Science Quote by Rudy Rucker

There is a quiet provocation in Rucker’s “Lately I’ve been working to convince myself that everything is a computation”: it’s not a triumphant declaration, it’s self-administered persuasion. The hedge words matter. “Lately” frames the idea as a project, a phase, maybe even an obsession. “Working” turns metaphysics into labor. And “convince myself” admits resistance - not from critics, but from the part of the mind that still suspects reality exceeds any formal model.

Coming from a scientist associated with cyberpunk-adjacent mathematical imagination, the line sits in the long shadow of computationalism: the view that mind, nature, and perhaps the universe itself can be understood as information processing. Rucker isn’t selling computation as a metaphor; he’s trying to make it feel like ontology. That’s the subtext: a desire to collapse the messy world into something legible, simulable, compressible. If everything is computation, then causality becomes code, intuition becomes algorithm, mystery becomes a bug you can eventually isolate.

The twist is that he’s honest about the psychological bargain. Treating everything as computation can be exhilarating - it offers a single unifying language across biology, physics, cognition, economics. It can also be a coping strategy: when complexity is overwhelming, “computation” is a promise that complexity has a grammar. The line works because it reveals the faith component inside a supposedly hard-edged worldview. Even the computational universe needs a believer, and Rucker is showing you the moment belief is manufactured.