Dawn of the new everythi.., p.17
Dawn of the New Everything, page 17
There were ways that psychedelic thinking lent maturity to my VR idealism. Behind the utopian curtain, more interesting ideas could be found, like “set and setting,” meaning that drug molecules didn’t really impose any particular meaning, absent context. For instance, MDMA (Ecstasy) was understood to be simply pleasurable, or an empathogen (stimulating empathy); it later found its broadest role as a stimulant and sensory enhancer in sleepless Euro-thumpy dance clubs. Now it’s being tested in the treatment of PTSD and even autism.2
So one psychoactive molecule can have a wide range of meanings. While I never thought VR was anything like a drug, the “set and setting” principle applies to VR at least as well. VR can either be beautiful art and sympathy or terrible spying and manipulation. We set its meaning.
LSD was common in tech circles. Steve Jobs would go on and on about it.
I used to come under tremendous social pressure to use drugs, LSD especially, and pot at the very least. As it happens I have never tried them, not even marijuana. It was burdensome to have to constantly explain myself. My choice was taken as an affront.
My intuition was that drugs weren’t for me. Simple. Am not judging anyone else. The recent pressures one feels to join social networks feel similar. My answer is the same.3
Some people called me a liar. Supposedly I evidenced having “seen things and known things” that could only be accessed through LSD. I was a pretty freaky and psychedelic guy, I suppose. Tim Leary had a nickname for me: “the control group.” I was the only person around the scene who had not taken drugs, so maybe I was the baseline. Maybe drugs made people straighter.
Someone needed to be the control group. Many years later, when Richard Feynman knew his cancer was starting to overtake him, he decided it was time to experiment with LSD. The plan was to hang out with some hippie women in a hot tub at the edge of an unfenced cliff high above the waves in Big Sur.4 He asked the control group to be there, keeping a discreet distance to make sure he didn’t fall to the rocks. The man was hilarious on LSD. Couldn’t do arithmetic anymore. “The machine’s broken,” he said, pointing to his head in delight.
There was one drug that resonated in particular with VR: an Amazonian compound called ayahuasca or yage. William Burroughs wrote about it, and there were other famous accounts.5
The culture around this drug finds that it creates a psychic link between people, in which users share experiences as a form of communication that transcends words. Therefore, ayahuasca was understood in a way that was similar to the way I thought about the future of virtual reality.
The similarities went beyond that: Both could make people throw up. That’s not just a flippant comment. Both demanded an element of risk, preparation, and potential sacrifice. Perfect setup for ritualistic adoration.
VR rarely makes people throw up these days—we don’t even have barf bags around demos anymore—but fascination with ayahuasca culture, which has recently enjoyed an improved legal climate in Brazil, continues to draw VR engineers. A batch of Silicon Valley VR-heads go down regularly, and there are still events in California that attempt to re-create the Amazonian rituals.
I never tried ayahuasca, so I will reserve judgment about what it does. I will say that I have never seen evidence of psychic links between people who use it, and I have been around people using it more than a few times. So I walk the tightrope I often talk about. You know, the one where if you fall off to the left you’re superstitious, and if you fall off to the right you’re reductionist.
Stim City
Anyway, back to Palo Alto, around 1982.
Walter and I used sensors related to the ones in Stephen LaBerge’s rig to create a simple monitoring device for vital signs. A partial glove. Put it on and you saw a real-time representation of your guts on a screen. Lungs matching yours; you could check by breathing in deeply and watching them expand. Same for your beating heart.
Data was recorded, though that was mostly mocked up, because it was way too expensive to actually store much data in those days; plus a bored employee would have to sit there constantly exchanging floppy disks.
Our idea was that we’d gather a bunch of data from people and eventually algorithms might find correlations related to health. Maybe the system would become able to diagnose illness. Maybe it would help people learn to control their stress or track their fitness. A toy to make you healthy!
This should all sound familiar, since devices like fitness bands are everywhere—and often oversold—but at the time the idea was fresh and startling.
Walter and I used to collaborate nocturnally, which had something to do with the schedule Walter kept at the sleep lab. I’d bundle up a computer, usually an Apple Lisa with luggage straps I’d added, and we’d work in an all-night diner. There were just a few with wall outlets in usable places; you had to be tactical to get the table you needed. “I’ll pay for your ham and eggs if you trade seats!”
