Thursday, April 01, 2004

Perceiving Reality Through Algorithms [-]

Recently it occurred to me that a lot of my thinking seems to be grounded in perceiving reality primarily in terms of algorithms rather than objects. Most people seem to do the opposite. I would argue -- and I will try to in the future -- that reality really is most accurately seen as a bunch of algorithms, and that it is wrong to give a special status to contiguous objects. It might seem that I'm talking about the fundamental nature of reality here -- at the level of physics -- rather than everyday reality, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm talking about reality on "all levels". Take economics, for example. A lot of economic thinking requires perceiving of things in terms of algorithms, and often runs contra to the more intuitive perception of reality in terms of individual objects. I think there's a lot of other examples, too, but I'm not going to try and develop a list right now.