Schmidhuber emphasizes computability and computational complexity. He even uses this to make predictions. So his theory is falsifiable, to an extent.

He also gives credit to his brother Christof Schmidhuber, a string theorist. He says he suspects Christof’s earlier ideas on the “universe as the sum of all mathematics” are the real reason why such ideas emerged in Munich. Check it out: http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code

Predicting that predictions are often wrong, seems to speak against itself.

I love thinking about these things but when you get on those lines of thought it’s always recursive into infinity and it starts to unravel your mind.

This is the ‘disturbing implication’ of the Level IV multiverse/reality. If a mathematical construct that describes such a thing exists- then that thing exists. If you can write the code for a god dribbling a universe like a basketball, it exists. As long as the math is consistent.

I enjoyed your post. Thanks.

Nothing and half, 0 and 0.5 perhaps? (What is half? What is half of something? Is it neither nothing nor something? Is it both nothing and something?)

Or nothing and infinitesimal 0.0000…1 (where ‘…’ is infinity) or 0.999…

In any case you can represent them as nothing and something. Something can be anything, anything except nothing, so anything can represent it. Nothing can be represented by anything also, but absence of something (whatever it is) is usually practical.

Frank J. Tipler believed that In the far future, We will convert the Whole Universe into a Supercomputer (and We will Merge with that Supercomputer). Through some form of Esoteric Physics, It is possible to make this Universe Supercomputer to Perform Infinite Computation with Finite Energy And Within Finite Time. If that happens, we will Achieve Omniscience.

It seems that when you take everything else away those two things are what’s left, hence nothing else really exists.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/neuroprosthesis-gives-rats-the-ability-to-touch-infrared-light

This is what we as humans try to do. Take information and try to realize it it terms we are comfortable with. This is the driving motivation behind models.

So, if at some point we are able to input numerical values as a paticular sensation in our brain, instead of “doing” mathmatics, we’d be comprehending it’s very nature.

The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics, saying, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.” (From Wikipedia)

Whenever we think everything is already discovered, we are almost certainly wrong.
Here are more good examples of experts’ (pessimic) predictions that end up wrong:
http://www.rinkworks.com/said/predictions.shtml

Me too.

I remember how awed I was when I first encountered the idea of an advanced species building a Dyson Sphere around a sun. Then one day the thought struck me- what about a being who could build a Dyson Sphere around a galaxy? And that idea is, of course, further recursive by taking the idea up one more notch to include our entire Hubble Volume. It actually makes me shudder in awe/fear/dread to take that idea any further than that.

An explanation for the ‘dark matter’ we are missing? ;-)

Serious question: What would natural (non-supernatural) gods pray to?

What would a Turing test for godhood look like? Would the test look different depending on the level of the species administering it? I think it would. So, like the term ‘primitive’ the opposite term ‘god’ is a relative term.

I went throughMax Tegmark’s website last night, searching for more. Read his papers. Interesting stuff. He’s pushing extreme Platonism. He has a ‘questions’ page and one of the questions had to do with the relative nature of god. His answer was interesting. He acknowledged that such creatures might exist in his Level IV reality.

Personally, I think, depending on how you defined the term, they almost certainly exist in our own (Iain Banks-like ‘Minds’ from his Culture novels or something similar to Q from Star Trek). Maybe even in our own galaxy.

I have been a believer in such a Level IV reality most of my life. I have never worked out in my head whether it implies a creator or not. I am agnostic on the question. But I always remind myself- based on the sliding scale Turing test for godhood- I wouldn’t know the difference in ‘THE god’ and just a mere ‘god minus 1′. It’s a moot question. We’ll never break through our own local membrane to be able to properly investigate the problem.

We can only hope that if our own existence happens to be running on the equivalent of an MP3 player of some hyper-dimensional teenager he’ll remember to keep the batteries charged and not delete us in favour of the latest music craze.

This is similar to how, in a 4-dimensional universe*, a *hypercube* is equivalent to *cube* in the 3-dimensional universe. (For more info on hypercube, please read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hypercube )
Despite being *equivalent* (perhaps, in Formal Mathematics, the mathematicians use another adjective), a *hypercube* is *very* different from a 3-dimensional cube.
For example: a *cube* consists of 6 *faces*, but a *hypercube* have 8 *face-cubes* (Hypercube is a 4-dimensional “Polychoron”, its equivalent of faces in a 3-dimensional “polyhedron” (in this case, cube)).
This is the precise reason I said “this is not a very accurate analogy”.

If this theory (or other similar theories) is true, we will know that human brains are *at least partially* quantum computers and, with proper trainings (or even physical augmentations, such as cyborg-izations) we can exploit the powerful *quantum computing*-enabled abilities (which is supposedly more powerful than classical computers).

It would be great if developers of augmented-reality hardwares can include (pre-install) graphic-calculator-softwares in their new products.

I as well think that we need a new company (or perhaps non-profit group) to manufacture and distribute (preferably in large numbers) graphic calculators similar to TI-83, but priced much lower than available TI-83 products (which, in my opinion, are very over-priced).
Distribution of low-price graphic calculators would greatly benefit not only education, but also enpower people daily lives.
Perhaps *Grassroot-based* self-motivated science projects will increase in numbers because of such low-price graphic calculators.
The quality of their research can also be improved (if machines that produce mathematical graphs can be of a lower price and become more ubiquitous).

Is pi perhaps dependent on the curvature of the universe, as in circles drawn on the surface of the earth, and we locally only see a very small example of that curvature here? Then designers of different universes could have different messages prominently displayed. But how could such messages be accurately converted to meaningful information?