Anything that happens happens

"Is There an Artificial God?" was the title of a talk given by Douglas Adams in 1998. It can be found in The Salmon of Doubt (p. 126 in the paperback edition) and online here. It relates to the concept of reality that I have blogged about.

Adams sums up his view as: "Anything that happens happens." He explains this in terms of the Four Ages of Sand. That is, sand to make glass lenses, silicon chips and fiber optic cable.

1. Telescopes - We discover the outer universe.
2. Microscopes - We discover the inner universe.
3. Computers - We discover computation.
4. The Internet - We discover new ways of communication.

In the First Age we discover that humans are insignificantly small. In the Second Age we discover that even with the microscope we still don't understand life. In the Third Age we discover that complexity can arise from the iteration of very simple processes.

The Fourth Age is something that we are just beginning to experience. We have always had one-to-one communications. We have long had one-to-many communications (mass media). Adams says that democracy is a clunky form of many-to-one communications. What is new is the ability to have many-to-many communications. We don't really know where this will take us, but it is sure to be full of surprises. Adams talks at length about the novelty (at the time) of someone typing on a computer and being able to control a Coke dispensing machine thousands of miles away. He would be fascinated by today's news of the Stuxnet worm.

Adams's thesis rests primarily on the Third Age and the fact that complexity can emerge from simplicity. He says that this is where life comes from. In his view life did not come from an intelligent designer, but emerged out of the simpler natural world through iterative processes analogous to how computers work, gradually becoming more and more complex.

A good example of this idea is the Mandelbrot Set. Infinite complexity arises out of something so simple that even I have programmed it, just to see how it works. Experience with computer programming helps one to understand Adams's point.

Computation is certainly a wonderful thing. To Stephen Wolfram and Max Tegmark it is everything. (See also the ideas of Nick Bostrom, linked in the Tegmark post.)

But we should keep in mind that there might be another view, as eloquently expressed by Jaron Lanier and Herman Wouk.

Well, what other luminaries can we consult for their views? How about Einstein? Funny you should ask. I just finished listening to the biography of Einstein that Nancy gave me last Christmas. See the next post.