From machines; out of sorts; and turtles all the way!

Related Link » deus ex machina
“Stage device in Greek and Roman drama in which a god appeared in the sky by means of a crane [skyhook] to resolve the plot of a play. See: miracle”
— TheFreeDictionary

Related Link » Stephen Jay Gould: The Pattern of Life's History
“What Darwin discovered, I claim, is that evolution is ultimately an algorithmic process — a blind but amazingly effective sorting process that gradually produces all the wonders of nature. This view is reductionist only in the sense that it says there are no miracles. No skyhooks.” [emphasis added]
— Daniel C. Dennett, commenting on Gould's work

Related Link » Turtles all the way down
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You're very clever, young man, very clever’, said the old lady. ‘But it's turtles all the way down!’”
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

I have recently intuited what I now believe amounts to a generalization of Dennett's claim for "nature", namely that: Darwin's discovery of evolution is "a blind but amazingly effective sorting process that gradually produces all the wonders of nature". In my posts "The Fundamental Dichotomy" and "The Classification of Everything", my fundamental operator is "the classification process" and my fundamental operand is "the evolving universe", whereas Dennett speaks of a "sorting process" operator with "the wonders of nature" as its operand.

I strikes me as fitting and quite elegant that such an algorithmic "operator{operand}" description neatly summarizes Darwin's evolution of nature within Einstein's expanding universe, viz.

classification{universe(sorting{nature})}

Post #963 From machines; out of sorts; and turtles all the way!