God’s Thinking

If God thought like today's engineer, our head would be a giant block of steel in order to stabilize our eyeballs. But what does God do? He says,

"I've got a noisy system here. Can I cancel the noise?" That's God. Clever God.

God says,

"Well, sure, I could cancel it by a lot of neurological structures and so forth, but can I use that noise to good avail?"

Lo and behold, our visual system takes these high-frequency vibrations in our eye and does a vernier computation over a random distribution of rods and cones and enables us to resolve distances less than half the diameter of a rod or a cone.

Interview in Wired Magazine, August 2000 with John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp, coauthor of 'The Social Life of Information"

Think like God.