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 blo… - Rudy Rucker

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.

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.

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.