Ha! "Layman's terms" you say ?
Sorry to hear of another casualty of covid... and admittedly Conway was an
important thinker... but this rambling interview seems best described as
confused. Does it really serve to further his legacy?
Randomness itself is an illusion in many ways - a semantic contrivance used as
a strawman, impossible to document as relevant on a large scale or outside of
narrow constraints - but for that imply determinism, then we always seem to end
up with the need for some kind of embedded memory or lingering "information
field"...with spiritual overtones which then create another issue.
This is the strange and ironic paradox for an atheist like Conway. The "Game of
Life" can in fact be used as the very basis of a kind of science-based
spirituality - for those so inclined.
Everything that occurs on a large enough scale seems to possess a lingering
echo of the past - which even as minimal causality, will be labeled as deism.
And why not?
H LV <[email protected]> wrote:
The mathematician John Conway died in April from complications due to Covid-19.
He was most well known for his Game of Life, however he felt his best work was
his discovery of surreal numbers which grew out his interest in the game of Go.
In this interview clip John Conway explains in layman's terms why the opposite
of deterministic is not random. He says that Einstein`s famous remark that "God
does not play dice with the universe" is irrelevant because he shows how
randomness is also a type of determinism.
https://youtu.be/r1bDSlt1n9M?t=2294
Harry
