Favorite Computationalist Quotes

Collection of quotes capturing the human discovery of the computational nature of the Universe.

How could you not love making intelligent things? Geoffrey Hinton

To you, mind of no mind, in whom the timeless way was born. Christopher Alexander

A biological cell is a Turing-complete, massively parallel computer. Andy Thomason

History of programming languages kind of mirrored the history of religions. Joscha Bach

Principles of emergent social agency have already been articulated by Thomas Aquinas circa 1270. Joscha Bach

Autonomous system gains sentience by discovering the world, itself in the world as well as its relationship to the world. Joscha Bach

Spirit is the software governing an autonomous system and enabled by agents existing at some structural level of that system. Joscha Bach

From a computational perspective physical reality is hardware, while the regularities that govern it is software. Software is, ultimately, a physical law. Joscha Bach

On 7 December 1920 at the University of Göttingen, Germany, Moses Schönfinkel presented his first and only work entitled Elemente der Logick ("Elements of Logic"), in which he outlined the concept of combinatory logic — the first Turing-complete computational model. Stephen Wolfram

Because any observer is embedded within the Universe they are trying to perceive a branching Universe while their minds are inevitably participating in the branching process, which, in turn, affects the branching process as well as the state of the Universe that the mind ends up perceiving. Stephen Wolfram

Perhaps the symmetric properties and simple arithmetic of the balanced ternary system as opposed to the binary system will prove to be quite important someday — when the "flip-flop" is replaced by a "flip-flap-flop". Donald Knuth

Intelligence of a sentient agent is the ability to flexibly adapt its behavior to the current environment such that it is enabled to perform exploitative action of harvesting maximally predicted amounts of negative entropy as well as exploratory action of minimizing the error of these predictions. Joscha Bach

Consciousness is manifested by a sentient system in actions that are based on the model of the system's own self-awareness. In other words, a sentient system is conscious when its world model recognizes the fact that it is the observer as well as when recognition of that fact factors into the system's behavior. Joscha Bach

Ribosome is a protein-synthesizing macromolecular machine found in every biological cell. It is made out of RNA and it consumes RNA in order to produce proteins, which means that it can bootstrap itself. That way, a ribosome is really a self-hosted compiler for the programming language of biological proteins. Bert Hubert

How do you recognize an extroverted mathematician? Well, they look at YOUR shoes. What this alludes to is that good mathematicians tend to have Asperger's, which means that the parts of the brain that "normal" people use for social cognition and for worrying what other humans think of them, mathematicians use for thinking about abstract problems. Joscha Bach

All of the world's computers as well as almost all natural languages obey the rules of Aristotelian logic (also known as Boolean or binary logic), which makes it possible to unambiguously express any bivalent logical function. Boolean algebra, however, cannot describe the logic of the Aymara language, as it is the only natural language known to be based on the trivalent logic. Iván Guzmán de Rojas

What is a classical computer? A classical computer is a physical system that processes information by flipping bits in an algorithmic fashion. What is the Universe? The Universe is a physical system that processes information through particle interactions in a consistent fashion, so the Universe can be thought of as a massive-scale quantum computer. Seth Lloyd

According to the Block Universe Theory, the unified four-dimensional fabric of space-time is absolute and pre-determined everywhere and at all time. However, once an observer is introduced as travelling through a specific region of this "frozen" space-time, from their personal point of view the space-time is inevitably perceived as relative, meaning that there can be no agreement reached with other observers upon the precise place and time of any event, including exactly where and when the observer is travelling. Kip Thorne

It is well-known that x86 instruction set is baroque, overcomplicated, and redundantly redundant. It remains Turing-complete even when reduced to the mov instruction. Removing all but the mov instruction from future iterations of the x86 architecture would have many advantages: the instruction format would be greatly simplified, the expensive decode unit would become much cheaper, and silicon currently used for complex functional units could be repurposed as even more cache. That is, as long as someone else implements the compiler... Stephen Dolan

DNA has many self-repair mechanisms largely enabled by the fact that not only is every DNA helix redundant but every chromosome has a whole spare helix. So, when a single nucleotide pair gets scrambled, for instance, by a stray ultraviolet photon, the DNA is smart enough to find out the correct nucleotide pair on the corresponding spare helix and copy it back in. However, since males have the incomplete XY gender-determining chromosomes, compared to the female XX chromosome pair, males don't have full spare copies of that X chromosome, which explains why they are much more likely to have genetic mutations, leading to things like color blindness or hemophilia. Bert Hubert

The Universe is a triad of three types of space: physical, branchial and rulial. Physical space is a hypergraph of distinct points that are connected to each other within their own bounded locality. Branchial space is a multi-way causal graph formed by applying a particular computational rule to complete states of the physical space at particular points in time, which are connected to each other within the bounded locality of their common ancestor. Note that a slice of branchial space at a particular point in time represents a full quantum state of the Universe, while two arbitrary ways represent a superposition of the histories of the Universe. Rulial space is a graph of branchial spaces formed by applying all computational rules from all possible initial conditions for infinite time. Stephen Wolfram