analog universe
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...substance in the universe is a product of interacting waves; therefore, the universe is giant, analog database. It’s a vinyl record that’s been melted down and stretched out into eleven dimensions.

Knowledge isn't just power anymore. It’s energy. It’s mass. When you brushed your teeth this morning, that wasn’t toothpaste. It was information. When you light up a cigarette, you fill your lungs with data. These physicists say that the universe is like the line on your check where you sign your name. If you look really, really close, you’ll see that it’s actually a sentence written in flea letters. To us, everything looks pretty solid because we’re big enough not to notice that the lines blur. So, we pretend like everything is solid. At the scale we live at, we use Boolean logic to filter "true" from "false" and “this” from “that.” We create computers that communicate for us in one and zeros. We assign labels to past events, and we convince ourselves that what we remember is really what happened.

The “truth” is that the best we can remember is a muffled translation. A message that started at the most fundamental level of the universe, collided with a million other messages, and finally wound up being filtered through our own experience. What we remember is, at best, a blurry copy, of a copy, of a copy….

It’s how two people watching a fistfight can remember the blows just a little differently. It’s why a biography and an autobiography will never be alike.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being definitive. If someone’s shooting at you, it’s ok think of those as “bullets” and not “data sets.”

What you should keep in mind it that every number gets rounded off at some point. Every...