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Singularity Summit 2009, A Conversation On The Singularity:
"In a quite different area, worth mentioning cause its kinda fun, the, you know, you think about this computational universe of possible systems, um, and you can ask the question: our physical universe --- is it one of those "computational universe of possibilities"? So, you know, if we take our physical universe and we say, you know: Can we search for our physical universe out of the space of all possible universes? Right. So, this sounds like kind of a crazy thing to do, but actually I've spent quite a bit of time making that, I think, a lot less crazy. You know it's a real thing, and it's a big, actually, it's --- what's really bizarre about it is it turns into a big software engineering effort, to try and actually build what you need, to represent these very abstract things that are sort of below space and time, and you have to kind of build up to how, something that might be recognizable in the universe. Well, the real bad thing is that this computational irreducibility phenomenon really bites one, because you have this little candidate universe, and you say, you know I've, look at these universes, and you say "okay, we've got thousands of universes today, lets look at each of them". Some of these universes are complete losers. You know, they, they, after a few steps they just go "splat!". They have some feature that it's, you know, obviously not our universe. But even within the first thousand universes you look at, I can tell you, that there are universes that kind of bubble around and do complicated things, and you can trace them for a billion steps, and they're still bubbling around and doing complicated things. And because of computational irreducibility, I don't know whether those universes are our universe or not. So, you know, it could be that, ah, we kind of have to rely on some degree of computational reducibility, cause we can't, in our computer, emulate the actual ..(in our universe).. 14 billion years or whatever. Um, so we have to rely some degree of computational reducibility. But this is a case kind of ah, you know, this is probably a worst case than biology. It's sort of interesting that, that, you know in physics, we sometimes have thought that, that ah, ah, physics is a, i mean, in the current... physics is somehow more fundamental and somehow more, more, *necessary* kind of science. Um, biology is the science where, where things are kind of just *particular*, um, ah, you know, where its the *particulars* of history. And I think, maybe, the actuality is the opposite. That is, that in biology, we're actually sampling a decent chunk of the computational universe. Whereas in physics, our particular universe, bizarrely, is just one universe in this computational universe." |
