I've just read an article which hits almost all of my intellectual hot buttons: cosmology, artificial intelligence, origins of life/evolution, relativity, particle physics, pattern recognition, complexity and randomness, determinism and free will, Turing machines, networks, consciousness (it doesn't cover beauty, ethics, language, or God explicitly so at least some topics are left for another day). I heard for the first time about "digital physics." The density of cool ideas in this review by Ray Kurzweil of the 1,197 pages I'm going to have to read... (aka Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science") is stunning.

I suppose that's what you get when one of the leading thinkers about the future covergence of computation and biology reads something that really challenges his mind.

Dang! I have genius envy.

P.S. Stephen Jay Gould, thank you and RIP.

12:47:19 AM    please comment []