Abstract
In an attempt to prevent an unwholesome action and a deadly increase of local entropy, the author engages in a ‘singular’ nightly conversation with a silent interlocutor, trying to convince him that External Reality is only made of interacting computational mechanisms that populate a hierarchy of levels of emergence, and that purposes, conversely, are an illusory business. In biology, for example, goals are just a narrative trick for describing, a-posteriori, features of mechanisms that darwinian evolution developed without any a-priori blueprint. More generally, goals are a convenient product of human knowledge meant to offer practical, concise, easily understood and easily communicated representations of the mechanisms we produce and/or observe. The conversation touches upon program specification (goal) and implementation (mechanism), entropy reduction in a sorting algorithm and in cellular automata, and provides experimental evidence that cooperation, as opposed to individual action, may help keeping ‘life’ parameters within a safe region, at least for some individual (not for the Man in a Tailcoat, in this case).
Tommaso Bolognesi