Re: Is the universe computable?

From: CMR <jackogreen.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 22:07:52 -0800

> 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?
>

Assuming you mean R is countably infinite(?), then a solution would be a
finite universe of underlying discrete structure, ala Fredkin, I imagine.

>
> 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?

Yes, this would indeed follow. But what of a view of QM itself emerging form
qubits?
as, for instance, expressed in the so-called Bekenstein bound: the entropy
of any region
of space cannot exceed a fixed constant times the surface area of the
region. This suggests
that the complete state space of any spatially finite quantum system is
finite, so
that it would contain only a finite number of independent qubits.
Received on Wed Jan 21 2004 - 01:10:40 PST