One night we were working at what I’ll call the “creamery” near Stanford. Just to be clear, this is NOT the same joint called a creamery that is found in Palo Alto today. The clarification is important because the overnight entertainment was watching the owner shriek like a ninja as he attempted to spear the rats that ran behind the counter. We never saw him succeed, but admired his determination. A few of the more spirited rats had names and were spoken of affectionately in hacking circles.
“It’s amazing how persistent this guy is, even though he never gets a rat.”
“If he was working in tech, he’d have a mega company by now.”
“Why don’t we try?”
We bundled up a prototype and drove to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to demonstrate our device. Maybe a big company would want to license it from us!
We were naïve. We got hooked up with a not entirely reputable business partner who was supposed to make connections and close deals. Actually, he put us up in a fleabag porn hotel and didn’t accomplish anything.
But we did learn a bit about how the world works. Walter remembers an enthusiastic reception. I remember potential customers grossed out by seeing animated representations of their guts.
I also remember feeling the joy of entrepreneurship. Invent. Bring it to people. Enjoy. Repeat.
In the 1990s, after VPL’s demise, Walter became interested in VR as a tool for research and treatment, especially in behavioral medicine. He’s since used VR to work with gang members on violent impulse control, and other fascinating applications. And in the new century he introduced me to my wife. “She’s like Betty Boop” were the first words I heard about her, and they were true.
Legitimacy, Hair, a Giant’s Shoulder
It sounds ridiculous now, but around age twenty-two I was enjoying all I have described, and yet I also feared that I was an irredeemable failure. I was ashamed that I had blown my education. My mother would have wanted me to become a Harvard professor, I imagined. An anachronistic notion took hold of me that I had to find a path to legitimacy. I wanted to be invited into one of the castles that Silicon Valley might burn to the ground.
The company that sold Moondust asked if I could present it at the preeminent computer graphics convention, SIGGRAPH. This conference straddled industry and academia, so I wondered if being there in an official capacity might give me an opening.
That year’s SIGGRAPH, in Boston, turned out to be nutso and exuberant. It was one of those countercultural gatherings that was still small enough to get away with genuine chaos, like the first few years of Burning Man. Also, as was true back in the hut, computers weren’t fast enough to do much yet, so people had to get weird to pass the time until Moore’s Law came through.
All the strands of fate clustered during my first visit to the Boston area. Before SIGGRAPH was over, I had decided to move there for a while, found a few new lifelong friends, met a woman I would eventually marry (if only bizarrely and briefly), met my most cherished mentor, and got my first real research gig.
Almost immediately I fell in with a batch of weirdo students from MIT, and it was as if we had been friends for years. Turned out they were students of Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence.
One of these remains a friend after all these decades. David Levitt had hair just like mine, but darker. A medium-length fountain of dreadlocks. We looked like mirror images if you squinted, though he’s black, or actually “nebrew” as he called himself. He used to call me “brother from another mother.”
We made for a dramatic pairing, and we cavorted ornately. Our favorite attire was vivid West African robes. Like me, David had developed a peculiar piano style, launching out of Monk and ragtime, as compared to my Scriabin, Nancarrow, and stride.
David’s PhD project at MIT was in visual programming languages! Eventually he’d join the gang in California.
His parents had tilted at the radical edges of the civil rights movement. Adding rhythm to history, David has recently run for the U.S. Senate as a candidate to the left of even the Bay Area field.
This is as good a spot as any to address a nontopic that often comes up: the hair. My hair expresses no agenda other than accommodation to genetics. It is not an attempt to pass as black, or a tribute to Jamaican or Indian holy images. I simply have hyperfrizzy hair.
The ceaseless effort it took to brush it out infringed on the rest of my life, so I gave up and let it dread. That is the simple story. There’s a book titled Programmers at Work from the early 1980s that includes a de-dreaded image of me on the cover. That’s the only documentation of the brief period when I was willing to waste hours just to not look weird.
By now the dreads have grown so long that they are presenting an inconvenience in a different way and I might have to cut them. But I’m putting the question off. I don’t like to worry about hair.6
In those days, it was super rare for white people to have dreadlocks, so I was quite exotic. Today it’s a cliché, and often not a complimentary one. Can’t help that.
No one in Silicon Valley or MIT cared about my hair. But MIT was easier for me than Silicon Valley. It was like Caltech, but this time I had that stupid thing I needed: legitimacy.
