Rudy Rucker writes a running archive of 117 podcast episodes spanning 2005 to 2026, documenting story readings, academic talks, interviews, and conversations with figures including Stephen Wolfram, Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, and V. Vale. The episodes cover his novels (the Ware Tetralogy, The Hollow Earth, Turing & Burroughs, The Big Aha, All the Visions), his concept of transrealism, computational theory, consciousness, and digital immortality.
- Episodes #17', #29 and #56 are lost to bit rot and unreliable hosting
- He taught a full "Philosophy and Computers" course at San Jose State, with recorded lectures based on his book *The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul*
- Several episodes feature readings of stories co-written with Bruce Sterling, later collected in their 2016 anthology *Transreal Cyberpunk*
- The most recent (2026) episode tackles writer bots and proposes transrealism as a way to rise above generated text
- Episodes #17', #29 and #56 are lost to bit rot and unreliable hosting
- He taught a full "Philosophy and Computers" course at San Jose State, with recorded lectures based on his book *The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul*
- Several episodes feature readings of stories co-written with Bruce Sterling, later collected in their 2016 anthology *Transreal Cyberpunk*
- The most recent (2026) episode tackles writer bots and proposes transrealism as a way to rise above generated text
This paper argues for the "substrate flexibility" of consciousness, asserting that conscious experience can arise from diverse physical media beyond Earth-based biological matter. Moving away from debates focused on whether human-like cognitive functions can be replicated in silicon (the neural replacement argument), authors Jeremy Pober and Eric Schwitzgebel argue that any form of non-human or extraterrestrial consciousness is possible across varied biochemical foundations. They support this via a three-part syllogism: the existence of numerous behaviorally sophisticated species in the universe, the likelihood that these species utilize fundamentally different chemical substrates (such as alternative solvents or differing amino acid alphabets), and the application of the Copernican Principle, which suggests we should not assume our specific biological architecture is uniquely privileged for consciousness.
* **The Copernican Argument:** Following the principle of mediocrity, if behaviorally sophisticated life exists in diverse environments across the cosmos, it is more philosophically consistent to assume some are conscious rather than assuming only Earth-like biology possesses sentience.
* **Substantial vs. Fine-Grained Flexibility:** The authors clarify that while "human-level" consciousness might require highly specific biological details, "substantial" substrate flexibility—the ability for awareness to exist in entirely different chemical systems—remains plausible and likely.
* **Biochemical Diversity:** Based on astrobiological considerations, the paper posits that because many alternative chemical combinations (different scaffolding atoms or heteroatoms) could support complex life and control systems, consciousness is not restricted to carbon-based, water-dependent organisms.
* **The Copernican Argument:** Following the principle of mediocrity, if behaviorally sophisticated life exists in diverse environments across the cosmos, it is more philosophically consistent to assume some are conscious rather than assuming only Earth-like biology possesses sentience.
* **Substantial vs. Fine-Grained Flexibility:** The authors clarify that while "human-level" consciousness might require highly specific biological details, "substantial" substrate flexibility—the ability for awareness to exist in entirely different chemical systems—remains plausible and likely.
* **Biochemical Diversity:** Based on astrobiological considerations, the paper posits that because many alternative chemical combinations (different scaffolding atoms or heteroatoms) could support complex life and control systems, consciousness is not restricted to carbon-based, water-dependent organisms.
DeepScientist is a goal-oriented, fully autonomous scientific discovery system. It uses Bayesian Optimization and a hierarchical 'hypothesize, verify, and analyze' process with a Findings Memory to balance exploration and exploitation. It generated and validated thousands of scientific ideas, surpassing human SOTA on three AI tasks.
Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. This article explores the idea that life, at its core, might be computational, drawing parallels between DNA, computation, and the work of Turing and von Neumann.
All for One: LLMs Solve Mental Math at the Last Token With Information Transferred From Other TokensThis paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) solve mental math problems. It proposes that meaningful computation occurs late in the network (in terms of layer depth) and primarily at the last token, receiving information from other tokens in specific middle layers. The authors introduce techniques (CAMA and ABP) to identify an 'All-for-One' subgraph responsible for this behavior, demonstrating its sufficiency and necessity for high performance across various models and input styles.
Physicists and computer scientists are using stochastic thermodynamics to understand the energy costs of computation, with implications for designing more energy-efficient devices.
The article discusses a phenomenon known as the "Dynamic Quantum Cheshire Cat Effect", which is a type of quantum effect that allows physical properties to be separated from the objects to which they belong. The authors show that this effect can be generalized to dynamical settings, where the property that is separated from the particle can propagate in space and lead to a flux of conserved quantity.
In this essay, Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist, argues that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world. He discusses how even seemingly random events, like a coin flip or the mailing of a letter, can be seen as computational processes. The essay also touches on the progress made in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how they are helping us manage randomness and complexity in our world.
