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I’m afraid that the title of this book, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, promises more than it delivers. I was excited in purchasing the book. I know that quantum computing is a hot topic. And, I liked the idea that the author could demonstrate the universe itself was a large computer. I was I was just too naive, however, in expecting that this book would contain actual instructions for programming the universe. I guess I was hoping to discover another hidden treasure, like John Lilly’s classic, Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer. And, because my expectations were unrealistically high, I found the book to be a disappointment.

To begin with, author Seth Lloyd was a colleague and admirer of Nobel Laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann. Well, I have interviewed Gell-Mann, and I know him to be an active (and ignorant) skeptic regarding my own academic speciality, parapsychology. Seth Lloyd, while not professing to be an active skeptic himself, nevertheless writes in a manner that is completely consistent with the tradition of scientific materialism. As far as he is concerned, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the universe’s complexity – merely the product of some fancy computations.

That, of course, is the mainstream argument within science today. But, I don’t buy it – and neither do philosophers of science and consciousness such as David Chalmers who point out, pointedly, that proponents of this viewpoint are not able to state, even in principle, how consciousness can arise from mere information, or from the interactions of particles that, themselves, are lacking in consciousness. The alternative viewpoint has been articulated elegantly by quantum physicist Amit Goswami, in a manner consistent with sacred texts from the world’s cultures: consciousness itself is fundamental to the universe. It is at least as basic as matter, energy, time and space (if not moreso). This perspective has been echoed by a variety of other great physicists including Wolfgang Pauli, John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner.

Seth Lloyd proposes in his book that it will be an advance for us to consider the universe as an information processing machine – rather than merely a machine. No doubt, he is correct. But, in this blog, I have provided testimony regarding numerous synchronicities that have provided significant meaning and direction to my own life. Therefore, I propose that for a theory of the universe to be useful to me is has to have some power to begin to explain the operation of such synchronicities. I’m inclined to think that the information processing metaphor lacks this power – whereas a metaphor that places consciousness within the universal computer (and, for a little spice, also adds in some higher-dimensional mathematics) seems to do the trick. That’s why I highly favor the theoretical writings of my friend Saul-Paul Sirag (another of my magical friends who should receive a future blog essay about his interesting life journey).

One thing that I did find fascinating in Seth Lloyd’s book were some of the personal stories concerning another of his mentors, a man whom I have met and admired, Heinz Pagels. Pagels was a great scientist who died tragically in a mountain climbing accident. And, it turns out – as revealed in an appendix titled “Personal Note: The Consolation of Information” that Seth Lloyd was with alone with Pagels on that mountain at the time Pagels plummeted to his death. It is hear that Seth Lloyd finally allows himself to speculate on the very subject I had hoped would be the focus of the whole book. He writes in an interesting way about Pagel’s death:

“Heinz’s body and brain are gone. The information his cells processed is wrapped up in the earth’s slow processes. He has lost consciousness, thought and action. But we have not entirely lost him. While he lived, Heinz programmed his own piece of the universe. The resulting computation unfolds in us and around us: the vivid thoughts and outrageous behavior he impressed on us still flourish in our thoughts and behavior and have their own vivid and outrageous consequences. Heinz’s piece of the universal computation goes on.”

Frankly, in spite of my disappointment that his book did not go as far as I would have wished, it is hard to really fault Seth Lloyd. In truth, his approach does constitute a brilliant new synthesis. He has shown the capacity to think deeply, in detail and in large terms about the universe. I would only like to encourage him to apply his talents just a little further – to see if he can grapple with what David Chalmers has called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

He might begin, for example, by asking himself if Heinz Pagel’s untimely death was in any way programmed or prefigured in Pagel’s own classic text, The Cosmic Code. Perhaps, however, I am simply asking too much from a professor of (quantum) mechanical engineering.

(Incidentally, I met Heinz Pagels through Seth Lloyd’s own agent, John Brockman, who also happened to be the agent of my friend physicist Fred Alan Wolf. Pagels was also very close to another friend, physicist Nick Herbert. Both Wolf and Herbert have written more deeply about the physics of consciousness. Bright thinkers, such as Seth Lloyd would do well to pay more attention to this literature.)

Rating: 4 / 5

Lloyd’s grandiose hypothesis/opinion/wishfull thinking is that “The universe is a quantum computer” For a hypothesis/opinion to become an accepted scientific theory/fact, it must be self-consistent, and it must make a good number of sharp predictions that separate it from competing theories, and, of course, all its predictions must agree with experimental observations. lloyd does not bother to show that his hypothesis/opinion meets any of the conditions that would make it a scientific theory. For this reason, in my opinion, LLoyd’s book is an opinion book dishonestly presented as a science book.
Rating: 1 / 5