Alan Kay had left Xerox PARC to start a new lab supported by Atari. He offered me a research position for the summer, a post that would normally go to a graduate student. I was in again! I had overcome my fall from grace.
Atari’s lab was practically embedded in MIT, on Kendall Square. It was one of the progenitors of MIT’s influential Media Lab, which would come into existence a few years later.
This is how I met Marvin Minsky, who became perhaps the sweetest and most generous of my mentors.
I’ve described a few things that happened while I lived in Cambridge in my earlier books, like becoming lost in Marvin’s copiously disordered home and arguing with Richard Stallman about the dawn of free software. I won’t repeat those stories here, but I would like you to read what I wrote about Marvin on the day he died in 2016 (this was for the tribute on John Brockman’s edge.org):
The last time I saw Marvin, just a few months ago, he was hanging out in his wonderful house, front door unlocked, students dropping by unannounced. One young MIT student had worked for a summer in a circus, and naturally a trapeze hung from the vaulted ceiling. She slid upward like a cat and swung about as we all argued about AI, just like it was forty years ago.
I remembered when that trapeze was being installed, and I was the young protégé. Why was it hung there? I don’t remember, but it was also when the tuba arrived in its place under a piano, now obscured by books, telescope parts, many wonderful things.
On my way to see Marvin that night I got a call from a mutual friend. “Don’t argue with him, he’s frail.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But Marvin thrives on arguments.”
I was right. Marvin said, “What you’re doing, criticizing AI, it’s perfect. If you’re wrong in the big picture, you’ll make AI better. There’s a lot of terrible work, after all. If you’re right in the big picture, then you’re right. So great!”
Marvin invented about half of the way we think about ourselves these days. His particular way of characterizing AI consumed a million imaginations. Marvin’s narrative about the future of machines is the thing people are afraid of. But that’s a sideshow.
The main event is that Marvin’s way of thinking about people and our emotions has more or less replaced Freud’s mythology. Pixar’s Inside Out, for instance, feels and even looks like Marvin’s lectures from decades ago. (He used to ask that we imagine our brains painting colors on memories of things or events so that we might react to them with a given emotion, for instance.)
And all this might be taken as an aside from his work at the foundations of computer science. And his technical contributions to so many other fields. The latest virtual reality optics have been influenced by one of Marvin’s inventions, for instance: the confocal microscope.
Why was Marvin so generous to me? I gave him grief. I disagreed with him at every turn. I wasn’t ever his student, officially, and yet he mentored me, inspired me, put serious time into helping me. His kindness was total, a singularity of kindness.
He came out to visit in California in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties and virtual reality was getting tolerable. He sat in a headset—was it a simulation of being inside a hippocampus with neurons firing?—while at the same time playing a real physical grand piano, and the two planes of reality became beautifully coordinated.
The music! Everyone knows Marvin improvised at the piano in the approximate style of Bach—elaborate counterpoint—but he never fell into a rut. He was just as fascinated by the obscure musical instruments I brought by, from around the world. Since everything was always new to Marvin, even Bach’s style was always brand-new. Marvin lacked the capacity to become jaded or bored, or to fall into any state of mind shy of being startled by the constant novelty of reality.
I remember Marvin talking to Margaret, his daughter, and me about his take on Alan Watts. It’s hard to imagine a philosopher who might seem more distant from Marvin than the gurulike, Asian-leaning Watts, and yet Marvin thought Watts was remarkably wise about death. I recall Marvin discussing Watts’s idea that reincarnation is the wave way of interpreting people instead of the particle way. (Not that Marvin, or Watts, for that matter, accepted the notion of individual survival through incarnations. Instead, a person’s properties or patterns would eventually reappear, approximately, in new combinations in fresh sets of people.)
I remember once we were walking near cheerful shops on a spring day in Cambridge and we came upon an infant in a stroller. Marvin started talking about “it” as if the baby were a device, a gadget, and I completely knew he was doing so to get a rise out of me. “It’s able to track objects in the visual field, but with limited interaction capabilities; it has not yet built up a corpus of observed behavioral properties to correlate with visual stimuli.”
Oh, that sly smile. He guessed I was the one who’d get all huffy and thus prove that I was the slave to my ideas. Marvin’s warmth shone through so radiantly that the ruse didn’t work. We laughed.
