Perfection and Meditation

"The Information" by James Gleick discusses what information really is, if it is really computable, and if, hypothetically, there was a machine that could be created to do all of the possible computing with any given numbers. In order to solve this problem, Alan Turing did something never before considered. He created a machine that had ideal powers, but only existed in his own mind.

And that is what I want to focus on in this post. How Turing basically answered important information-related questions that mathematicians had long been considering, with a machine that only existed in his mind. This would require Turing to have a very focused and logical mind. This idea of being able to focus one's mind to one particular subject also occurs in different religions, especially religions involving meditation.

Buddhist meditation is a classic example of meditiation for enlightenment, or understanding the nature of things. I think this can be similarily correlated with what Turing did regarding information. Followers of Buddhism use meditation to pursue understanding of the nature of the world, meaning they have to be very focused. Turing created a machine in his own mind, requiring him to be very focused on his theories.

Also interesting was Shannon's idea about cryptology. His goal was to create a coding system that was impossible to decode without a certain key. He was able to prove that a perfect coding system was possible, but that to be perfect, that encoding something was basically useless because the receiving end would not be able to understand the code either.

I think that this point can relate to Christianity in the following way. God did not create people to be perfect, so there are no perfect people. This allows people to have emotions. If everybody was perfect, there would be no sadness or fear, meaning that there would be no reason for people to truly feel happy or joy. So in reality, perfection in people would be useless, just as Shannon found perfection in a coding system useless because it would have no real purpose.