attofishpi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 16, 2019 6:30 am
Its just a matter of perspective. From experience of this 3rd party intelligence (22yrs worth) I cannot to this day truly discern between whether God is 'divine' or whether it is indeed some form of technology, indeed an A.I. (note my previous post above)
I don't think our one-post-wonder friend is going to come back, having pitched his book
So you agree it's just a matter of perspective. The trendy "new" idea that we are computations (is that a fair paraphrase of "we live in a simulation?") is nothing more than the ancient idea of a God or Gods who created and rule the world, dressed up in techno-hippy buzzword speak.
But I submit there IS a difference, and that it does not favor the computational side.
Question: Why should the universe be restricted to that which is computable?
Explanation of question. Turing (1936) showed that the set of mathematical functions that can be implemented by "an effective procedure," as they used to think of it, is a tiny subset of all the functions that there are.
So the simulation hypothesis is a tremendous restriction of what the universe can do. The universe is required to implement only computable functions ... which is an idea that we only developed in the past 70 year. It suffers from the fallacy of contemporary technology. The ancient Romans had great waterworks. They conceived of the soul as a flow. The word nous, for mind, and pneumatic, come from the same root.
After Newton. everyone thought the world was a machine, a clockwork. Intricate machinery for decorative and functional purpose was the mindset of the 18th century.
And now here we are, in the age of the Internet, which percolated inside industry and academia before bursting into world consciousness with the IBM PC in 1982 and the Internet in 1995, is the great new technology of the age. So everyone thinks they're being very clever and saying "Everything is a computation," when in fact that idea is CERTAIN to end up looking just as silly as the 18th century mechanistic universe.
And again: Computations are a greatly restricted form of what can be. Why could not the universe do things that can not be computed? Turing himself gave a class of examples of problems that cannot be solved by computer: Namely the Halting problem. People should try to think these issues through before jumping on the trendy idea of the day that is
absolutely certain to look silly in a hundred years or two.