The Software Eaten World

Rajesh Kasturirangan
4 min readApr 1, 2019
Photographer: Markus Spiske | Source: Unsplash

In accounting for the furniture of the universe, several intellectual traditions have settled upon two great organizing principles:

  1. Materialism: the world’s made of stuff and only stuff. If you can’t kick it, it don’t exist.
  2. Idealism: the world’s conjured by the mind. If you can dream it, it exists.

While the two positions are at odds with each other, there’s always been a dialectical dance between them. Hegel was an idealist. Marx a materialist; yet Marx borrowed heavily from Hegel. Those German thinkers 🙃.

It doesn’t have to be so. Today, as energy (aka matter stuff) and information (aka mind stuff) are two sides of the same coin, we have the language and the ideas to set aside the materialist-idealist distinction entirely. Further, we have machines that constantly challenge our desire to swerve left towards materialism and right towards idealism.

I am talking about computers of course.

I am not talking about the theoretical computing devices conjured by Turing and his followers. I am also not talking about the machines explicitly called “computer,” i.e., the devices in your pocket or in front of you. Turing and Jobs have roles in my movie but the star is yet to be discovered.

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Rajesh Kasturirangan

M-Theorist. My mind goes many places: towards metaphysics, mathematics, myth. These days, all M’s are coming together in an exploration of the Metaverse.