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After reading the article, who assumes the universe is a computer? The only times I heard it is people suggesting the possibility, not believing in it. I'm sure
by lomegor 14y ago
After reading the article, who assumes the universe is a computer? The only times I heard it is people suggesting the possibility, not believing in it. I'm sure there are some people who actually think the universe is a computer, but this is not a widespread problem, or anything really.
- dllthomas 14y agoThe article is conflating "the universe is a computer" with "the universe can be described as a computational process, generating later states from earlier ones." I could certainly see this assumption creeping in unnoticed in various places, though I have no clue as to whether that's the case or what the ramifications are. If it's a correct assumption, of course, then it doesn't matter that it's been assumed all over.
- svachalek 14y agoMath, computation, and physics are not things we crafted from nothing; they were explicitly made as tools to describe and predict the universe around us and we continue to use them because they work so well. But relativity killed the simple, clean model of Newtonian physics by kicking out the underlying assumptions, and I like the idea that at least somebody's considering the possibility that maybe our deepest, most fundamental premises are completely wrong. I have no idea how anyone who's gone all the way through to a physics Ph.D. is going to be able to unlearn those assumptions though, that sounds incredibly difficult.
- bunderbunder 14y agoI think what the article's really referencing is the Church-Turing thesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis A lot of people conjecture that, if true, it implies that there exists no deterministic process which cannot be modeled by an algorithm.
- sharkbot 14y agoThe article also references the probabilistic nature of quantum phenomena. However, quantum mechanics is deterministic under the Many-Worlds interpretation. Observations don't collapse waveforms, our quantum states are deterministically entangled with that of the system under measurement. The jury is still out on the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics, but quantum phenomena doesn't rule out the deterministic state-change metaphor a priori.
- bunderbunder 14y agoIt's been my impression that, MWI aside, quantum mechanics being probabilistic does not imply that the processes it models are probabilistic. The map is not the territory, and a map that is known to be incomplete is especially not the territory.
- cschmidt 14y agoStephen Wolfram's ideas on New Kind of Science (NKS) suggest that the universe is based on simple computational rules. (If I might paraphrase a thousand plus page book I've only partially read into a sentence.) Strangely, the paper in the OP doesn't mention that.
- stephengillie 14y agoWe humans learned how to compute from the natural universe.
- gshubert17 14y agoSeth Lloyd, in "Programming the Universe", seems to argue the universe is a computer or is like a computer. The universe computes "its own dynamical evolution". "As the computation proceeds, reality unfolds."