Saturday, May 18, 2002

Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" "Fredkin is quoted by Robert Wright in the 1980s as saying 'There are three great philosophical questions. What is life? What is consciousness and thinking and memory and all that? And how does the Universe work? The informational viewpoint encompasses all three.'" 2:15:29 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" "It is patterns (e.g., people, ideas) that persist, and in my view constitute the foundation of what fundamentally exists. The view of the Universe as a cellular automaton provides the same perspective, i.e., that reality ultimately is a pattern of information. The information is not embedded as properties of some other substrate (as in the case of conventional computer memory) but rather information is the ultimate reality. What we perceive as matter and energy are simply abstractions, i.e., properties of patterns. As a further motivation for this perspective, it is useful to point out that, based on my research, the vast majority of processes underlying human intelligence are based on the recognition of patterns." 2:12:56 PM  Google It!  comment  []