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

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 20:34:52 -0500

Dear Eric,

    I like your idea! But how do we reconsile your notion with the notion
expressed by Russell:

> From: "Russell Standish" <R.Standish.domain.name.hidden>
> To: <Fabric-of-Reality.domain.name.hidden>
> Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 5:12 PM
> Subject: Re: not-sets, not-gates, and the universe
>
> > There is no problem is saying that all computations exist in
> > "platonia" (or the plenitude). This is a zero information set, and
> > requires no further explanation.
> >

    One definition of "information" is a "difference that makes a
difference". If we take the "substrate" to be the "capacity for there to be
difference" as you propose we obviously can not consider Platonia or the
"Plenitude" do be it. If we take these two ideas seriously, is there any way
that we can have both?

Kindest regards,

Stephen


----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Hawthorne" <egh.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Cc: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 4:36 PM
Subject: Re: The universe consists of patterns of arrangement of 0's and
1's?


> 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.
> >
>
>
Received on Tue Nov 26 2002 - 20:36:02 PST