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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/ancient-book-wisdom-i-ching-computer-binary-code
Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz was a philosopher and mathematician in search of a model. In the late 1600s Leibniz decided there was a need for a new, purer arithmetic than our common decimal system. Leibniz discovered the model for this new arithmetic in the five-millennia-old book that is at the heart of Chinese philosophy: the I-Ching, or Book of Changes.
This ancient text was such an influence on Liebniz that he titled his article on the new arithmetic: "Explanation of the binary arithmetic, which uses only the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi". Fu Xi was the legendary first author of the I-Ching. The arithmetic Liebniz described was binary code, which is used in almost every modern computer,
Liebniz's insight was that even the most complex aspect of reality could potentially be represented in the binary form as 1s and 0s.The I-Ching represents the binary poles of reality as Yin and Yang. Like 1 and 0, these are abstract concepts that can represent the poles of any binary set, but in the text of the I-Ching are often discussed as female and male. They are notated with a broken line for Yin, and an unbroken line for Yang. These lines are combined in sets of three to produce the eight basic trigrams, which are in turn combined to give the 64 hexagrams,
In the philosophy of the I-Ching, reality is not entirely real. It is something more like a dream or an illusion. This dream of reality arises from the binaries of Yin and Yang, as they play out their infinite combinations. It's not surprising then, from the I-Ching's perspective, that anything in the dream of reality can be represented as a model of its binary constituents, in a string of 1s and 0s, processed by a computer.
So when scientific thinkers – including many of my favourite science fiction writers – ask whether computers can create "virtual realities" or "artificial intelligence", they are missing the point. Of course we can create ever deeper and more complex layers of the dream of reality to get lost in. The real question is, can we wake up from the dream we're in already?