On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 12:55 PM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 1:34 AM, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> >>> I would say it would have to have *SOMETHING* physical as we know it >>> or it wouldn't be another physical universe as we know it. >>> >> >> > >> So according to you, does every physical universe has to have hadrons, >> electrons and photons, and 3 spatial dimensions? >> > > No, according to me every physical universe must have something > physical in it or it wouldn't be a physical universe. > > > > >> What in your mind delineates the physical from the mathematical? > > > "Mathematics" is the best language minds have for thinking about the > physical universe. > And "physical" is anything that is NOT nothing. > And "nothing" is anything that is > infinite > , > unbounded > , and > homogeneous > > in both space and time. > > So if a Game of Life computation qualifies as a physical universe, I am guessing so would other cellular automata systems would. Some linear cellular automata systems are even Turing universal: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UniversalCellularAutomaton.html When we envision (imagine) a GoL emulation, we interpret it as a grid of cells with changing states, but an equally consistent view would be to imagine the grid as a binary number, whose bits flip from one step to another according to finite rules. For example, the game tic-tac-toe (a.k.a. naughts and crosses) is often envisioned as completing a line, or diagonal with X's or O's, but a mathematically equivalent view of the game is the players complete for selecting unique numbers from 1 to 9, such that the sum of their selected numbers adds to 15 ( https://www.mathworks.com/moler/exm/chapters/tictactoe.pdf ). All this is to say that a "physically existing GoL universe" is from the inside of that world, no different (in any testable way) from a recursive function operating on an integer. So can anyone truly differentiate a "physically existing GoL universe" from a "platonically existing recursive computation" when both are equivalent and for all intents and purposes identical--sharing all the same internal relations isomorphically? If a GoL universe exists and contains a Turing machine executing the universal dovetailer, no conscious entities within the programs executed by the universal dovetailer could ever know their ultimate substrate happens to be a GoL universe. Jason > >> >>> Cells and particles are physical. >>> >>> >> >> > >> Would you say it is a particle even when the particles have only 1 bit of >> information associated with them "exists in this cell" >> > > Yes I would and that's why you're not talking about nothing, you're > talking about something, you're talking about the physical. You use plural > words like "particles" and "them". So there is more than one. So neither > particles nor cells can be infinite, unbounded, and homogeneous in both > space and time. So it can't be nothing. So it must be physical. > > John K Clark > > > > > -- > 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 https://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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
