Sunday, May 20, 2007

The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul

I just leafed through the last chapter in Rudy Rucker's book. While each chapter has a dizzying array of advanced mathematics (which I promptly skipped over for the most part) to argue his "the universe is a gnarly computation" theory (universal automatism), the author comes to a very real and understandable conclusion.

Rudy attempts to answer, "the meaning of life" question using this same theory. He suggests that even human emotions can be described in a computationally rich scale.

  • Rage - simple class 1 computation which predictably and simply terminates
  • Hatred - class 2 computation looping endlessly and again predictably
  • Needy desire to please another -class 3 (random, messy, with no obvious order) computation
  • Compassion - a gnarly ever evolving class 4 process
This leads Rudy to explain that the meaning of life is beauty and love.

It seems to me, no matter how complex or simple our explanation is, the ultimate results is always very similar. Compassion, Beauty, Love

Peace!

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