Under the roof of one controversial assumption about physics, we discuss five big questions that can be addressed using concepts from a modern understanding of digital informational processes. The assumption is called finite nature. The digital mechanics model is obtained by applying the assumption to physics. The questions are as follows: 1. What is the origin of spin? 2. Why are there symmetries and CPT (charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal)? 3. What is the origin of length? 4. What does a process model of motion tell us? 5. Can the finite nature assumption account for the efficacy of quantum mechanics?

The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine — it — is digital, and digital is the decision to forget the idea of the infinitely moving wave, and just take snapshots, convincing yourself that if you take enough pictures, it won’t matter that you’ve left out the flowing, continuous aspect of things. You take the mimic for the thing mimicked and say, Good enough. But now I knew that between one pixel and the next — no matter how densely together you packed them — the world still existed, down to the finest grain of the stuff of the universe. And no matter how frequently that mouse located itself, sample after sample, snapshot after snapshot — here, now here, now here — something was always happening between the here’s. The mouse was still moving — was somewhere, but where? It couldn’t say. Time, invisible, was slipping through its digital now’s.

...to be able to say of a representation that it is "exactly like Nature " is by no means equivalent to saying that it is a fine picture.

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.

Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.

In the intangible digital realm, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is becoming. Upon this relentless change all the disruptions of modernity ride.

And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

The fundamental digital divide is no measured by the number of connections to the Internet, but by the consequences of both connection and lack of connection.