« Eastern Standard Tribe | Main | Joe Trippi at Digital Democracy Teach-In »

Physics Lesson

Joi Ito describes his lunch conversation with Seth Lloyd, an MIT Professor who is also associated with the Santa Fe institute and the study of complex systems. He's proposed a feasible design for a quantum computer. The lunch discussion was more about economics.

Seth pointed out that if you are struggling to survive in a tough environment, eating fatty and sweet foods and conserving your energy are probably good things. When you have enough food, sitting around eating sweets on the couch suddenly becomes detrimental. Is there an equivalent to this with money? I believe that free markets and democracy are great things and are the foundation of civilization and progress. I believe that efficiency and greed play a big role in creating healthy economies. Having said that, I do not believe that just because we have free markets and democracies, that people will be happy or that we will have peace. My question is, at what point, if any, do you have too much money? At what point is greed pointless and destructive? Can countries and economies become addicted to economic growth or become financially obese?

They also talked about physics:

Seth explained that historically, physicists have always talked a lot about energy and the conservation of energy. Energy changed form, but there was always the same amount. They later found that you would lose a bit of energy over time and they attributed this to entropy. Recently, people have realized that entropy is sort of randomized molecules and looks a lot like information. Seth explained that the whole universe could be viewed as a big huge computer and you could apply information theory on physics and vice versa.

Discussions like this suggest that we're beginning to grasp more of the mystery, yet the political and spiritual realities of the 21st century feel reactionary and unsatisfactory, as though we're resisting transformation. Joi's discussion with Seth raises questions - few answers so far.

(Mean while John Shirley will release a book about Gurdjieff in March. Gurdjieff saw our ordinary state of consciousness as sleeping, at least he used sleep as a metaphor for a lack of real awareness of our state and our condition. (Students of Gurdjieff will probably take issue with my simplistic rendering of one small part of this thinking, but I hope my interpretation is not too far off.)

Stay awake!

jon posted this at 7:56 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky