Douglas Adams

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams

Douglas Adams
Born	Douglas Noel Adams 11 March 1952 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
Died	11 May 2001 (aged 49) Montecito, California, US
Resting place	Highgate Cemetery, London, England
Occupation	Writer
Alma mater	St John's College, Cambridge
Genre	Science fiction, comedy, satire
Notable work	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Signature
Website
douglasadams.com

Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Adams was author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.

Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990), Last Chance to See (1990). He wrote two stories for the television series Doctor Who, co-wrote City of Death, and served as script editor for its seventeenth season in 1979. He co-wrote the Monty Python sketch “Patient Abuse” which appeared in the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A posthumous collection of his selected works, including the first publication of his final, unfinished, novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

Adams was an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, a lover of fast cars, technological innovation, the Apple Macintosh, and a self-proclaimed "radical atheist".

Early life

Adams was born on 11 March 1952 to Janet (née Donovan; 1927–2016) and Christopher Douglas Adams (1927–1985) in Cambridge. The family moved to the East End of London a few months after his birth, where his sister, Susan, was born three years later. His parents divorced in 1957; Douglas, Susan, and their mother moved to an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood, Essex, run by his maternal grandparents.

Education

Adams attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood. At nine, he passed the entrance exam for Brentwood School. He attended the prep school from 1959 to 1964, then the main school until December 1970. Adams was 6 feet (1.8 m) by age 12 and stopped growing at 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 m). His form master, Frank Halford, said Adams's height had made him stand out and that he had been self-conscious about it. His ability to write stories made him well known in the school. He became the only student ever to be awarded a ten out of ten by Halford for creative writing, something he remembered for the rest of his life, particularly when facing writer's block.

Some of his earliest writing was published at the school, such as a report on its photography club in The Brentwoodian in 1962, or spoof reviews in the school magazine Broadsheet, edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, who later became a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide. He also designed the cover of one issue of the Broadsheet, and had a letter and short story published in The Eagle, the boys' comic, in 1965. A poem entitled "A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining" written by Adams in January 1970, at the age of 17, was discovered in a cupboard at the school in early 2014.

On the strength of an essay on religious poetry that discussed the Beatles and William Blake, he was awarded an Exhibition in English at St John's College, Cambridge, going up in 1971. He wanted to join the Footlights, an invitation-only student comedy club that has acted as a hothouse for comic talent. He was not elected immediately as he had hoped, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith, forming a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams", and became a member of the Footlights by 1973. Despite doing very little work—he recalled having completed three essays in three years—he graduated in 1974 with a 2:2 in English literature.

Career

Writing

After leaving university Adams moved back to London, determined to break into TV and radio as a writer. An edited version of the Footlights Revue appeared on BBC2 television in 1974. A version of the Revue performed live in London's West End led to Adams being discovered by Monty Python's Graham Chapman. The two formed a brief writing partnership, earning Adams a writing credit in episode 45 of Monty Python for a sketch called "Patient Abuse". The pair also co-wrote the "Marilyn Monroe" sketch which appeared on the soundtrack album of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Adams is one of only two people other than the original Python members to get a writing credit (the other being Neil Innes).^[12]

Adams in his first Monty Python appearance, in full surgeon's garb

Adams had two brief appearances in the fourth series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the beginning of episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War", Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another but never gets started. At the beginning of episode 44, "Mr. Neutron", Adams is dressed in a pepper-pot outfit and loads a missile onto a cart driven by Terry Jones, who is calling for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). The two episodes were broadcast in November 1974. Adams and Chapman also attempted non-Python projects, including Out of the Trees.

At this point Adams's career stalled; his writing style was unsuited to the then-current style of radio and TV comedy. To make ends meet he took a series of odd jobs, including as a hospital porter, barn builder, and chicken shed cleaner. He was employed as a bodyguard by a Qatari family, who had made their fortune in oil.

During this time Adams continued to write and submit sketches, though few were accepted. In 1976 his career had a brief improvement when he wrote and performed Unpleasantness at Brodie's Close at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. By Christmas, work had dried up again, and a depressed Adams moved to live with his mother. The lack of writing work hit him hard and low confidence became a feature of Adams's life; "I have terrible periods of lack of confidence [..] I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it was like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather – you just have to get on with it".

Some of Adams's early radio work included sketches for The Burkiss Way in 1977 and The News Huddlines. He also wrote, again with Chapman, 20 February 1977 episode of Doctor on the Go, a sequel to the Doctor in the House television comedy series. After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who. 

In 1979, Adams and John Lloyd wrote scripts for two half-hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles: "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The Great Disappearing Mystery" (episodes eight and twelve). John Lloyd was also co-author of two episodes from the original Hitchhiker radio series ("Fit the Fifth" and "Fit the Sixth", also known as "Episode Five" and "Episode Six"), as well as The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff.

