Back in college I had that spinning around in my head along with a computer science foundations course (automata, computability, complexity, Turing completeness) and a bunch of AI/AL light reading that was already rather dated. Kitzmiller v. Dover was being covered all over Slashdot and here I was looking at all these examples from the 80s of complex emergent behaviour evolving from simple rules applied to randomness and then simulated over time in computers.
Something clicked in my head and everything made as much sense as it needed to. Life, the Universe, everything. I started to think of the sciences as being just a continuum of studies that describe behaviour at increasingly higher levels of abstraction: math -> physics -> chemistry -> biology -> psychology -> sociology.
Computers made life without specific reason or meaning demonstrable.
Camus made life without specific reason or meaning acceptable.
Back in college I had that spinning around in my head along with a computer science foundations course (automata, computability, complexity, Turing completeness) and a bunch of AI/AL light reading that was already rather dated. Kitzmiller v. Dover was being covered all over Slashdot and here I was looking at all these examples from the 80s of complex emergent behaviour evolving from simple rules applied to randomness and then simulated over time in computers.
Something clicked in my head and everything made as much sense as it needed to. Life, the Universe, everything. I started to think of the sciences as being just a continuum of studies that describe behaviour at increasingly higher levels of abstraction: math -> physics -> chemistry -> biology -> psychology -> sociology.
Computers made life without specific reason or meaning demonstrable. Camus made life without specific reason or meaning acceptable.