science professor in California. And it’s thanks to Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science that I wrote my own long book on the meaning of computation, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I’ve seen him off and on over the years, and he seems to enjoy my company as well. At one point we had the idea of writing a book of dialogues together, but the present snippet is as far as we got.