1/27/2005
   slide 6
Computation of Everything
•World as
–Will of deities
–World as clockworks
–Machine/industrial process
–Computation
•Each reflect where we are
•Each has given us more power over
our surroundings
•Wolfram and automata, A New Kind of Science
(NKS Summer School at Brown)
•Fredkin’s Digital Philosophy (everything discrete)
•Kurzweil, Age of Intelligent Machines
•Pat Hanrahan: Can describe things in nature computationally that were not attempted before—how light interacts with marble…
science meets philosophy…

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SOURCES
Fredkin: Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables. This paper explores Digital Philosophy by examining the consequences of these premises
http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/index.htm

http://www.wolframscience.com/thebook.html

Computation new model for thinking about nature