You know, we talk a lot about the nature of reality.
And we human beings, we are a curious bunch.
We want to look up God's skirt.
And increasingly-- through either our understanding
of quantum mechanics, and all kinds
of new, exotic technologies that are allowing
us to peer at the primary building blocks of matter--
for whatever reason, we're starting
to find some really weird stuff.
Buckminster Fuller perhaps had it right
when he said, "God is a verb."
There's an amazing, amazing article
by Kevin Kelly called "The Fifth and Sixth Discontinuities,"
where he essentially talks about a series of discontinuities
that have transformed the context within which we
understand ourselves in the world.
So we used to think the Earth was flat.
We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe.
We used to think all these erroneous consensus realities
that we had agreed upon that were smashed by science,
transforming the way we understood ourselves.
We used to think we were separate
And then we realized that we were descended from apes.
And then it just keeps getting weirded and weirder.
Because now we're at the point that through quantum physics,
through things like nanotechnology, what we're
starting to understand is that at the most primary level,
reality, matter actually seems like it's
John Archibald Wheeler, the quantum physicist,
used to say that it comes from bit.
Bits, as in bits of computer data, like data
Description precedes "it"ness.
"The verbs are verbing all by themselves,
without a need to introduce nouns,"
This idea that matter acts, but there
are no actors acting upon the action,
the verbs are verbing all by themselves without a need
Everything a signal, everything is information.
Perhaps there lies the mystery of consciousness.