Marvin linked humor with wisdom. Humor was his brain’s way of noticing a hole to fill, a way to be wiser. I always think of him finding a way to make each moment a little funnier, a little wiser, a little warmer, a little kinder. He never failed at that, so far as I ever saw.
Ah, Marvin.
At Atari Research there were real resources. We could print on laser printers, send email to each other, and do other digital things that were quite futuristic, elite, and exclusive at the time. I had rappelled over the chasm and was back in the world of big science.
I worked on some profoundly nonmainstream programming language ideas, as well as a couple of strange haptic games, including a robotic broomstick one could ride in a simulator. In order to be a witch. Once again, vaguely sexual.
Speaking of which, I have covered a lot of what happened in Cambridge: the new friends, the mentor, the research gig. What about the woman?
She’ll remain unnamed, but her name wasn’t remarkable anyway. What astounded was her presence. An iridescent goddess, a perfect archetypal blond cliché with a psychedelic hippie twist.
Flirty, weirdly wise, verbiage, cleavage, everything. Calculated indifference. I had fallen for women before, but this was electric free fall, an entirely different experience.
But here’s the strange thing. I didn’t actually feel attracted to her in a direct sense. It was more the case that everyone else was attracted to her, so that I lost myself in a social tide.
She was a status symbol. It felt like stumbling into an ancient magic cult, a secret society of the powerful and the beautiful.
When I first met her, I wasn’t well known. I was just one of the curious, brainy, hirsute boys to be found around MIT. She was a sexual Polaris, heads always turning to follow her, the way the heads of kittens turn to track a dangling toy.
She was deeply committed to imponderable social ambitions. In our first conversation, she said, “Oh, Tim Leary sent me to Harvard so I could seduce MIT computer geniuses into the psychedelic revolution.” A secret mission of historic importance!
Nothing happened between us at the time, but I would eventually end up marrying her, if only briefly. We’ll come to that in due time.
Dixie-Futurism
My enchanted interlude as a legit researcher was coming to an end.
Marvin’s daughter, Margaret, was doing a PhD on haptics at MIT, and she asked me to come down with her to visit the VR lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The feeling of the South retriggered my subservience to mood and I found it hard to function. Slow, steamy, kudzu-coated. Polite, segregated. It felt wrong to enjoy it. A piquant preparation with an improper ingredient; vinegar BBQ of an endangered species.
Whatever one made of the region, the lab was superb. I ought not play favorites, but UNC Chapel Hill had and still has my favorite academic VR lab.
So one psychoactive molecule can have a wide range of meanings. While I never thought VR was anything like a drug, the “set and setting” principle applies to VR at least as well. VR can either be beautiful art and sympathy or terrible spying and manipulation. We set its meaning.
LSD was common in tech circles. Steve Jobs would go on and on about it.
I used to come under tremendous social pressure to use drugs, LSD especially, and pot at the very least. As it happens I have never tried them, not even marijuana. It was burdensome to have to constantly explain myself. My choice was taken as an affront.
My intuition was that drugs weren’t for me. Simple. Am not judging anyone else. The recent pressures one feels to join social networks feel similar. My answer is the same.3
Some people called me a liar. Supposedly I evidenced having “seen things and known things” that could only be accessed through LSD. I was a pretty freaky and psychedelic guy, I suppose. Tim Leary had a nickname for me: “the control group.” I was the only person around the scene who had not taken drugs, so maybe I was the baseline. Maybe drugs made people straighter.
Someone needed to be the control group. Many years later, when Richard Feynman knew his cancer was starting to overtake him, he decided it was time to experiment with LSD. The plan was to hang out with some hippie women in a hot tub at the edge of an unfenced cliff high above the waves in Big Sur.4 He asked the control group to be there, keeping a discreet distance to make sure he didn’t fall to the rocks. The man was hilarious on LSD. Couldn’t do arithmetic anymore. “The machine’s broken,” he said, pointing to his head in delight.
There was one drug that resonated in particular with VR: an Amazonian compound called ayahuasca or yage. William Burroughs wrote about it, and there were other famous accounts.5
The culture around this drug finds that it creates a psychic link between people, in which users share experiences as a form of communication that transcends words. Therefore, ayahuasca was understood in a way that was similar to the way I thought about the future of virtual reality.
The similarities went beyond that: Both could make people throw up. That’s not just a flippant comment. Both demanded an element of risk, preparation, and potential sacrifice. Perfect setup for ritualistic adoration.
