Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look

The archetypal version of this story appeared successful Quanta Magazine.

In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist aboriginal successful his career:

Bohr: Algebra is similar expanse music. The important happening isn’t “can you work music?” It’s “can you perceive it?” Can you perceive the music, Robert?

Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.

I can’t perceive the algebra, but I consciousness the machine.

I felt the instrumentality adjacent earlier I touched a computer. In the 1970s I awaited the accomplishment of my archetypal one, a Radio Shack TRS-80, imagining however it would function. I wrote immoderate elemental programs connected insubstantial and could consciousness the instrumentality I didn’t yet person processing each step. It was astir a disappointment to yet benignant successful the programme and conscionable get the output without experiencing the process going connected inside.

Even today, I don’t visualize oregon perceive the machine, but it sings to me; I consciousness it humming along, updating variables, looping, branching, searching, until it arrives astatine its destination and provides an answer. To me, a programme isn’t static code, it’s the embodiment of a surviving carnal that follows my instructions to a (hopefully) palmy conclusion. I cognize computers don’t physically enactment this way, but that doesn’t halt my metaphorical machine.

Once you commencement reasoning astir computation, you commencement to spot it everywhere. Take mailing a missive done the postal service. Put the missive successful an envelope with an code and a stamp connected it, and instrumentality it successful a mailbox, and someway it volition extremity up successful the recipient’s mailbox. That is simply a computational process—a bid of operations that determination the missive from 1 spot to different until it reaches its last destination. This routing process is not dissimilar what happens with physics message oregon immoderate different portion of information sent done the internet. Seeing the satellite successful this mode whitethorn look odd, but arsenic Friedrich Nietzsche is reputed to person said, “Those who were seen dancing were thought to beryllium insane by those who could not perceive the music.”

This innate consciousness of a instrumentality astatine enactment tin lend a computational position to astir immoderate phenomenon, adjacent 1 arsenic seemingly inscrutable arsenic the conception of randomness. Something seemingly random, similar a coin flip, tin beryllium afloat described by immoderate analyzable computational process that yields an unpredictable result of heads oregon tails. The result depends connected myriad variables: the unit and space and tallness of the flip; the weight, diameter, thickness, and organisation of wide of the coin; aerial resistance; gravity; the hardness of the landing surface; and truthful on. It’s akin for shuffling a platform of cards, rolling dice, oregon spinning a roulette wheel—or generating “random” numbers connected a computer, which conscionable involves moving immoderate purposely analyzable function. None of these is simply a genuinely random process.

The thought goes backmost centuries. In 1814, successful his Philosophical Essay connected Probabilities, Pierre-Simon Laplace archetypal described an intelligence, present known arsenic Laplace’s demon, that could foretell these outcomes: