Quantum mechanics is just completely strange and counterintuitive. We can't believe that things can be here [in one place] and there [in another place] at the same time. And yet that's a fundamental piece of quantum mechanics. So then the question is, life is dealing us weird lemons, can we make some weird lemonade from this?

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.

If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.

Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information.

It's also a reasonable scientific program to look at the dynamics of the standard model and to try to prove from that dynamics that it is computationally capable.