Doctor Who

Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet. He had also previously attempted to submit a potential film script, called Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, which later became his novel Life, the Universe and Everything (which in turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). Adams then went on to serve as script editor on the show for its seventeenth season in 1979. Altogether, he wrote three Doctor Who serials starring Tom Baker as the Doctor:

• The Pirate Planet (the second serial in the Key to Time arc, in season 16)
• City of Death (with producer Graham Williams, from an original storyline by writer David Fisher. It was transmitted under the pseudonym "David Agnew")
• Shada (only partially filmed; not televised due to industry disputes, but was later completed using animation for the unfinished scenes and broadcast as "Doctor Who: The Lost Episode" on BBC America 19 July 2018)

The episodes authored by Adams are some of the few that were not novelised, as Adams would not allow anyone else to write them and asked for a higher price than the publishers were willing to pay. Shada was later adapted as a novel by Gareth Roberts in 2012 and City of Death and The Pirate Planet by James Goss in 2015 and 2017 respectively.

Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in particular, the character of Professor Chronotis. Big Finish Productions eventually remade Shada as an audio play starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. Accompanied by partially animated illustrations, it was webcast on the BBC website in 2003, and subsequently released as a two-CD set later that year. An omnibus edition of this version was broadcast on the digital radio station BBC7 on 10 December 2005.

In the Doctor Who 2012 Christmas episode "The Snowmen", writer Steven Moffat was inspired by a storyline that Adams pitched called The Doctor Retires.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Main article: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a concept for a science-fiction comedy radio series pitched by Adams and radio producer Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Adams came up with an outline for a pilot episode, as well as a few other stories (reprinted in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion) that could be used in the series.

Towel Day 2005 in Innsbruck, Austria, where Adams first had the idea of The Hitchhiker's Guide. In the novels, a towel is the most useful thing a space traveller can have. The annual Towel Day (25 May) was first celebrated in 2001, two weeks after Adams's death.

According to Adams, the idea for the title occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, gazing at the stars. He was carrying a copy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that "somebody ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

Despite the original outline, Adams was said to make up the stories as he wrote. He turned to John Lloyd for help with the final two episodes of the first series. Lloyd contributed bits from an unpublished science fiction book of his own, called GiGax. Very little of Lloyd's material survived in later adaptations of Hitchhiker's, such as the novels and the TV series. The TV series was based on the first six radio episodes, and sections contributed by Lloyd were largely re-written.

BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series weekly in the UK starting 8 March 1978, lasting until April. The series was distributed in the United States by National Public Radio. Following the success of the first series, another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21–25 January 1980.

While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was completed. He was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Despite the difficulty with deadlines, Adams wrote five novels in the series, published in 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1992. 

The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo-illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of the first four Hitchhiker's novels (the paperback for the fifth re-used the artwork from the hardback edition).

In 1980, Adams began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a film, making several trips to Los Angeles, and working with Hollywood studios and potential producers. The next year, the radio series became the basis for a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts. When he died in 2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the film project started with Disney, which had bought the rights in 1998. The screenplay got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick, and the resulting film was released in 2005.

Radio producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams, first in 1993, and later in 1997 and 2000 about creating a third radio series, based on the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series. They also discussed the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the five-book "trilogy". As with the film, this project was realised only after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and was subsequently released on audio CD. With the aid of a recording of his reading of Life, the Universe and Everything and editing, Adams can be heard playing the part of Agrajag posthumously. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and these were broadcast in May and June 2005, and also subsequently released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series (with a new, "more upbeat" ending) concluded with, "The very final episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately dedicated to its author."

Dirk Gently series

Adams in March 2000

Between Adams's first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985, and their series of travels that formed the basis for the radio series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other novels with a new cast of characters. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was published in 1987, and was described by its author as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics". It was derived from two Doctor Who serials Adams had written. 

A sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, was published a year later. This was an entirely original work, Adams's first since So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. After the book tour, Adams set off on his round-the-world excursion which supplied him with the material for Last Chance to See.

Music

Adams played the guitar left-handed and had a collection of twenty-four left-handed guitars when he died (having received his first guitar in 1964). He also studied piano in the 1960s. Pink Floyd and Procol Harum had important influence on Adams's work.

Pink Floyd

Adams's official biography shares its name with the song "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd. Adams was friends with Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and, on Adams's 42nd birthday, he was invited to make a guest appearance at Pink Floyd's concert of 28 October 1994 at Earls Court in London, playing guitar on the songs "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". Adams chose the name for Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell, by picking the words from the lyrics to one of its tracks, "High Hopes". Gilmour also performed at Adams's memorial service in 2001, and what would have been Adams's 60th birthday party in 2012.

Computer games and projects

Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986 he participated in a week-long brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy as a parody of events in his own life. 