VR rarely makes people throw up these days—we don’t even have barf bags around demos anymore—but fascination with ayahuasca culture, which has recently enjoyed an improved legal climate in Brazil, continues to draw VR engineers. A batch of Silicon Valley VR-heads go down regularly, and there are still events in California that attempt to re-create the Amazonian rituals.
I never tried ayahuasca, so I will reserve judgment about what it does. I will say that I have never seen evidence of psychic links between people who use it, and I have been around people using it more than a few times. So I walk the tightrope I often talk about. You know, the one where if you fall off to the left you’re superstitious, and if you fall off to the right you’re reductionist.
Stim City
Anyway, back to Palo Alto, around 1982.
Walter and I used sensors related to the ones in Stephen LaBerge’s rig to create a simple monitoring device for vital signs. A partial glove. Put it on and you saw a real-time representation of your guts on a screen. Lungs matching yours; you could check by breathing in deeply and watching them expand. Same for your beating heart.
Data was recorded, though that was mostly mocked up, because it was way too expensive to actually store much data in those days; plus a bored employee would have to sit there constantly exchanging floppy disks.
Our idea was that we’d gather a bunch of data from people and eventually algorithms might find correlations related to health. Maybe the system would become able to diagnose illness. Maybe it would help people learn to control their stress or track their fitness. A toy to make you healthy!
This should all sound familiar, since devices like fitness bands are everywhere—and often oversold—but at the time the idea was fresh and startling.
Walter and I used to collaborate nocturnally, which had something to do with the schedule Walter kept at the sleep lab. I’d bundle up a computer, usually an Apple Lisa with luggage straps I’d added, and we’d work in an all-night diner. There were just a few with wall outlets in usable places; you had to be tactical to get the table you needed. “I’ll pay for your ham and eggs if you trade seats!”
One night we were working at what I’ll call the “creamery” near Stanford. Just to be clear, this is NOT the same joint called a creamery that is found in Palo Alto today. The clarification is important because the overnight entertainment was watching the owner shriek like a ninja as he attempted to spear the rats that ran behind the counter. We never saw him succeed, but admired his determination. A few of the more spirited rats had names and were spoken of affectionately in hacking circles.
“It’s amazing how persistent this guy is, even though he never gets a rat.”
“If he was working in tech, he’d have a mega company by now.”
“Why don’t we try?”
We bundled up a prototype and drove to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to demonstrate our device. Maybe a big company would want to license it from us!
We were naïve. We got hooked up with a not entirely reputable business partner who was supposed to make connections and close deals. Actually, he put us up in a fleabag porn hotel and didn’t accomplish anything.
But we did learn a bit about how the world works. Walter remembers an enthusiastic reception. I remember potential customers grossed out by seeing animated representations of their guts.
I also remember feeling the joy of entrepreneurship. Invent. Bring it to people. Enjoy. Repeat.
In the 1990s, after VPL’s demise, Walter became interested in VR as a tool for research and treatment, especially in behavioral medicine. He’s since used VR to work with gang members on violent impulse control, and other fascinating applications. And in the new century he introduced me to my wife. “She’s like Betty Boop” were the first words I heard about her, and they were true.
Legitimacy, Hair, a Giant’s Shoulder
It sounds ridiculous now, but around age twenty-two I was enjoying all I have described, and yet I also feared that I was an irredeemable failure. I was ashamed that I had blown my education. My mother would have wanted me to become a Harvard professor, I imagined. An anachronistic notion took hold of me that I had to find a path to legitimacy. I wanted to be invited into one of the castles that Silicon Valley might burn to the ground.
The company that sold Moondust asked if I could present it at the preeminent computer graphics convention, SIGGRAPH. This conference straddled industry and academia, so I wondered if being there in an official capacity might give me an opening.
That year’s SIGGRAPH, in Boston, turned out to be nutso and exuberant. It was one of those countercultural gatherings that was still small enough to get away with genuine chaos, like the first few years of Burning Man. Also, as was true back in the hut, computers weren’t fast enough to do much yet, so people had to get weird to pass the time until Moore’s Law came through.
All the strands of fate clustered during my first visit to the Boston area. Before SIGGRAPH was over, I had decided to move there for a while, found a few new lifelong friends, met a woman I would eventually marry (if only bizarrely and briefly), met my most cherished mentor, and got my first real research gig.
