1.1.6 The Cosmic Computer
If we can compare the cosmos to a movie that is displayed on a computer monitor, the Sufis always seek to dive inside the complicated vertical hierarchy of the computer structure down to the disc, memory and processor, trying to understand the logic behind all that, while astronomers are engaged in studying the motion of some tiny pixels on the screen, where they themselves are living inside some minuscule shady region, obscured by the limits of their own corporeal bodies and surrounding physical boundaries.
It is not surprising, therefore, that characters who are habitually living on the screen, absorbed by their natural diverse and deceptive phenomena, denote computer science as “mystical” and even “superstitious”, as it was nicely demonstrated in the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic of Plato. Inversely, however, although computer engineers innately realize that the shapes being displayed on the screen are pure simulations, they still want to look at every pixel and study its color, position, and motion, because they consider them equally real in their own level of existence, and surely reflect what is happening inside each level of the complex vertical hierarchy and internal formation of the computer.