20 - 008 What is Digital Thinking ?

What is Digital Thinking? Unfortunately as you read this book you are going to encounter my way of thinking about things. To many of you as readers this may include the use of an unusual vocabulary and a strange way of viewing the world around us. As the author I accept everybody views the world differently based upon their knowledge, understanding, perceptions and all the various thoughts they have in their head both now and in the past. But what I am looking to do is change your future thinking to align it to the way I think. This is no attempt to brainwash my audience but purely to acknowledge that you will not be able to grasp the ideas I am looking to convey about the Digital Human without changing your future thinking patterns. What I do not want to do is at this stage is expand on the fact that my thinking is based upon the concept of consilience sometimes called the unity of knowledge. It will be best to move you down this Digital Human pathway some way before we move more into the subject of consilience. Just consider it as a bonus subject to be covered later. So what is Digital Thinking? Having developed my computer career in the days of paper tape, punch cards, core dumps, file design and a variety of programming languages I have experienced the foundations of the digital world first hand. Take a core dump where this could amount to a foot thick print out of the computer memory often triggered by a failure. It just consists of page after page of zeroes and ones. (0’s and 1’s). You searched through it looking for specific patterns of the 0’s and 1’s to locate a faulty pattern. It was the digital interpretation of something you wanted the computer to do in the real world. Often a program would have been running to create this memory content and an error in the program generated the faulty pattern. So get your mind to think of doing something like the steps to make a cup of tea where you forget the tea bags. Similar to the steps you take to make a new living cell. This is the start of Digital Thinking. Now think of a process taking place on a tiny cell in your body where it is required to make a new cell. The digital representation is of the chemical makeup of the molecules in the cell. The process may convert the chemical from one type to another by possibly the addition of new molecule. The digital cell created would have a new digital make up which could be examined as a new core dump. The process itself is digitally defined just like a digital program and it could error by missing the tea bag out of the step. So are you getting it? Biological processes are chemical processes. Chemical processes can be digitally defined. The outcome of these processes can be digitally viewed since they are just digital representations of these chemicals. All chemicals have a precise digital definition. The Chemical Human can just be viewed as a Digital Human. That is the essence of Digital Thinking.