Daily Inspiration Quote by Seth Lloyd

Lloyd is quietly trying to disarm a turf war. In a sentence that sounds like a neutral definition, he’s pushing a provocative reframing: computation isn’t just what laptops do, it’s what physics does. Any physical system “registering and processing information” turns the universe into a kind of ongoing accounting problem, where particles, fields, and thermodynamic states are not merely stuff but carriers of bits, correlations, and constraints. That move matters because it collapses the boundary between “natural” processes and “computational” ones, inviting us to see black holes, molecules, and even noisy lab apparatus as information machines with measurable limits.

The second clause is the tell: “how one wishes to define computation will determine your view.” Lloyd flags that this isn’t a settled category so much as a choice with consequences. Define computation narrowly (symbol manipulation, algorithms, intentional design), and most of nature stays outside the tent. Define it broadly (state transitions that can be mapped to information processing), and suddenly every physical evolution can be read as a computation. The subtext is methodological: the interesting fight isn’t over whether nature computes, but over what you gain or lose by adopting a computational lens.

Contextually, this sits squarely in the late-20th/early-21st-century convergence of information theory and fundamental physics: Landauer’s “information is physical,” quantum information, and the growing sense that limits on energy, entropy, and coherence are also limits on what can be computed. Lloyd’s line is an invitation and a warning: your definition will either unlock powerful unifications or dissolve “computation” into a synonym for “anything that happens.”