Tata Says

For as long as we can remember, we built instruments, yantras, physical objects that provide to us and convey to others access to ever deeper levels of consciousness. Straddling the boundary of consciousness and the level of control we can exert over the physical world around us, they are as much an intrinsic and defining element of a human culture as are a language or a cuisine.

Ultimately, they are useful. They embody growing parts of what our minds can do into physical tools, and that is what drives societies to build them; but that is not what makes us enchanted by them.

What drives us is the purest of joys. The same joy that a child feels when they draw their first perfect circle with a compass; the same joy felt over and over again billions of times in history. The joy followed by the burning need to then understand what we are now looking at and to describe the relationship between its radius and circumference – the relationship so unfathomable that we call it irrational. The same joy that we feel when we learn to meditate over Sri-Chakra, seeking the peace of comprehension; or even before that, while we simply learn about the reasons for its geometry.

These are the innate drives that computers help us access, more directly than ever before; this is why we want to write code, why we use them to put words to paper, and organize terabytes of data in beautiful ways to extract and convey information. That is what we really built computers for.

Computers are our current most advanced mechanical¹ tools for exploring consciousness and building things out of it. The myriad applications and things built using computers are a mere consequence of our search for beauty and meaning through this exploration that they facilitate.

They are immensely complex. Not only in terms of physics, chemistry, and engineering they rely upon to run, but equally in terms of mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy that they embody. Which is only fitting for instruments that are built using the sum total of millenia of human knowledge.

They are also incredibly intuitive to use. Which is only fitting for instruments that are built to provide access to consciousness that underlies our shared existence.

In between the complexity and the intuition are layers upon layers of abstractions that we constructed in order to make sense of them².

In the end, however, it is not really that hard or mysterious, it’s all just human knowledge. Just some stories.

This book is a collection of stories about some of the most obvious layers that make computers work.

1. I emphasize “mechanical” here – the pointless hope and the silly hype that we are as powerful as gods and have finally created something better than ourselves for that task is rife, once again, as it has been many a time before. ↩︎
2. Yes, I know this sentence is recursive, but that is not my fault: we did build abstractions in order to make sense of abstractions, that is what we do. ↩︎