Hi Giu1i0 Pri5c0,
We have discuss this many many many times on this list.
I am used to mention a result I got and which is (I admit) rather
counter-intuitive in that context, and which says that
if WE (whatever we are) are computer emulable THEN there
is no physical universe at all and the Wholeness (to take
John M expression) CANNOT be computer emulable.
People like Wolfram, Schmidhuber, ... missed the point by not taking
into account the difference of first and third person point of view.
To give you a picture: IF we are turing-emulable then the whole
block-reality structure is given by a subset of arithmetical truth so that
the "MATRIX" is just a part of the atemporal aspatial arithmetical truth
and the *appearance* of physical stable laws comes from the
arithmetical probabilistic interference of all possible machine dreams.
And by interviewing a logically classically-extended Universal Machine
on the logical structure of that probability structure you get something
very close to a quantum logic.
If you want a better appreciation of the result, see my paper
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHAL.htm
For a shorter explanation look at
http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list.domain.name.hidden/msg05272.html
Bruno
At 06:48 19/11/04 +0100, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote:
>The Times: Professor Sir Martin Rees is to suggest that "life, the
>universe and everything" may be no more than a giant computer
>simulation with humans reduced to bits of software. Rees, Royal
>Society professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, will say that
>it is now possible to conceive of computers so powerful that they
>could build an entire virtual universe.
>The possibility that what we see around us may not actually exist has
>been raised by philosophers many times dating back to the ancient
>Greeks and appears repeatedly in science fiction.
>In a television documentary, What We Still Don't Know, to be screened
>on Channel 4 next month, he will say: "Over a few decades, computers
>have evolved from being able to simulate only very simple patterns to
>being able to create virtual worlds with a lot of detail.
>"If that trend were to continue, then we can imagine computers which
>will be able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one
>we think we're living in.
>"This raises the philosophical question: could we ourselves be in such
>a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of
>vault of heaven rather than the real thing. In a sense we could be
>ourselves the creations within this simulation."
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1358588,00.html
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Nov 19 2004 - 05:47:58 PST