Born of the Ones and Zeroes

Computers as an example of Consilience

<< After a short introduction to the idea, one would be tempted to think on consilience. Are there examples of such a thing in our current world and scientific community?
    I propose that one of the best examples that we can find is something that we may soon seldom notice... something that is quickly becoming so ubiquitous in our society that our reliance will soon be as universal, and as acceptable, as logical thought itself: the computer.

To begin making this argument, let me start by going back a moment in my argument to pick up something that I missed. Where does this idea of consilience all start? What does it hold at its core? Let me first propose that computers and consilience share a common base, a building stone foundation that ties them together as certainly as we are, or will be, tied to computers.

Let me then propose that building on these basic foundations allows computers, in their own intriguing way, to duplicate the way that the sciences build on their basic laws.
    In a Consilient universe, each level of science would be able to be reduced, level after level, down until finally you could see that it was nothing but an extension of the laws that created the universe.
     So too do computers build and reduce, ever with more levels of separation between the computer user and the bits that form it all, but always connected and reducible, up and down with equal ease.

Lastly, let us consider just where our computers, if they already mimic science, are headed. Is it possible that through them we may find validation in the idea that the world is ultimately understandable?
    Their future could be the key to a full understanding of ourselves and our role in this world, and we would be fools to ignore the possibility.

And that, I think, is ultimately why computers may be the best possible argument for Consilience that we ever will find. Perhaps not computers so much as those ideas and concepts that we put into them.
    Computers are simply the physical, useful incarnation of the ideas that spawned this Unity of Knowledge movement. Basic laws exist, and can be built upon ad infinitum.
    If in our computers we can create a reality which coincides entirely with what we suppose would be a consilient reality, then ours is almost certainly the same. For, if we know something to be real, intelligent, beautiful, and all of the things that we see in our world, and yet find it in a world we have created out of simply 'true' and 'false', I/O, 1 and 0, then how can we expect that we are any different?