No one wants to see themselves as someone else’s program running on someone else’s computer. Put that way, life seems a bit secondhand. But doctrine of universal computation means all existing things — the made, the found and the born — are linked to one another because they share, as John Wheeler said, “at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source.” This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: information, computation, extropy.

Posted on August 30, 2009