@Libbie Grant Thank you. This is really interesting. Your Sci-Fi novel sounds like it's going to be fun. How is it going? At 56:20 you said exactly what I was thinking, and what I think every time I hear one of these "The Universe is a Simulation" or "The Universe is a Computer". It looks like a computer because anything we can understand can be described as some kind of computation, because that is what we have come to think of understanding something to mean. Just before I started listening to your podcast I was looking at the Wikipedia page for Algorithmic Complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity The idea goes back at least to Ernst Mach in 1910: "The aim of scientific economy is to provide us with a picture of the world as complete as possible — connected, unitary, calm and not materially disturbed by new occurrences: in short a world picture of the greatest possible stability. The nearer science approaches this aim, the more capable will it be of controlling the disturbances of practical life, and thus serving the purpose out of which its first germs were developed. [PH: 336, italics added]" (See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ernst-mach/#EcoUniSci) So the Time Wave Zero phenomenon ought also to be something that shows up in scientific literature at some point, and your Sci-Fi story could have a bit where some people in a shady organisation with access to enormous amounts of AI data can see all this happening and it's like a massive wave of compression flowing through their networks and you can imagine it like a fire in a piece of rice paper, where the flame is brightest at the front just before the ash goes completely black. Wouldn't that be great in a movie?!! Your summing up was really beautiful. Have you read Aristotle's Metaphysics? I haven't read the whole thing properly but when I got to his description of God in Part 7 I knew I'd found my philosopher. I'm very pleased to meet you Libbie, and here's wishing you a very merry Winter Solstice!

@Libbie Grant Great, let us know when it comes out! I heard about another Sci-Fi story this morning that sounds equally good. https://youtu.be/Sf25pdLv3D8 and if you want to short-circuit a lot of baffling stuff in Aristotle's Metaphysics, you can read my blog post https://eternaldoorman.blogspot.com/2023/11/aristotle-on-god.html Some of it might still seem baffling, but it's only a few paragraphs and well worth the read. Happy holidays!

@Jonathan Laliberte Thanks. What a database!

@Graham St John 🐰!

Another apposite bit at 56:13 https://youtu.be/OdQ2-_JCIZQ?t=56m13s

@Manuel Trinidad Thank you for this. I wish I'd known about it back in 2014! Do you know what happened to Network The World? The web site was on squarespace but it's been closed-down. Also the wndw facebook group was suspended early in 2022. The book is very interesting, starting at basic physics of radio waves and getting into network planning and congestion control. It's 500+ pages so I've not read it all, but this was a very impressive project. I think though that we need to do something that is based on a different idea of time. Ideas don't live in real-time, they each have their own time, and when the ideas connect they isochronize (I just made up that word). This idea of networking the world in real-time with wireless links is a good one, but these small decentralised networks will each react in real time only in their immediate spatial neighbourhoods. Then ideas that develop locally will sometimes filter slowly through the global network and connect with others that have been developing in other places, and then these distant regions will suddenly prove to have been in some sort synchrony for possibly years. A big part of the problem with the big-tech global network is that it connects things too fast and from too far away. So people's attention is taken from where they can really make a difference to places far away, and the world starts to appear more chaotic than it actually is.

@Lee Richard 😂

On our complex prostheses: https://youtu.be/GdEKhIk-8Gg?t=32m0s they're not ours any more! Google et all got hold of them.

Mathematics. And self-transforming syntax machine-elves. They have to be mathematical, of course.