"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way"
About this Quote
“Computations are everywhere” isn’t a claim about laptops; it’s a lens. Rudy Rucker, a mathematician and cyberpunk connective tissue figure, is smuggling in a worldview: computation as a way of seeing, not a gadget you own. The quiet pivot is the clause that follows: “once you begin to look at things in a certain way.” That “certain way” is the conversion moment. It suggests that computation is less a property of the world than a chosen grammar for describing it.
The intent feels evangelical in the best scientist sense: you adopt the frame and suddenly patterns snap into focus. Ant colonies become distributed algorithms. Markets look like feedback loops. Brains read as probabilistic machines. Even a city’s traffic is recast as a giant, imperfect sorting process. Rucker’s subtext is that “computation” can be an ontological solvent, dissolving old categories (life vs. machine, mind vs. matter) into processes, inputs, outputs, and emergent behavior.
That’s also the warning baked into the seduction. “Once you begin to look” implies you might not stop. The computational metaphor is powerful precisely because it’s portable; it travels from silicon to sociology with minimal friction. In a late-20th-century context shaped by personal computing, chaos theory, and the rise of information-as-king, Rucker’s line reads like a manifesto for the information age: reality as something you can model, simulate, maybe even hack.
It works because it’s modest on the surface and totalizing underneath. A casual observation that doubles as a claim about how modern consciousness is being rewired.
The intent feels evangelical in the best scientist sense: you adopt the frame and suddenly patterns snap into focus. Ant colonies become distributed algorithms. Markets look like feedback loops. Brains read as probabilistic machines. Even a city’s traffic is recast as a giant, imperfect sorting process. Rucker’s subtext is that “computation” can be an ontological solvent, dissolving old categories (life vs. machine, mind vs. matter) into processes, inputs, outputs, and emergent behavior.
That’s also the warning baked into the seduction. “Once you begin to look” implies you might not stop. The computational metaphor is powerful precisely because it’s portable; it travels from silicon to sociology with minimal friction. In a late-20th-century context shaped by personal computing, chaos theory, and the rise of information-as-king, Rucker’s line reads like a manifesto for the information age: reality as something you can model, simulate, maybe even hack.
It works because it’s modest on the surface and totalizing underneath. A casual observation that doubles as a claim about how modern consciousness is being rewired.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by Rudy
Add to List
