I forgot to tell my M* friends about my most recent post on Wheat and Tares continuing my exploration of using reason as a guide to reality. My latest post was called “Computability and Algorithmic Compression.” I find it fascinating just how important ‘computability’ is to comprehending reality. But even more fantastic is the fact that it just so happens that reality can be described via computable means. What’s up with that?

To explore this concept I explore a profound quote I came across from physicist John Barrow:

The goal of science is to make sense of the diversity of Nature. It is not based upon observation alone. It employs observation to gather information about the world and to test predictions about how the world will react to new circumstances, but in between these two procedures lies the heart of the scientific process. This is nothing more than the transformation of lists of observational data into abbreviated form by the recognition of patterns. The recognition of such a pattern allows the information content of the observed sequence of events to be replaced by a shorthand formula which possesses the same, or almost the same, information content. … On this view, we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions. … Without the development of algorithmic compressions of data all science would be replaced by mindless stamp collection – the indiscriminate accumulation of every available fact. (Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, p. 14-15)

Check out the whole post if you haven’t already.