The Universe is Information

Read an interesting article in the latest Scientific American last night, on the universe as a hologram. Main theme, it's all about information. (Correction to an earlier blog: the Planck length is 10^-33 cm). I read Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" a few weeks after it came out, pretty much the same thing. The base substance of universe is information, and all physical processes are computations. The universe is a Turing machine running itself -- and for lots of things, all you can do is wait and see how it comes out.

It seems odd, I started out as a physicist, then became a Servant of the Great Machines, and now they seem to be coming together. One gut-level feel I have from working in software: there is no limit to the amount of software that can be written. It's like derivative investments, but much worse. I think Bruce Sterling said, one particularly dysfunctional future we may have to look forward to is one where we all work at help desks trying to help each other figure out how to use everyone's buggy software packages.

On vacation a few weeks ago, we were watching glass blowing at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning NY. I'm watching them make a glass bowl with one furnace running at 2300 degrees, one at 2100, and an annealling furnace at 1200, and I'm basically stuck thinking, "Damn, that's sure a lot of energy for not a lot of information".

A comment on the last blog re AE and using the model of "The Cognitive Structure of Emotion". It doesn't seem to address basic "drives". Most of these are tied to the four F's (fight, flight, feed, procreate). What do you replace these with in AE?