Re: The universe consists of patterns of arrangement of 0's and 1's?

[Eric Hawthorne]

As I mentioned in an earlier post, titled "quantum computational cosmology"
why don't we assume/guess that the substrate (the fundamental concept of the
universe or multiverse) is simply a capacity for there to be difference, but also,
a capacity for all possible differences (and thus necessarily all possible
configurations of differences) to "potentially exist".

If we assume that all possible configurations of differences can "potentially exist"
and that that unexplained property (i.e. the capacity to manifest any configuration of
differences) is THE nature of the substrate, then
a computation can just be defined as a sequence of states selected from all
of the potential difference-configurations inherent in the substrate.

I don't even think that this notion of a computation requires energy to do the
information processing.

My main notion in the earlier post was that some selections of a sequence
of the substrate's "potential states" will corresponds to order-producing
computations (computations which produce emergent structure, systems,
behaviour etc).

Such an order-producing sequence of substrate potential-states might be
considered to be "the observable universe" (because the order generation
in that sequence was adequate to produce complex systems good enough
to be sentient observers of the other parts of that state-sequence).

If we number the states in that selected order-producing sequence of substrate
states from the first-selected state to the last-selected state, we have a numbering
which corresponds to the direction of the time arrow in that observable universe.

My intuition is that the "potential-states" (i.e. potentially existing configurations of
differences) of the substrate may correspond to quantum states and configurations
of quantum entanglement, and that "selection" of meaningful or observable sequences
of potential states corresponds to decoherence of quantum states into classical
states.
Eric

Stephen Paul King wrote:

It is the assumption that the 0's and 1's can exist without some substrate that bothers me. If we insist on making such an assuption, how can we even have a notion of distinguishability between a 0 and a 1?.
   To me, its analogous to claiming that Mody Dick "exists" but there does not exists any copies of it. If we are going to claim that "all possible computations" exists, then why is it problematic to imagine

that "all
possible implementations of computations" exists as well. Hardware is not an
"epiphenomena" of software nor software an "epiphenomena" of hardware, they
are very different and yet interdependent entities.