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!

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.

The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

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

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.