Adams was a founder-director and Chief Fantasist of The Digital Village, a digital media and Internet company with which he created Starship Titanic, a Codie award-winning and BAFTA-nominated adventure game, which was published in 1998 by Simon & Schuster. Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project, an experimental attempt at making The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality, and at harnessing the collective brainpower of the internet community. It was hosted by BBC Online from 2001 to 2011.

In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland which featured Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the assistant pictured in Apple's Knowledge Navigator video of future concepts from 1987), and interviews with Ted Nelson, the co-inventor of hypertext and the person who coined the term. Adams was an early adopter and advocate of hypertext.

Personal beliefs and activism

Atheism and views on religion

Adams described himself as a "radical atheist", adding "radical" for emphasis so he would not be asked if he meant agnostic. He told American Atheists that this conveyed the fact that he really meant it. He imagined a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, "This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" to demonstrate his view that the fine-tuned universe argument for God was a fallacy.

He remained fascinated by religion because of its effect on human affairs. "I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing."

The evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins invited Adams to participate in his 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, where Dawkins calls Adams from the audience to read a passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe which satirizes the absurdity of the thought that any one species would exist on Earth merely to serve as a meal to another species, such as humans. Dawkins also uses Adams's influence to exemplify arguments for non-belief in his 2006 book The God Delusion. Dawkins dedicated the book to Adams, whom he jokingly called "possibly [my] only convert" to atheism and wrote on his death that "Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender."

Environmental activism

Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kakapo and baiji, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992 this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audiobook, e-book and picture slide show.

Adams and Mark Carwardine contributed the 'Meeting a Gorilla' passage from Last Chance to See to the book The Great Ape Project. This book, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, launched a wider-scale project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to include all great apes, human and non-human. 

In 1994, he participated in a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino suit for the British charity organisation Save the Rhino International. Puppeteer William Todd-Jones, who had originally worn the suit in the London Marathon to raise money and bring awareness to the group, also participated in the climb wearing a rhino suit; Adams wore the suit while travelling to the mountain before the climb began. About £100,000 was raised through that event, benefiting schools in Kenya and a black rhinoceros preservation programme in Tanzania. Adams was also an active supporter of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. 

Since 2003, Save the Rhino has held an annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture around the time of his birthday to raise money for environmental campaigns.

Technology and innovation

Adams bought his first word processor in 1982, having considered one as early as 1979. His first purchase was a Nexu. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 1000. In Last Chance to See, Adams mentions his Cambridge Z88, which he had taken to Zaire on a quest to find the northern white rhinoceros.

Adams's posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features several articles by him on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine, and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that he had "adored" his Apple Macintosh ("or rather my family of however many Macintoshes it is that I've recklessly accumulated over the years") since he first saw one at Infocom's offices in Boston in 1984.

Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. He was the first person to buy a Mac in Europe, the second being Stephen Fry. Adams was also an "Apple Master", celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its products (others included John Cleese and Gregory Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video was available on Adams's .Mac homepage. Adams installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. He said it was "awesome...", which was also the last word he wrote on his site.

Adams used email to correspond with Steve Meretzky in the early 1980s, during their collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup, alt.fan.douglas-adams, and occasionally, when his computer was acting up, to the comp.sys.mac hierarchy. Challenges to the authenticity of his messages later led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the issue. In 1996, Adams was a keynote speaker at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) where he described the personal computer as being a modelling device. The video of his keynote speech is archived on Channel 9. Adams was also a keynote speaker for the April 2001 Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, one of the major technical conferences on embedded system engineering.

Personal life

Adams moved to Upper Street, Islington, in 1981 and to Duncan Terrace, a few minutes' walk away, in the late 1980s.

In the early 1980s Adams had an affair with novelist Sally Emerson, who was separated from her husband at that time. Adams later dedicated his book Life, the Universe and Everything to Emerson. In 1981 Emerson returned to her husband, Peter Stothard, a contemporary of Adams's at Brentwood School, and later editor of The Times. Adams was soon introduced by friends to Jane Belson, with whom he later became romantically involved. Belson was the "lady barrister" mentioned in the jacket-flap biography printed in his books during the mid-1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh"). The two lived in Los Angeles together during 1983 while Adams worked on an early screenplay adaptation of Hitchhiker's. When the deal fell through, they moved back to London, and after several separations ("He is currently not certain where he lives, or with whom") and a broken engagement, they married on 25 November 1991.

Adams and Belson had one daughter together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994, shortly after Adams turned 42. In 1999 the family moved from London to Santa Barbara, California, where they lived until his death. Following the funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London. Belson died on 7 September 2011 of cancer, aged 59.

Death and legacy

Adams's gravestone, Highgate Cemetery, North London

Adams died of a heart attack on 11 May 2001, aged 49, after resting from his regular workout at a private gym in Montecito, California. His funeral was held on 16 May in Santa Barbara. His ashes were placed in Highgate Cemetery in north London in June 2002. A memorial service was held on 17 September 2001 at St Martin-in-the-Fields church, Trafalgar Square, London. This became the first church service broadcast live on the web by the BBC.