Almost immediately I fell in with a batch of weirdo students from MIT, and it was as if we had been friends for years. Turned out they were students of Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence.
One of these remains a friend after all these decades. David Levitt had hair just like mine, but darker. A medium-length fountain of dreadlocks. We looked like mirror images if you squinted, though he’s black, or actually “nebrew” as he called himself. He used to call me “brother from another mother.”
We made for a dramatic pairing, and we cavorted ornately. Our favorite attire was vivid West African robes. Like me, David had developed a peculiar piano style, launching out of Monk and ragtime, as compared to my Scriabin, Nancarrow, and stride.
David’s PhD project at MIT was in visual programming languages! Eventually he’d join the gang in California.
His parents had tilted at the radical edges of the civil rights movement. Adding rhythm to history, David has recently run for the U.S. Senate as a candidate to the left of even the Bay Area field.
This is as good a spot as any to address a nontopic that often comes up: the hair. My hair expresses no agenda other than accommodation to genetics. It is not an attempt to pass as black, or a tribute to Jamaican or Indian holy images. I simply have hyperfrizzy hair.
The ceaseless effort it took to brush it out infringed on the rest of my life, so I gave up and let it dread. That is the simple story. There’s a book titled Programmers at Work from the early 1980s that includes a de-dreaded image of me on the cover. That’s the only documentation of the brief period when I was willing to waste hours just to not look weird.
By now the dreads have grown so long that they are presenting an inconvenience in a different way and I might have to cut them. But I’m putting the question off. I don’t like to worry about hair.6
In those days, it was super rare for white people to have dreadlocks, so I was quite exotic. Today it’s a cliché, and often not a complimentary one. Can’t help that.
No one in Silicon Valley or MIT cared about my hair. But MIT was easier for me than Silicon Valley. It was like Caltech, but this time I had that stupid thing I needed: legitimacy.
Alan Kay had left Xerox PARC to start a new lab supported by Atari. He offered me a research position for the summer, a post that would normally go to a graduate student. I was in again! I had overcome my fall from grace.
Atari’s lab was practically embedded in MIT, on Kendall Square. It was one of the progenitors of MIT’s influential Media Lab, which would come into existence a few years later.
This is how I met Marvin Minsky, who became perhaps the sweetest and most generous of my mentors.
I’ve described a few things that happened while I lived in Cambridge in my earlier books, like becoming lost in Marvin’s copiously disordered home and arguing with Richard Stallman about the dawn of free software. I won’t repeat those stories here, but I would like you to read what I wrote about Marvin on the day he died in 2016 (this was for the tribute on John Brockman’s edge.org):
The last time I saw Marvin, just a few months ago, he was hanging out in his wonderful house, front door unlocked, students dropping by unannounced. One young MIT student had worked for a summer in a circus, and naturally a trapeze hung from the vaulted ceiling. She slid upward like a cat and swung about as we all argued about AI, just like it was forty years ago.
I remembered when that trapeze was being installed, and I was the young protégé. Why was it hung there? I don’t remember, but it was also when the tuba arrived in its place under a piano, now obscured by books, telescope parts, many wonderful things.
On my way to see Marvin that night I got a call from a mutual friend. “Don’t argue with him, he’s frail.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But Marvin thrives on arguments.”
I was right. Marvin said, “What you’re doing, criticizing AI, it’s perfect. If you’re wrong in the big picture, you’ll make AI better. There’s a lot of terrible work, after all. If you’re right in the big picture, then you’re right. So great!”
Marvin invented about half of the way we think about ourselves these days. His particular way of characterizing AI consumed a million imaginations. Marvin’s narrative about the future of machines is the thing people are afraid of. But that’s a sideshow.
The main event is that Marvin’s way of thinking about people and our emotions has more or less replaced Freud’s mythology. Pixar’s Inside Out, for instance, feels and even looks like Marvin’s lectures from decades ago. (He used to ask that we imagine our brains painting colors on memories of things or events so that we might react to them with a given emotion, for instance.)
And all this might be taken as an aside from his work at the foundations of computer science. And his technical contributions to so many other fields. The latest virtual reality optics have been influenced by one of Marvin’s inventions, for instance: the confocal microscope.
