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Last Visited: 10/22/2008
(April 1988), Robert Wright profiled Edward Fredkin, a self-taught computer scientist at MIT who went so far as to postulate that the universe actually is a computer.
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Drawing from his experience with information theory, Fredkin posited that computation is the basis of reality and that the structure of the universe is supported by a massive network of cellular automata.
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This rule, Fredkin says, is something fairly simple, something vastly less arcane than the mathematical constructs that conventional physicists use to explain the dynamics of physical reality.
Yet through ceaseless repetition … it has generated pervasive complexity.
Wright traced Fredkin's career through his years as a college dropout, a fighter pilot, a computer programmer, an inventor, and a professor, pointing out that Fredkin's unconventional training may have been what led to his ability to see things that other scientists could not.
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Fredkin was indeed a brilliant and intuitive thinker, one whose intellectual prowess was praised by world-renowned scientists like Richard Feynman and Marvin Minsky.
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But because there was no apparent way to test his theory empirically, Fredkin was forced to frame his ideas about the underlying structure of the universal digital rule, which he called "the prime mover of everything," in metaphysical terms.
According to Fredkin, Wright explained,
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So long as the cellular automaton's rule is the same in each case, the patterns of information will be the same, and so will we, because the structure of our world depends on pattern, not on the pattern's substrate; a carbon atom, according to Fredkin, is a certain configuration of bits, not a certain kind of bits.