Viewing life as an automaton
In high school I loved physics. Be it mechanics, electricity or quantum mechanics; I liked it. And not just because of the actual calculations or the experiments we did. Physics, as a natural science, has a vast amount of laws and principles which fit remarkably well to other matters that themselves are not related to physics at all. They turn out to be universally applicable laws and as such they form a great inspiration for those who seek the true meaning of life. I know someone who finished chemistry purely because of this — and even Einstein is said to be a religious person who claimed that there had to be “something more”. Physics, chemistry… those are natural sciences and as such logical candidates for inspiring existential philosophies. Computing science would not be of much use for these things… or… would it?
During courses over the last year I’ve drawn quite a few automata; most of them for designing chips to test on an FPGA. Automata, transitions, states… inside a machine states are being stored as tiny electric charges, but it may as well be figure skating jury members with 0 or 1 signs or a class full of school kids that either sit down or stand up depending on the value they need te represent. A state is a single moment. A moment that has no movement whatsoever, that does not change no matter how much time passes by. A moment in the real world is infinitely small as well. A static state, described by the positions of particles at that time. The real world is a closed system — there are no influences that aren’t a part of the universe itself. Doesn’t this sound an awful lot like a finite state automaton without inputs? Is the next state determined by the current one? Is fate inevitable? Or is the universe non-deterministic to bring some randomness into our lives? For all we know God is some geek who is writing transition functions to make the world go around…