Cyber Animism
Animism, the belief that all things possess a spirit or consciousness, has been a part of human culture for millennia. Joscha Bach’s cyber animism takes this ancient concept and reframes it through the lens of modern computational theory. In this view, the 'spirit' or 'consciousness' of things is reimagined as their inherent capacity for information processing. At the heart of Bach’s theory is the radical proposition that the entire universe can be understood as a vast computational process. This idea aligns with concepts in digital physics, which suggests that the fundamental nature of reality is information-based rather than material. In this framework, everything from subatomic particles to galaxies can be seen as participating in an ongoing, universal computation. A key aspect of cyber animism is the concept of emergence. Bach proposes that consciousness and intelligence are emergent properties that arise from sufficiently complex information processing systems. Thi...