Re: Is the universe computable?

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:33:34 -0500

Dear CMR,

----- Original Message -----
From: "CMR" <jackogreen.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 6:46 PM
Subject: Re: Is the universe computable?


> Greetings Stephen,
>
> >BTW, have you ever read about the Maxwell Demon?
>
> Being partial to the information physical view; not only have I read it, I
> also account for it by viewing a system's information as physical.
>
[SPK]

    Ok, but what about the fact that there does not exist a unique
representation for a given physical object, unless one is going to restrict
oneself to a Turing computable world and use the Kolmogorov notion. Doing
this is problematic because it requires that all of a given object's
properties be both enumerable and pre-specifiable. QM, as I understand it,
disallows this in most cases. Consider the problem of computing the Unitary
evolution of a DNA molecule's wave function.
    Think of it this way, what is the cardinality of the equivalence class
of representations R of, say, a 1972 Jaguar XKE, varying over *all possible
languages* and *symbol systems*? I think it is at least equal to the Reals.
Is this correct? If R has more than one member, how can we coherently argue
that "information is physical" in the material monist sense?


> So by inference should then I be viewing the mapping of the intra and
extra
> universal resources as informational in "nature"? In that the
implementation
> "informs" (and thus constrins?) the evolution of our toy universe?
>

[SPK]

     What if the "informing" and "constraining" (?) is done, inter alia, by
the systems that "use up" the universal resources?

    What if, instead of thinking in terms of a priori existing solutions,
ala Platonia, if we entertain the idea that the *solutions are being
computation in an ongoing way* and that what we experience is just one (of
many)stream(s) of this computation. Such a computation would require
potentially infinite "physical resources"...
    Would it be to much to assume that all we need to assume is that the
"resources" (for Qcomputations, these are Hilbert space dimensions) are all
that we have to assume exists a priori? Does not Quantum Mechanics already
have such build in?

Stephen
Received on Tue Jan 20 2004 - 19:53:59 PST