4 ms·

Lets say we are in a "game of life" simulation on a computer. It has been proven turing complete. So you would say its deterministic because "game of life" has

Lets say we are in a "game of life" simulation on a computer. It has been proven turing complete. So you would say its deterministic because "game of life" has deterministic rules. But if the computer that runs the simulation is in a random universe, then it might happen that bits of the computer switch in a random fashion. Making our universe inside the "game of life" simulation random too. And we could touch the randomly flipping bits. So there is no point in saying something is "outside" our universe and something is "inside".

jblow 13y ago
There is no point to saying something is "outside" and something is "inside" in the extreme cases of the example you just gave, which may or may not be the case. What if the outer universe is not a random universe? What if its laws of nature are so unlike ours that we do not know what to say about it? (Maybe it does not have space or time, but it has other things instead.) But I think this is a little bit beside the point, because as I mentioned in my first post, all of this is predicated on us adopting the naïve view of time in our own universe, which is maybe not the best idea, given that we have plenty of evidence otherwise. (And anyway, if you believe that "everything that exists" can be infinite, then there is no sense in saying our universe is being produced by some kind of simulation controlled in one particular other place, because of course it is, but actually this is probably happening in an infinite number of different ways from different places such that there is not really point any more in claiming that this is happening at all; the situation becomes such that you could just draw a relation between situation X and situation Y and could state that one could be causal of the other from a certain point of view.)

4 ms·

Lets say we are in a "game of life" simulation on a computer. It has been proven turing complete. So you would say its deterministic because "game of life" has

by no_gravity 13y ago

jblow 13y ago
There is no point to saying something is "outside" and something is "inside" in the extreme cases of the example you just gave, which may or may not be the case. What if the outer universe is not a random universe? What if its laws of nature are so unlike ours that we do not know what to say about it? (Maybe it does not have space or time, but it has other things instead.) But I think this is a little bit beside the point, because as I mentioned in my first post, all of this is predicated on us adopting the naïve view of time in our own universe, which is maybe not the best idea, given that we have plenty of evidence otherwise. (And anyway, if you believe that "everything that exists" can be infinite, then there is no sense in saying our universe is being produced by some kind of simulation controlled in one particular other place, because of course it is, but actually this is probably happening in an infinite number of different ways from different places such that there is not really point any more in claiming that this is happening at all; the situation becomes such that you could just draw a relation between situation X and situation Y and could state that one could be causal of the other from a certain point of view.)