Rudy Rucker Quotes

The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere.

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.

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.

Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book.

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.

Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring.

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?

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.

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?

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.

My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.

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.

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.

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.

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.