Last week, the Foundation Questions Institute announced the winners of its third essay contest, which Scientific American co-sponsored. (I helped to decide on the question, judge the essays, and hand out the awards at the World Science Festival.) The essay question was, "Is Reality Digital or Analog?" Is nature, at root, continuous or discretized? You can make a powerful case for either option. Or both options. Or neither. A venerable tradition in essay-writing is to question the question.

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5 Comments

1. 1. jgrosay 05:49 PM 6/15/11

   When the philosophy that proposes that qualitative is just a different amount of quantitative things, they proposed that atoms do differ in the number of protons, electrons and neutrons, and the number of them makes a qualitative difference, this discussion was more active than today. The problem in analog subjects is that tehy can have an infinite number of variants, just the mind as computers, simulate analog features like integrals do. Digital features can have a limited number of possible steps, but one must remember that things exist in nature, but the way we perceive them is an innate trait of our nervous system and conscience, that may have nothing to do with important features of objects. Like the problem of squaring a circle, analog an digital can be considered totally separate realities, and their main common feature is that we are able to perceive or imagine both.

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2. 2. ewknowlton 09:28 AM 7/11/11

   If not digital...what is the universe?

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3. 3. Ying & Yang 07:02 PM 7/17/11

   the only answer youll get is life goes on, that life is just a series of cycles. life has no sense of contradictions whatsoever... just ppl can make that up, thats what makes us human. the fate of life itself relys on balance.

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4. 4. TexasRandom 11:25 PM 7/26/11

   Do you think we can grasp reality? Has human evolution stopped? Is the subconscious mind limited to understanding in three or four dimensions? Is the subsconscious mind limited by the senses? Is it possible for the subconcious mind to obtain information not provided by the senses? Does "quantum theory" make all possibilities mandatory? Does the infinity of multiverse possibilities make the human grasp of reality mandatory? If human reality is relative,can it remain relative?

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5. 5. snjacobi 03:30 AM 10/12/11

   30sec ago I submitted a rather lengthy commentary to the Susskind article -- BUT I sent it before the confirming email system had been satisfied. PLEASE ATTEMPT TO RETRIEVE IT.
   PEACE ALL WAYS NORTON JACOBI

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