Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Digital world

Photons are digital
Atoms are digital
DNA is digital
Voting in a democracy is digital

In all these different scales, amorphous information is encoded into a digital form, making it easier to store, copy, and to act on.

It seems that when life on a given scale gets populous and complicated enough, it eventually finds ways to build a new, higher level structure. That structure often needs to make decisions so that it can act. It must be stable enough to be fair and trusted by its citizens. It formally encodes wishes of its citizens into law.

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