Two days before Adams died, the Minor Planet Center announced the naming of asteroid 18610 Arthurdent. In 2005, the asteroid 25924 Douglasadams was named in his memory.

In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays, and letters, as well as eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the US edition), and Terry Jones (in the US paperback edition). It also includes eleven chapters of his unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was originally intended to become a new Dirk Gently novel, but might have later become the sixth Hitchhiker novel.

Other events after Adams's death included a webcast production of Shada, allowing the complete story to be told, radio dramatisations of the final three books in the Hitchhiker's series, and the completion of the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The film, released in 2005, posthumously credits Adams as a producer, and several design elements – including a head-shaped planet seen near the end of the film – incorporated Adams's features.

A 12-part radio series based on the Dirk Gently novels was announced in 2007.

BBC Radio 4 also commissioned a third Dirk Gently radio series based on the incomplete chapters of The Salmon of Doubt, and written by Kim Fuller; but this was dropped in favour of a BBC TV series based on the two completed novels. A sixth Hitchhiker novel, And Another Thing..., by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, was released on 12 October 2009 (the 30th anniversary of the first book), published with the support of Adams's estate. A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime adaptation and an audio book soon followed. 

On 25 May 2001, two weeks after Adams's death, his fans organised a tribute known as Towel Day, which has been observed every year since then.

In 2018, John Lloyd presented an hour-long episode of the BBC Radio Four documentary Archive on 4, discussing Adams' private papers, which are held at St John's College, Cambridge. The episode is available online.

A street in São José, Santa Catarina, Brazil is named in Adams' honour.

Digital physics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics 

 

In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is describable by information. It is a form of digital ontology about the physical reality. According to this theory, the universe can be conceived of as either the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program, a vast, digital computation device, or a mathematical Isomorphism to such a device.

History

The operations of computers must be compatible with the principles of information theory, statistical thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics. In 1957, a link among these fields was proposed by Edwin Jaynes. He elaborated an interpretation of probability theory as generalized Aristotelian logic, a view linking fundamental physics with digital computers, because these are designed to implement the operations of classical logic and, equivalently, of Boolean algebra.

The hypothesis that the universe is a digital computer was proposed by Konrad Zuse in his book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space). The term digital physics was employed by Edward Fredkin, who later came to prefer the term digital philosophy. Others who have modeled the universe as a giant computer include Stephen Wolfram, Juergen Schmidhuber, and Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft. These authors hold that the probabilistic nature of quantum physics is not necessarily incompatible with the notion of computability. Quantum versions of digital physics have recently been proposed by Seth Lloyd, Paola Zizzi, and Antonio Sciarretta.

Related ideas include Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's binary theory of ur-alternatives, pancomputationalism, computational universe theory, John Archibald Wheeler's "it from bit", and Max Tegmark's ultimate ensemble.

Overview

Digital physics suggests that there exists, at least in principle, a program for a universal computer that computes the evolution of the universe. The computer could be, for example, a huge cellular automaton (Zuse 1967), or a universal Turing machine, as suggested by Schmidhuber (1997), who pointed out that there exists a short program that can compute all possible computable universes in an asymptotically optimal way.

Loop quantum gravity could lend support to digital physics, in that it assumes space-time is quantized. Paola Zizzi has formulated a realization of this concept in what has come to be called "computational loop quantum gravity", or CLQG. Other theories that combine aspects of digital physics with loop quantum gravity are those of Marzuoli and Rasetti and Girelli and Livine.

Weizsäcker's ur-alternatives

Physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's theory of ur-alternatives (theory of archetypal objects), first publicized in his book The Unity of Nature (1971), further developed through the 1990s, is a kind of digital physics as it axiomatically constructs quantum physics from the distinction between empirically observable, binary alternatives. Weizsäcker used his theory to derive the 3-dimensionality of space and to estimate the entropy of a proton. In 1988 Görnitz has shown that Weizsäcker's assumption can be connected with the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy.

Pancomputationalism

Pancomputationalism (also known as naturalist computationalism) is a view that the universe is a computational machine, or rather a network of computational processes that, following fundamental physical laws, computes (dynamically develops) its own next state from the current one.

A computational universe is proposed by Jürgen Schmidhuber in a paper based on Zuse's 1967 thesis. He pointed out that a simple explanation of the universe would be a Turing machine programmed to execute all possible programs computing all possible histories for all types of computable physical laws. He also pointed out that there is an optimally efficient way of computing all computable universes based on Leonid Levin's universal search algorithm (published in 1973). In 2000, he expanded this work by combining Ray Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference with the assumption that quickly computable universes are more likely than others. This work on digital physics also led to limit-computable generalizations of algorithmic information or Kolmogorov complexity and the concept of Super Omegas, which are limit-computable numbers that are even more random (in a certain sense) than Gregory Chaitin's number of wisdom Omega.

