From a time nearly 14 billion years ago when all matter and energy existed in an exquisitely uniform and boring state, the cosmos has evolved to contain complex structures that—in at least one tiny spot in our solar system—have gained mysterious things like agency and consciousness that compel them to try to decode reality. Every equation of physics or every computer simulation of how planets, stars, and galaxies orbit and evolve, is a bizarre imprint of an interpretation of the universe by the universe, built into the universe by the rearrangement of its atoms into a dataome. But there’s an even deeper perspective: Was all of this really inevitable?
Key Takeaways:
- Albert Einstein once pointed out that the great mystery of the universe is that it’s comprehensible.
- Scientist Scott Aaronson argues that what we label randomness, in fact, follows well-defined statistical laws of probability.
- The debate is whether there isn’t something human that is just unpredictable, not predictably unpredictable.
“By dataome, I mean all of the data (and the information it contains) that we generate, utilize, and propagate but which is not encoded in our DNA.”
Read more: https://nautil.us/issue/102/hidden-truths/is-the-universe-open_ended
