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Comment by eis | Hacker News Reader

The notion of god leads immediately to paradoxes and logical contradictions when thinking it through a little bit. It's fine if people have certain believes but let's not put religion on the same level as physics. No such paradoxes exist with the notion of a deterministic computable universe.

I concur with the OP when they said Zuse is being waaay underappreciated. He is one of the fathers of the modern computational age.

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Everything leads to paradoxes or unanswerable questions when you think it through. If our universe is computable then what "computer" is it running on? Why is our universe as computationally strong as it is and not more or less? Is it a simulation and if yes who is simulating it? Is there an infinite tower of universes each running progressively weaker (as in they can do less complex computation) versions of themselves? And if not then where does it stop and why?

Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will. Science can never answer the first one and the second will always be an open question because explaining why something evolved in nature is hard.

A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.

> Everything leads to paradoxes or unanswerable questions when you think it through. If our universe is computable then what "computer" is it running on? Why is our universe as computationally strong as it is and not more or less? Is it a simulation and if yes who is simulating it? Is there an infinite tower of universes each running progressively weaker (as in they can do less complex computation) versions of themselves? And if not then where does it stop and why?

None of the things you listed are paradoxes. A paradox is something that is self-contradictory.

> Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will.

Something can easily appear random when it is in fact not. Any random number your computer gives you is not truly random. Any hash looks random but is completely deterministic.

> A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.

Hard disagree. Not all attempts at explanations are equally valid or invalid. Some are more "out there" than others. And it should not stop us from trying to understand the universe more and more.

> to this day, there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.

This was the claim, and OP has a point, which you are misinterpreting as religion vs physics.

The person I replied to compared religion with physics (god vs deterministic computable universe). I said those are not remotely equally defensible theories.

I did not compare religion with physics, I compared one completely unfalsifiable cosmological theory with another.

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