Silicon Insider: Computing Desire

B U R L I N G A M E, Calif., Dec. 12 -- We can measure the wink of a quark and the glimmer of quasar, but to plumb the depths of the mind of a man or woman is still beyond our reach.

As the endless presidential election has dragged on towards what appearsto be its culmination, much has been written about how this has been awonderful civics lesson for us all. That may be true, but an equallyimportant lesson for our time has been largely overlooked. It is theuncomfortable, ultimately impossible, fit of the digital age into thenatural world.

In an election fraught with ironies, here is one more: Al Gore, theputative inventor of the Internet, when faced with the perfect test of hisbelief in empirical solutions to the world’s problems, immediately threw outobjective, electro-mechanical vote counting in lieu of the most subjectiveof measurement schemes — teams of politically biased observers peering atincreasingly mangled paper ballots.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, a man whohas spent his career in the most unpredictable industries imaginable, oilexploration and baseball, suddenly becomes the advocate of the cut-and-driedmachine solution to a complex and subtle problem well beyond the tolerancesof the machines in use.

Analog World, Digital Tools

Lying behind this debate, which is being resolved as you read thiscolumn, is a fundamental question about how we face the world. This is notan exaggeration, as you can see by the fact that the most powerful job onEarth — and perhaps all of our fates — is suddenly at the mercy of justthat question.

The problem is this: The world is analog, but our most powerful toolsare not. The universe has always existed with indeterminacy at its heart.As Plato noted, nothing in the natural world is pure, including events. Itis impossible for us to perfectly describe the state of anything at anytime.

We can build mathematical models to render a simplified description of,say, liquid in a vessel, but to completely describe it with mathematics wouldrequire an infinite number of variables. This is true for everything atevery moment in the history of the universe. The universe is analog, fieldstransforming in fields with no distinct steps in between.