Why was Marvin so generous to me? I gave him grief. I disagreed with him at every turn. I wasn’t ever his student, officially, and yet he mentored me, inspired me, put serious time into helping me. His kindness was total, a singularity of kindness.
He came out to visit in California in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties and virtual reality was getting tolerable. He sat in a headset—was it a simulation of being inside a hippocampus with neurons firing?—while at the same time playing a real physical grand piano, and the two planes of reality became beautifully coordinated.
The music! Everyone knows Marvin improvised at the piano in the approximate style of Bach—elaborate counterpoint—but he never fell into a rut. He was just as fascinated by the obscure musical instruments I brought by, from around the world. Since everything was always new to Marvin, even Bach’s style was always brand-new. Marvin lacked the capacity to become jaded or bored, or to fall into any state of mind shy of being startled by the constant novelty of reality.
I remember Marvin talking to Margaret, his daughter, and me about his take on Alan Watts. It’s hard to imagine a philosopher who might seem more distant from Marvin than the gurulike, Asian-leaning Watts, and yet Marvin thought Watts was remarkably wise about death. I recall Marvin discussing Watts’s idea that reincarnation is the wave way of interpreting people instead of the particle way. (Not that Marvin, or Watts, for that matter, accepted the notion of individual survival through incarnations. Instead, a person’s properties or patterns would eventually reappear, approximately, in new combinations in fresh sets of people.)
I remember once we were walking near cheerful shops on a spring day in Cambridge and we came upon an infant in a stroller. Marvin started talking about “it” as if the baby were a device, a gadget, and I completely knew he was doing so to get a rise out of me. “It’s able to track objects in the visual field, but with limited interaction capabilities; it has not yet built up a corpus of observed behavioral properties to correlate with visual stimuli.”
Oh, that sly smile. He guessed I was the one who’d get all huffy and thus prove that I was the slave to my ideas. Marvin’s warmth shone through so radiantly that the ruse didn’t work. We laughed.
Marvin linked humor with wisdom. Humor was his brain’s way of noticing a hole to fill, a way to be wiser. I always think of him finding a way to make each moment a little funnier, a little wiser, a little warmer, a little kinder. He never failed at that, so far as I ever saw.
Ah, Marvin.
At Atari Research there were real resources. We could print on laser printers, send email to each other, and do other digital things that were quite futuristic, elite, and exclusive at the time. I had rappelled over the chasm and was back in the world of big science.
I worked on some profoundly nonmainstream programming language ideas, as well as a couple of strange haptic games, including a robotic broomstick one could ride in a simulator. In order to be a witch. Once again, vaguely sexual.
Speaking of which, I have covered a lot of what happened in Cambridge: the new friends, the mentor, the research gig. What about the woman?
She’ll remain unnamed, but her name wasn’t remarkable anyway. What astounded was her presence. An iridescent goddess, a perfect archetypal blond cliché with a psychedelic hippie twist.
Flirty, weirdly wise, verbiage, cleavage, everything. Calculated indifference. I had fallen for women before, but this was electric free fall, an entirely different experience.
But here’s the strange thing. I didn’t actually feel attracted to her in a direct sense. It was more the case that everyone else was attracted to her, so that I lost myself in a social tide.
She was a status symbol. It felt like stumbling into an ancient magic cult, a secret society of the powerful and the beautiful.
When I first met her, I wasn’t well known. I was just one of the curious, brainy, hirsute boys to be found around MIT. She was a sexual Polaris, heads always turning to follow her, the way the heads of kittens turn to track a dangling toy.
She was deeply committed to imponderable social ambitions. In our first conversation, she said, “Oh, Tim Leary sent me to Harvard so I could seduce MIT computer geniuses into the psychedelic revolution.” A secret mission of historic importance!
Nothing happened between us at the time, but I would eventually end up marrying her, if only briefly. We’ll come to that in due time.
Dixie-Futurism
My enchanted interlude as a legit researcher was coming to an end.
Marvin’s daughter, Margaret, was doing a PhD on haptics at MIT, and she asked me to come down with her to visit the VR lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The feeling of the South retriggered my subservience to mood and I found it hard to function. Slow, steamy, kudzu-coated. Polite, segregated. It felt wrong to enjoy it. A piquant preparation with an improper ingredient; vinegar BBQ of an endangered species.
Whatever one made of the region, the lab was superb. I ought not play favorites, but UNC Chapel Hill had and still has my favorite academic VR lab.