Wheeler's "it from bit"

Following Jaynes and Weizsäcker, the physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed an "it from bit" doctrine: information sits at the core of physics, and every "it", whether a particle or field, derives its existence from observations.

In a 1986 eulogy to the mathematician Hermann Weyl, Wheeler proclaimed: "Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits. ... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future."

Digital vs. informational physics

Not every informational approach to physics (or ontology) is necessarily digital. According to Luciano Floridi, "informational structural realism" is a variant of structural realism that supports an ontological commitment to a world consisting of the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. Such informational objects are to be understood as constraining affordances.

Pancomputationalists like Lloyd (2006), who models the universe as a quantum computer, can still maintain an analogue or hybrid ontology; and informational ontologists like Kenneth Sayre and Floridi embrace neither a digital ontology nor a pancomputationalist position.

Computational foundations

Turing machines

The Church–Turing–Deutsch thesis

The classic Church–Turing thesis claims that any computer as powerful as a Turing machine can, in principle, calculate anything that a human can calculate, given enough time. Turing moreover showed that there exist universal Turing machines that can compute anything any other Turing machine can compute—that they are generalizable Turing machines. But the limits of practical computation are set by physics, not by theoretical computer science:

"Turing did not show that his machines can solve any problem that can be solved 'by instructions, explicitly stated rules, or procedures', nor did he prove that the universal Turing machine 'can compute any function that any computer, with any architecture, can compute'. He proved that his universal machine can compute any function that any Turing machine can compute; and he put forward, and advanced philosophical arguments in support of, the thesis here called Turing's thesis. But a thesis concerning the extent of effective methods—which is to say, concerning the extent of procedures of a certain sort that a human being unaided by machinery is capable of carrying out—carries no implication concerning the extent of the procedures that machines are capable of carrying out, even machines acting in accordance with 'explicitly stated rules.' For among a machine's repertoire of atomic operations there may be those that no human being unaided by machinery can perform."

On the other hand, a modification of Turing's assumptions does bring practical computation within Turing's limits; as David Deutsch puts it:

"I can now state the physical version of the Church–Turing principle: 'Every finitely realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means.' This formulation is both better defined and more physical than Turing's own way of expressing it."

This compound conjecture is sometimes called the "strong Church–Turing thesis" or the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle. It is stronger because a human or Turing machine computing with pencil and paper (under Turing's conditions) is a finitely realizable physical system.

Experimental confirmation

So far there is no experimental confirmation of either binary or quantized nature of the universe, which are basic for digital physics. The few attempts made in this direction would include the experiment with holometer designed by Craig Hogan, which among others would detect a bit structure of space-time. The experiment started collecting data in August 2014.

A new result of the experiment released on December 3, 2015, after a year of data collection, has ruled out Hogan's theory of a pixelated universe to a high degree of statistical significance (4.6 sigma). The study found that space-time is not quantized at the scale being measured.

Criticism

Physical symmetries are continuous

One objection is that extant models of digital physics are incompatible with the existence of several continuous characters of physical symmetries, e.g., rotational symmetry, translational symmetry, Lorentz symmetry, and the Lie group gauge invariance of Yang–Mills theories, all central to current physical theory. 

Proponents of digital physics claim that such continuous symmetries are only convenient (and very good) approximations of a discrete reality. For example, the reasoning leading to systems of natural units and the conclusion that the Planck length is a minimum meaningful unit of distance suggests that at some level, space itself is quantized.

Moreover, computers can manipulate and solve formulas describing real numbers using symbolic computation, thus avoiding the need to approximate real numbers by using an infinite number of digits. 

A number—in particular a real number, one with an infinite number of digits—was defined by Alan Turing to be computable if a Turing machine will continue to spit out digits endlessly. In other words, there is no "last digit". But this sits uncomfortably with any proposal that the universe is the output of a virtual-reality exercise carried out in real time (or any plausible kind of time). Known physical laws (including quantum mechanics and its continuous spectra) are very much infused with real numbers and the mathematics of the continuum.

"So ordinary computational descriptions do not have a cardinality of states and state space trajectories that is sufficient for them to map onto ordinary mathematical descriptions of natural systems. Thus, from the point of view of strict mathematical description, the thesis that everything is a computing system in this second sense cannot be supported".

For his part, David Deutsch generally takes a "multiverse" view to the question of continuous vs. discrete. In short, he thinks that “within each universe all observable quantities are discrete, but the multiverse as a whole is a continuum. When the equations of quantum theory describe a continuous but not-directly-observable transition between two values of a discrete quantity, what they are telling us is that the transition does not take place entirely within one universe. So perhaps the price of continuous motion is not an infinity of consecutive actions, but an infinity of concurrent actions taking place across the multiverse.” January, 2001 "The Discrete and the Continuous", an abridged version of which appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement.

