Word: computerizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ROBERT Wright, now senior editor at The New Republic, appropriately begins his "search for meaning" by taking us on a journey: to the private Caribbean island of multimillionaire computer scientist Edward Fredkin (rumored to be the model for the pessimistic and reclusive computer guru in the movie, War Games).
Fredkin has stirred a debate in physics by proposing that the universe is fundamentally made up not of matter and energy, as commonly supposed, but of information, assembled into different forms by what he calls "programming rules." Basically, Ed Fredkin thinks the universe is a computer. He has evidence, and...
Few physicists, for example, are willing to even entertain the computer-as-universe model, and Boulding's theories of "ecodynamics" and our future cultural evolution have been written off as too vague and unfocused to be of much use. In Wilson's case, the debate over the power of genes...
The diverse textual sources for the narrative, Cage said, ranged from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake to a recent copy of The New York Times. After selecting a number of excerpts from the various sources, he said he fed them into a computer and "chance operations were used."
In his introduction, Cage described in poetic terms the process of choosing the book and newspaper excerpts to be compiled by a computer for the lecture. "It is as if I am in a forest, hunting for ideas," he said.