Shooting for a physical location? Now we head of (my choice) into Conjecture-Land. Two possibilities, submitted for your scorn and disapproval. One is that since the universe is said by astronomers to be somewhere in the zone of 26-80 light-years, in extant, and we can only detect what is within the Hubble Volume, it could be there, perhaps as dark matter, dark energy and together, dark flow. At the other end of the scale, there is the possibility, within each Planck Cell/Width, that exist as either processing, storage, or both.
Your ideas seems excellent to me (maybe that's a back-handed compliment considering who it comes from, Me?) Your concepts are echoed, separately, by professor, Ben Goertzel, a true computer scientist, at the University of Singapore, and Professor Eric Steinhart, who is a philosophy prof at Patterson University, in New Jersey-he has a comp-sci background. Tipler, I have asked a question or two, over the years, you did not mention Seth Lloyd at MIT-who also is a computationalism. Steinhart, in his papers, gets deep in the logical-rational weeds on all this. Also with theological implications-not necessarily Christian theological either. Even in Amoeba, Marchal doesn't go in this direction, as with a formal structure, and all that. Maybe he will someday? What we exist in may not strictly be a Sim, but a computation that yields that reality, from which we evolved from. That for us, real is real, and pain, is pain, and love, is love, and comets are comets. The substrate or super-structure of the universe/multiverse though, is 'more real' as it exists outside our program, so we are right back to Platonism again. -----Original Message----- From: Peter Sas <[email protected]> To: Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, Aug 26, 2015 3:21 am Subject: If the universe is computational, what is the computing platform? What are the options? Hi guys and girls, I'm sure this question has already come up many times before, but it's an important one, so I guess it can't do any harm to go over it again. If the universe is thoroughly computational, what are the computations 'running' on? What I especially like to know is what options are discussed in digital physics. So far I have encountered only the following possibilities: (1) Mathematical platonism: all natural numbers, and all mappings between them (i.e. all algorithms), simply exist in 'Plato's heaven', including those algorithms that compute our universe. The simple non-spatiotemporal existence of those algorithms is enough to 'instantiate' a spatiotemporal world. This type of solution can be found in Tipler, Tegmark and our own Bruno Marchal. Major problem: the hard problem of consciousness. (2) Simulation by an advanced civilization: Our universe is simulated on a physical computer build by a superior intelligence. Nick Bolstrom has explored this option and found it quite probable. I don't know about that, but as a general approach to digital physics it fails. If we want to understand the physical universe in terms of computation then it is circular to postulate a physical hardware on which the computations are running. (3) Or perhaps it is not circular? This third option sees the physical universe itself as a (quantum) computer (or cellular automaton) computing its own future. Thus its present state is the input and the temporally next state is the output. Isn't this how David Deutsch approaches it? I am not very clear on this option. The major problem seems to be that you have to presuppose an initial state of the universe that itself is not the result of computation, just to avoid an infinite regress. Or you accept the regress and say the universe exists eternally (but this is problematic in light of the big bang). But then you still have to explain why the universe exists eternally. And then the explanation must still fall outside the computations going on in the universe... (4) The computations that yield our universe run on a platform that exists somewhere else, in another dimension that is principally inaccessible to us. Ed Fredkin has embraced this 'solution' and calls this other dimension simply "the Other" which has a theological ring to it. I don't like this option, but it seems to be the most straightforward one. Any thoughts or corrections? Are there some options I haven't discussed. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
