It's Only Bits and Bytes, Baby
The recent Wired article God is the Machine is a good example of why I love that magasine. The articles are often speculative and borderline weird, but it makes you think. I remember I read on Edge once that most scientists would, if given the choice, rather be credited with a fascinating and important discovery that actually turned out to be flawed, than a true discovery that really wasn't that important.
 On the subatomic level, reality isn't hard surfaces like the ones we are used to in our daily lives. Reality is indeed made up of something more resembling waves of energy than the billiard-ball-like particles illustrated in textbooks for children. And some scientists argue that reality is really a binary system. Does this mean the universe is a giant computer?
Language has long reached its limitations when we discuss such issues. As philosophers are often all too aware of, language sometimes construct our reality as much as it describes it. We have computers. We know how they work. We find similarities between the universe itself (or, in other cases, our brains) and we postulate that the universe is a giant computer. Alan Turing (picture) lay much of the fundamental theorietical work for computer science. Have we found out he also found the fundamental principle for reality?
Or have we just created a metaphor and fooled ourselves to believe the metaphor is the reality?
This is the question that keeps coming back to me as I read this article. There are also some leaps and bounds that may be difficult to catch.
For example, MIT professor Seth Lloyd calculated that if the universe was a computer, it would have the computer power to do 10^120 logical operations. Large number. He also calculated that the total number of human-made computers ever amounts to 10^31 ops. Huge difference. But along comes Moore's law (no discussion of computer theory can avoid this 'law'), which states that computing power doubles roughly every two years. So, in 600 years all the power in the universe will be taken up by computers. Am I the only one to see the flaw here? Moore's law is nothing but a description of the pace of technology over the last decades. It is not written in stone. Perhaps we will reach physical barriers sometime in the coming decade that slows it down. Or we reach a massive breakthrough, making it go much faster for a while. This article is not the first to confuse descriptive (the way things are) with normative (the way things have to or ought to be). You can't just extrapolate a few decades into centuries.
 The metaphor is taken way too far, again, when someone jumps from the premise that the universe is a program to the conclusion that it must therefore have a Programmer, ie. God. The power of metaphors to human inventions is that they appeal to the imagination. But even a successful metaphor can't create information out of nothing. If the universe is a program, and God is a programmer, can't we say that God is a program, too? And then this Super-Program would need an infinite regress of even more powerful Programmers. The buck has to stop somewhere, and we should deal with the universe we have, and not postulate complexities beyond what we observe (Occam strikes again).
Reading the article gave me a strong sense of deja vu. Isn't the digital principles underlying all of reality very similar to the universal essences of Plato (picture)? And isn't the idea we are just a massive digital simulation quite similar to George Berkeley's rejection of the material universe, claiming it is all just impressions to our mind?
Perhaps it's a part of the program that we keep recycling the same ideas about the order of the universe until the end of time.
2:02:34 AM 
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Red Star Over Russia