Two Bit Universes

If you take the cover off the box you will find some thin slabs of metal, some circuit boards, boxes of electronics sandwiching disk platters, diodes maybe, chips in sockets definitely.  This is the physical reality.  This is how the machine coincides with our universe.  This is how the electrons, neutrons and protons assemble themselves into the macro structures that channel the ions through chutes and gates, ebbing and flowing, charging and dissipating, accumulating and counting, spinning, beaming, refracting, humming to the choreography of light. 

This is the machine world, the untruth, the illusion, physical bits bound to charged particles and magnetism.

There is a different plane of reality, one that exists beyond the machinations of fields and forces and crystalline matrices.  We can observe it only as a projection onto our few limited dimensions, but still we can know it and understand it.  We can reason about it, predict it, poke it, prod it and bend it to our will.

This is the world of logic bits, computation, operation, execution, program counters ticking upward, instructions fetching, acting, resolving into newness; the purity of mathematics in its own atomic form.  It defines its own space, defying everything we understand about our own.  It is both one dimensional and N dimensional, there is no distance, only location.  There is no fluid time, only discrete ticks of a clock, order of execution, this before that, or maybe both at once.

Computation upon computation, free of infernal physics, builds upon its own self, its own macro reality, constructing algorithms, data structures, modules, applications, systems, worlds of meaning, billions of ephemeral parts, spinning, moving in virtuality, a functioning meta-verse of life.

Matt

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• Anonymous
  June 07, 2004
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