The Modeling of Nature as a Glass Bead Game

In his novel The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse introduces an essentially cosmic game within a symbolical Universe which recently has been compared with a „neuronal network of the cosmic mind“. In his game all those games which are known to us today appear to be summarized. Hence, by closer inspection, the glass bead game shows up as a meta-game, a proto-game, and as a playful paradigm of playing, at the same time. As its rules it encompasses all what characterizes the reflexive activity of humans within the worldly environment. It thus aims towards all those fields of the sciences and arts which are available as the inventory of human orientation. Hesse describes the rules as such: „These rules, the sign language and grammar of the game, represent a kind of highly developed secret language, in which several sciences and arts, in particular mathematics and music (or the science of music) participate which are able to express the contents and results of practically all of the sciences and relate them to each other.“ This systematic form of approach to a universal game, conceptualized in a global manner, implies an important methodological consequence. Hesse continues therefore: „The glass bead game is thus a game with all the contents and the values of our culture, it plays with them, as in the heyday of the arts a painter may have played with the colours on his palette. What humankind has produced in its creative epochs in terms of knowledge, noble thoughts, and works of art, what the successive epochs of learnt reflexion have conceptualized and claimed as intellectual property, all of this extraordinary material of intellectual values is being played by the glass bead player like an organ is played by the organist, and this organ is of a hardly graspable perfection, its manuals and pedals are scanning the whole spiritual cosmos, its registers are almost uncountable, theo-