Locality

Some argue that extant models of digital physics violate various postulates of quantum physics. For example, if these models are not grounded in Hilbert spaces and probabilities, they belong to the class of theories with local hidden variables that have so far been ruled out experimentally using Bell's theorem. This criticism has two possible answers. First, any notion of locality in the digital model does not necessarily have to correspond to locality formulated in the usual way in the emergent spacetime. A concrete example of this case was given by Lee Smolin. Another possibility is a well-known loophole in Bell's theorem known as superdeterminism (sometimes referred to as predeterminism). In a completely deterministic model, the experimenter's decision to measure certain components of the spins is predetermined. Thus, the assumption that the experimenter could have decided to measure different components of the spins than he actually did is, strictly speaking, not true.

Object-oriented ontology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology 

 

In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. This is in contrast to what it calls the "anthropocentrism" of Kant's Copernican Revolution, as accepted by most other current metaphysics, in which phenomenal objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently (as Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.

Object-oriented ontology is often viewed as a subset of speculative realism, a contemporary school of thought that criticizes the post-Kantian reduction of philosophical enquiry to a correlation between thought and being, such that the reality of anything outside of this correlation is unknowable.^[6] Object-oriented ontology predates speculative realism, however, and makes distinct claims about the nature and equality of object relations to which not all speculative realists agree. The term "object-oriented philosophy" was coined by Graham Harman, the movement's founder, in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects". In 2009, Levi Bryant rephrased Harman's original designation as "object-oriented ontology", giving the movement its current name.

Founding of the movement

The term "object-oriented philosophy” was used by speculative philosopher Graham Harman in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects" (later revised and published as Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects). For Harman, Heideggerian Zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand, refers to the withdrawal of objects from human perception into a reality that cannot be manifested by practical or theoretical action. Furthering this idea, Harman contends that when objects withdraw in this way, they distance themselves from other objects, as well as humans. Resisting pragmatic interpretations of Heidegger's thought, then, Harman is able to propose an object-oriented account of metaphysical substances. Following the publication of Harman's early work, several scholars from varying fields employing object-oriented principles in their own work. Levi Bryant began what he describes as "a very intense philosophical email exchange" with Harman, over the course of which Bryant became convinced of the credibility of object-oriented thought. Bryant subsequently used the term "object-oriented ontology" in 2009 to distinguish those ontologies committed to an account of being composed of discrete beings from Harman's object-oriented philosophy, in order to mark a difference between object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and object-oriented ontology (OOO).

Basic principles

While object-oriented philosophers reach different conclusions, they share common precepts, including a critique of anthropocentrism and correlationism and a rejection of "preservation of finitude", "withdrawal", and philosophies that undermine or "overmine" objects.

Rejection of anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism is the privileging of humans as "subjects" over and against nonhuman beings as "objects". This widespread tendency frequently limits attributes such as mind, autonomy, moral agency, reason, and the like to humans, while contrasting all other beings as variations of "object", or things obeying deterministic laws, impulses, stimuli, instincts, and so on. Beginning with Kant's epistemology, modern philosophers began articulating a transcendent anthropocentrism, whereby the Kantian argument that objects are unknowable outside of the imposed, distorting categories of the human mind in turn shores up discourses wherein objects frequently become effectively reduced to mere products of human cognition. In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception, and that nonhuman object relations distort their related objects in the same fundamental manner as human consciousness. Thus, all object relations, human and nonhuman, are said to exist on equal ontological footing with one another.

Critique of correlationism

Related to 'anthropocentrism', object-oriented thinkers reject correlationism, which the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other". Because object-oriented ontology is the realist philosophy, it stands in contradistinction to the anti-realist trajectory of correlationism, which restricts philosophical understanding to the correlation of being with thought by disavowing any reality external to this correlation as inaccessible, and, in this way, fails to escape the ontological reification of human experience.

Rejection of undermining and "overmining"

Object-oriented thought holds that there are two principal strategies for devaluing the philosophical import of objects. First, one can undermine objects by claiming that they are an effect or manifestation of a deeper, underlying substance or force. Second, one can "overmine" objects by either an idealism which holds that there is nothing beneath what appears in the mind or, as in social constructionism, by positing no independent reality outside of language, discourse or power. Object-oriented philosophy rejects both undermining and "overmining".

Preservation of finitude

Unlike other speculative realisms, object-oriented ontology maintains the concept of finitude, whereby relation to an object cannot be translated into direct and complete knowledge of an object. Since all object relations distort their related objects, every relation is said to be an act of translation, with the caveat that no object can perfectly translate another object into its own nomenclature. Object-oriented ontology does not restrict finitude to humanity, however, but extends it to all objects as an inherent limitation of relationality.

