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Comment by madisp | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the universe the only computer in some sense?

All of the compute power we have is just an arrangement of matter to have the universe perform computations for us.

I don't regard computation as a physical process, or a property of any kind. It's a description of a system, say like "salad" or "party", which whilst informative in conversation, doesn't map to any actual property of reality.

ie., there is no property shared by all salads, nor by all computers.

Saying, "everything is a computer" is a bit presocratic in its way, like "everything is water" or "everything is fire"

In practice, what we mean by "computer" is something which can transmit power in a programmable fashion.. this has more to do with our ability to control devices, and what those devices are, than anything in the "computer".

It turns out LCDs, keyboards, CPUs, etc. can all be joined up so I can do something with them.. I call this a "computer" and leave it there.

As far as the mathematical definition goes, all functions from ints->ints are computable.. this is eitehr useless or uniformative. It has no relevance for physics.

How is it not electric?? You have trillions of fields and particle’s everywhere. How’s it not programmable? It’s computing new structures with gases at any moment.

The electric part seems an arbitrary limitation. The original computers ran off food, which okay technically is chemistry which technically is just a minor application of coulomb's law, but ultimately you can use stones in the desert or water flowing through pipes to compute. Of course all this is still based off chemistry, but you can imagine computing with gravity or nuclear forces.

TIL piping /dev/random into a file is programming.

There’s always a chance it’ll put out something better than your greatest work.

Humble yourself to chaos, evilduck

You can think of the universe that way, but is it meaningful to say it's computing new gas structures? Maybe for some physicists. Metaphysically speaking, I don't think it makes sense for the universe to be a computer, unless we're inside a simulation. What would that even mean?

From that point of view, all the other matter is also a computer, it's just for the most part computing really boring functions.

> in some sense

I think you missed the point - this is what they mean by "defined so loosely as to be uninformative." By saying "in some sense" you are allowing arbitrarily abstract definitions of the term "computer" thereby making the term itself no longer useful.

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