Digital Cowboy

Here’s something I just wanna throw out as food for thought.

Moral relativists often like to claim that “Life is not black and white. It’s just various shades of gray.”

It’s an interesting argument that I’ve sometimes espoused in the past and it’s almost singularly used to denigrate the idea that there are absolutes in this world - absolute right and wrong, mainly.

What I find interesting is that now that we’re in a “digital world,” we seem to be finding out that our best attempts to mimic the natural world can only be done with binary math.

The music you listen to on your iPod, the digital cable broadcast or HD satellite image you watch on your widescreen TV, the operation of every digital medical device, the video you watch on YouTube, the very words you’re reading right now… ALL digital representations of sight and sound.

Modern computer monitors, graphics cards and HD TVs are capable of representing BILLIONS of colors - more than the human eye can differentiate. Modern audio codecs can encode compressed audio that still has a frequency range greater than the human ear can hear.

Mankind’s science, with all of it’s learning and all of it’s arrogance has managed to re-create and reproduce (just) two of our five natural senses with near perfection. I’m not a skeptic that they can figure out how to do a couple of the remaining three soon. There have been promising efforts.

But it’s all digital. It likely will all be digital. “Digital” has come to be used in this age as a marketing term that is intended to imply “superior.” With good reason - it is almost always true that digital is superior. In many ways, it is the height of mankind’s discovery of how to recreate the world around him.

For those of you who aren’t geeks, let me clarify what “digital” means. It means that it is done with binary math. That is, bits and bytes. That is, ones and zeroes. Each bit is either on or it’s off. That’s how the computer that you’re using to read this, works. It all comes down to ones and zeroes. The chip in your computer - and every other microchip (currently) - only “understands” binary math.

On or off.

Black or white.

In all of our learning, we’ve managed to synthesize sound and sight (with motion) well only with microchips and binary math.

Black and white.

Now, the truly ambitious are speculating about the power we could harness with “DNA-based computing” - computers that use DNA as their base instead of binary. Many are excited about the possibilities. I’m not ruling out anything, but I’m not holding my breath either. I doubt they’ll pull it off any time soon. But even if they do, they’re still only discovering and imitating.

We live in a black and white world. Despite what anyone stretches their faith in science to believe, we are created in God’s image. That’s very different from being God. I find it fascinating that many of the same people that spout the “shades of gray” argument for many things, only have expertise in a binary world and don’t even see how ridiculous that makes the argument.

In the digital world, even shades of gray come down to whether the bit is set or not.