What digit of π are you working on?
”...the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate π to nine jillion decimal places”. So says Robert Wright in Did The Universe Just Happen, discussing Edward Fredkin’s theory that every process in the universe can be understood as an information process: that is, everything is software. The theory has the advantage that unlike analytical approaches, you can’t know the output in advance. But it also tempts the anthropomorphising of the quote: you think the output has a purpose, since our own computational devices are given purposes. The emphasis here is on given: computers don’t have purposes, they have uses, for us. If you wanted to retain a cosmological purpose under Fredkin’s view, you need that remote hacker, which ain’t ever so far from Bishop Berkeley’s God, who simply drops out of any philosophy grounded in perception (esse est percipi), like a rabbit out a hat.
I’ve been thinking about this stuff since reading some reviews and commentary on a new book by Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, which realises yet one more intellectual’s dream of explaining everything in terms of some subset of everything. Read about it here, here, and here.