"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into
and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through
pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets'
towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock,
blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again
into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on
profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms
come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange
and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits
for you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
Edward Abbey
A Parable
"Master," the student asked. "The Universe is so complex, surely the Creator could not have used volition alone to set it in motion. In crafting His design, and in commanding the angels to carry out His will, He must have used computers."
The great savant contemplated this for several spans before replying in the negative.
"You are mistaken. No reality can be modeled completely by a calculating engine that is contained within and partaking of that same reality. God did not use a computer to create the world. He used mathematics."
The student pondered this wisdom for a long time, theProgramming
Thoughts |