Withdrawal

Object-oriented ontology holds that objects are independent not only of other objects, but also from the qualities they animate at any specific spatiotemporal location. Accordingly, objects cannot be exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects in theory or practice, meaning that the reality of objects is always present-at-hand. The retention by an object of a reality in excess of any relation is known as withdrawal.

Metaphysics of Graham Harman

In Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Graham Harman interprets the tool-analysis contained in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time as inaugurating an ontology of objects themselves, rather than the valorization of practical action or networks of signification. According to Harman, Heideggerian Zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand, indicates the withdrawal of objects from both practical and theoretical action, such that objectal reality cannot be exhausted by either practical usage or theoretical investigation. Harman further contends that objects withdraw not just from human interaction, but also from other objects. He maintains:

If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops. Even inanimate things only unlock each other's realities to a minimal extent, reducing one another to caricatures...even if rocks are not sentient creatures, they never encounter one another in their deepest being, but only as present-at-hand; it is only Heidegger's confusion of two distinct senses of the as-structure that prevents this strange result from being accepted.

From this, Harman concludes that the primary site of ontological investigation is objects and relations, instead of the post-Kantian emphasis on the human-world correlate. Moreover, this holds true for all entities, be they human, nonhuman, natural, or artificial, leading to the downplayment of dasein as an ontological priority. In its place, Harman proposes a concept of substances that are irreducible to both material particles and human perception, and "exceed every relation into which they might enter".

Coupling Heidegger's tool-analysis with the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl, Harman introduces two types of objects: real objects and sensual objects. Real objects are objects that withdraw from all experience, whereas sensual objects are those that exist only in experience. Additionally, Harman suggests two kinds of qualities: sensual qualities, or those found in experience, and real qualities, which are accessed through intellectual probing. Pairing sensual and real objects and qualities yields the following framework:

• Sensual Object/Sensual Qualities: Sensual objects are present, but enmeshed within a "mist of accidental features and profiles".
• Sensual Object/Real Qualities: The structure of conscious phenomena are forged from eidetic, or experientially interpretive, qualities intuited intellectually.
• Real Object/Sensual Qualities: As in the tool-analysis, a withdrawn object is translated into sensual apprehension via a "surface" accessed by thought and/or action.
• Real Object/Real Qualities: This pairing grounds the capacity of real objects to differ from one another, without collapsing into indefinite substrata.

To explain how withdrawn objects make contact with and relate to one another, Harman submits the theory of vicarious causation, whereby two hypothetical entities meet in the interior of a third entity, existing side-by-side until something occurs to prompt interaction. Harman compares this idea to the classical notion of formal causation, in which forms do not directly touch, but influence one another in a common space "from which all are partly absent". Causation, says Harman, is always vicarious, asymmetrical, and buffered:

'Vicarious' means that objects confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity. 'Asymmetrical' means that the initial confrontation always unfolds between a real object and a sensual one. And 'buffered' means that [real objects] do not fuse into [sensual objects], nor [sensual objects] into their sensual neighbors, since all are held at bay through unknown firewalls sustaining the privacy of each. from the asymmetrical and buffered inner life of an object, vicarious connections arise occasionally...giving birth to new objects with their own interior spaces.

Thus, causation entails the connection between a real object residing within the directionality of consciousness, or a unified "intention," with another real object residing outside of the intention, where the intention itself is also classified as a real object. From here, Harman extrapolates five types of relations between objects. Containment describes a relation in which the intention "contains" both the real object and sensual object. Contiguity connotes relations between sensual objects lying side-by-side within an intention, not affecting one another, such that a sensual object's bystanders can be rearranged without disrupting the object's identity. Sincerity characterizes the absorption of a real object by a sensual object, in a manner that "takes seriously" the sensual object without containing or being contiguous to it. Connection conveys the vicarious generation of intention by real objects indirectly encountering one another. Finally, no relation represents the typical condition of reality, since real objects are incapable of direct interaction and are limited in their causal influence upon and relation to other objects.

Expansion

Since its inception by Graham Harman in 1999, many authors in a variety of disciplines have adapted and expanded upon Harman's ideas.

Onticology (Bryant)

Like Harman, Levi Bryant opposes post-Kantian anthropocentrism and philosophies of access. From Bryant's perspective, the Kantian contention that reality is accessible to human knowledge because it is structured by human cognition limits philosophy to a self-reflexive analysis of the mechanisms and institutions through which cognition structures reality. He states:

For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap. And indeed, in the reduction of philosophy to the interrogation of this single relation or gap, not only will there be excessive focus on how humans relate to the world to the detriment of anything else, but this interrogation will be profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to through the agency of the human will becomes a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intentions without contributing anything of its own.

