At first, his description of the simulation was reasoned, quiet. He told me about the creatures, their interactions with the habitats, how the populations rose and fell in response to the food stores, and how the food stores in turn responded to the presence or absence of creatures. He discussed his plans for migration, so that the creatures could search for food stores on other "island" habitats. Next he turned to the philosophy behind the simulation, the idea that all complex systems were actually nothing more than a collection of simple, "mindless" interactions, complexity not being something built into a system from "on high" by some designer, but something that emerges from "below", as a result of some unexpected interplay among all the underlying simple interactions. A complicated world without a god to oversee it, he called it (or, the idea of God itself was something that emerged from the underlying interactions —I really don't recall which way he put it). All of this took some ten or fifteen minutes, during which time I started to have hope for the night's outcome. I was impressed with what he was attempting, if not for the current results. And he showed philosophical depths I had not suspected were in him.
But as he began describing the elements he would add over time to his world —genders, species, variation in habitats, weather, predators, parasites, viruses, fires, floods, earthquakes, all manner of biblical-scale disasters— a terrible manic energy began to take him over. He started swiping at his hair. His voice rose in pitch and volume, and his legs, splayed out from the sides of the stool, began shaking up and down. It was as if the ideas themselves were banging around furiously in his body, wanting to get out. I had no idea exactly what was causing this reaction, whether it was the drinking or the lateness of the hour or something truly strange in Ethan suddenly showing itself (or the ideas actually battling it out inside him), so there was no recourse for me but to sit quietly and hope that soon come to a conclusion.
(Ullman: pp. 291-292)
Now, these ideas are quite similar to those proposed by Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science, as Ullman herself acknowledges later in the book:
By then he was raving. I'd already spent hours inside his mind —an odd mind, full of tight kinks like his hair. But I was not prepared for this rush of what seemed to be intellectual hysteria. I had no way of knowing that, less than two decades later, a famous computer scientist would be trying to warn the world about the dangers of self-replicating artificial creatures, descendants of Ethan Levin's silly milling O's. No idea I would attend a seminar at which perfectly sane-seeming men would debate not if but only when artificial life-forms, complete in their "humanity", would surpass our poor carbon-based existence, the coming of the "posthuman". What Ethan could only imagine in a fever that night —the notion of human beings as nothing more than a collection of chemical and electrical processes that could be scanned, stored, and replicated in silicon— has already come to be seen as reasonable. And his ideas about complexity arising from simple interactions —now proposed as the basis of an entirely new science. But at the time, I simply thought that Ethan Levin had gone a little crazy —in that hyperlogical way men can get crazy, when they isolate an idea and keep traveling deeper and deeper into it, until they arrive at a place so narrow their little idea seems huge, all-encompassing, an explanation for the world.
(Ullman: p. 293)
Well, that happens, right? How many times have we heard of what we thought was a pretty crazy idea just to find out years later that it slowly became the widely accepted mainstream? Wolfram's theory remains quite controversial, to be fair, but the overall idea that information pervades our whole universe is a whole different story. That other idea is quickly becoming part of the mainstream, if not the main hypothesis of what some might term a new paradigm. Now, from there to Wolfram's hypothesis there is only one more step: the one that assumes that even complex systems can be reduced to small tidbits of information, simple statements —as in a computer program— that, when combined with other statements and interacting with them, can end up building enormously complex systems. I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but it sounds quite reasonable to me, to be honest.
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