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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

What would that even mean though? People throw around these "universe is a computation" ideas without ever making any predictions.

Do you think you're living in the matrix? Or do you just think that quantum mechanics can be fully simulated on a classical turing machine?

Here is the almighty Scott Aaronson to set us right on the subject:

http://www.closertotruth.com/series/the-cosmos-computer#vide...

http://www.closertotruth.com/series/what-does-quantum-theory...

EDIT: lets throw in this full length lecture at IBM for good measure, even though its not 100% related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7lv4-Bah5c

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>What would that even mean though?

That all physical systems are governed by equations rather than, say, gnomes pulling levers.

>Or do you just think that quantum mechanics can be fully simulated on a classical turing machine?

This seems quite reasonable. There's no good reason this couldn't be the case, and quantization of fundamental units like Energy-time/Momentum-distance is certainly something that a programmer might reasonably do for a simulation.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

If your glass is half full, then of course we are living in a simulation. What is the halting problem for this simulation? That's the real question. IMO that should be true AI.

Don't forget worrying about hackers.

Have some fun with mixing automata theory and the universe as a machine, where there's whole classes of machine that can or cannot be simulated by other machines or classes of machines and algorithms to convert from one machine to another or run one class of machine on others, and limitations and all kinds of big O notation results.

Not entirely different from the idea of being able to convert from magnetic to electric field and vice versa via a collection of moving bits and bobs as discovered a century or two ago.

It could be useful, in some peculiar way. Or maybe not.

> limitations and all kinds of big O notation results

Or blockchains.

> as discovered a century or two ago

Give it up to Michael Faraday!

More in the vein of Scott Aaronson about complex numbers "emerging"

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1267

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.4084

I was watching last night. Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?, with Seth Lloyd and others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atMuFCpxnUQ

Tangential to the topic but thank you for the closertotruth site reference, looks like an amazing resource.

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