To counter the form of post-Kantian epistemology, Bryant articulates an object-oriented philosophy called onticology, grounded in three principles. First, the Ontic Principle states that "there is no difference that does not make a difference". Following from the premises that questions of difference precede epistemological interrogation and that to be is to create differences, this principle posits that knowledge cannot be fixed prior to engagement with difference. And so, for Bryant, the thesis that there is a thing-in-itself which we cannot know is untenable because it presupposes forms of being that make no differences. Similarly, concepts of difference predicated upon negation—that which objects are not or lack when placed in comparison with one another—are dismissed as arising only from the perspective of consciousness, rather than an ontological difference that affirms independent being. Second, the Principle of the Inhuman asserts that the concept of difference producing difference is not restricted to human, sociocultural, or epistemological domains, thereby marking the being of difference as independent of knowledge and consciousness. Humans exist as difference-making beings among other difference-making beings, therefore, without holding any special position with respect to other differences. Third, the Ontological Principle maintains that if there is no difference that does not also make a difference, then the making of difference is the minimal condition for the existence of being. In Bryant's words, "if a difference is made, then the being is". Bryant further contends that differences produced by an object can be inter-ontic (made with respect to another object) or intra-ontic (pertaining the internal constitution of the object).

Onticology distinguishes between four different types of objects: bright objects, dim objects, dark objects, and rogue objects. Bright objects are objects that strongly manifest themselves and heavily impact other objects, such as the ubiquity of cell phones in high-tech cultures. Dim objects lightly manifest themselves in an assemblage of objects; for example, a neutrino passing through solid matter without producing observable effects. Dark objects are objects that are so completely withdrawn that they produce no local manifestations and do not affect any other objects. Rogue objects are not chained to any given assemblage of objects, but instead wander in and out of assemblages, modifying relations within the assemblages into which they enter. Political protestors exemplify rogue objects by breaking with the norms and relations of a dominant political assemblage in order to forge new relations that challenge, change, or cast off the prior assemblage. Additionally, Bryant has proposed the concept of 'wilderness ontology' to explain the philosophical pluralization of agency away from human privilege.

Hyperobjects (Morton)

Timothy Morton became involved with object-oriented ontology after his ecological writings were favorably compared with the movement's ideas. In The Ecological Thought, Morton introduced the concept of hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. He has subsequently enumerated five characteristics of hyperobjects:

1. Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes.
2. Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent.
3. Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, objects don't feel global warming, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations they produce.
4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently to an observer with a higher multidimensional view.
5. Interobjective: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the Sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet, global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predated its own measurement.

According to Morton, hyperobjects not only become visible during an age of ecological crisis, but alert humans to the ecological dilemmas defining the age in which they live. Additionally, the existential capacity of hyperobjects to outlast a turn toward less materialistic cultural values, coupled with the threat many such objects pose toward organic matter gives them a potential spiritual quality, in which their treatment by future societies may become indistinguishable from reverential care.

Alien phenomenology (Bogost)

Ian Bogost, a video game researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of Persuasive Games, has articulated an "applied" object-oriented ontology, concerned more with the being of specific objects than the exploration of foundational principles. Bogost calls his approach alien phenomenology, with the term "alien" designating the manner in which withdrawal accounts for the inviolability of objectal experience. From this perspective, an object may not recognize the experience of other objects because objects relate to one another using metaphors of selfhood.

Alien phenomenology is grounded in three "modes" of practice. First, ontography entails the production of works that reveal the existence and relation of objects. Second, metaphorism denotes the production of works that speculate about the "inner lives" of objects, including how objects translate the experience of other objects into their own terms. Third, carpentry indicates the creation of artifacts that illustrate the perspective of objects, or how objects construct their own worlds. Bogost sometimes refers to his version of object-oriented thought as a tiny ontology to emphasize his rejection of rigid ontological categorization of forms of being, including distinctions between "real" and "fictional" objects.

Criticism

Some commentators contend that object-oriented ontology degrades meaning by placing humans and objects on equal footing. Matthew David Segall has argued that object-oriented philosophers should explore the theological and anthropological implications of their ideas in order to avoid "slipping into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe".

Other critical commentators such as David Berry and Alexander Galloway have commented on the historical situatedness of an ontology that mirrors computational processes and even the metaphors and language of computation. Pancomputationalism and digital philosophy explore these ideas further. 

Joshua Simon contextualized the rise of popularity of the theory in contemporary art circles as a variation on commodity fetishism - a return to the primacy of the object, in a post-2008 art market.

Cultural critic Steven Shaviro has criticized object-oriented ontology as too dismissive of process philosophy. According to Shaviro, the process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze account for how objects come into existence and endure over time, in contrast to the view that objects "are already there" taken by object-oriented approaches. Shaviro also finds fault with Harman's assertion that Whitehead, Simondon, and Iain Hamilton Grant undermine objects by positing objects as manifestations of a deeper, underlying substance, saying that the antecedence of these thinkers, particularly Grant and Simondon, includes the "plurality of actually existing objects", rather than a single substance of which objects are mere epiphenomena.