In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!