Careful not to privilege hypotheses—the game of life’s fame is not correlated with it’s use as a theory of everything, at last not when you compare it to the zillions of other systems that have very similar properties. So allll those non-famous systems are probably just as good.
Philosophical speculation should still be grounded, since we don’t have time to consider every possibility ever.
Careful not to fall prey to the Sorites Paradox—where exactly is the line between insufficient and sufficient evidence to form a hypothesis?
I should clarify that by CGoL-type substrate I meant some kind of 3-D cellular automaton, clearly not the 2-D CGoL itself. Other people, e.g. Stephen Wolfram and Konrad Zuse have seen fit to speculate at length on this subject.
Do Wolfram and Zuse speculate that there is a correspondence between cells in the cellular automaton and space in our universe, or do they speculate that our universe is being computed (at a high-level) by a cellular automaton? In other words, at what level does the correspondence between our universe and the cellular automaton exist?
In the former case, where there is a low-level correspondence, we can expect the properties of the cellular automaton, i.e.,
the uni-directionality of time
the light-speed limit
the observer effect
to have a similar physical meaning in our universe.
However, in the second case, which seems more reasonable to me, I don’t see how these specific properties of the cellular automaton will have anything to do with the properties of our universe.
Careful not to fall prey to the Sorites Paradox—where exactly is the line between insufficient and sufficient evidence to form a hypothesis?
Sufficient evidence to promote and think more about a hypothesis (we weren’t talking about “forming” before) is when the expected value of so promoting and thinking is positive. So for example, I wouldn’t spend much philosophical speculation on the idea that the universe is actually running on a really big computer with the operating system Windows XP. It’s possible, it has lots of nice properties, but it’s simply not worth the energy of even writing a blog post about.
But yeah, sure, if by “like the game of life” you meant “any system that’s local and discrete in space and time,” then that’s an nigh-infinitely bigger chunk of hypothesis-space, and I won’t knock it.
Careful not to privilege hypotheses—the game of life’s fame is not correlated with it’s use as a theory of everything, at last not when you compare it to the zillions of other systems that have very similar properties. So allll those non-famous systems are probably just as good.
Philosophical speculation should still be grounded, since we don’t have time to consider every possibility ever.
Careful not to fall prey to the Sorites Paradox—where exactly is the line between insufficient and sufficient evidence to form a hypothesis?
I should clarify that by CGoL-type substrate I meant some kind of 3-D cellular automaton, clearly not the 2-D CGoL itself. Other people, e.g. Stephen Wolfram and Konrad Zuse have seen fit to speculate at length on this subject.
Do Wolfram and Zuse speculate that there is a correspondence between cells in the cellular automaton and space in our universe, or do they speculate that our universe is being computed (at a high-level) by a cellular automaton? In other words, at what level does the correspondence between our universe and the cellular automaton exist?
In the former case, where there is a low-level correspondence, we can expect the properties of the cellular automaton, i.e.,
to have a similar physical meaning in our universe.
However, in the second case, which seems more reasonable to me, I don’t see how these specific properties of the cellular automaton will have anything to do with the properties of our universe.
The former in both cases.
BTW, after a bit of web surfing I found that other scientists have also proposed similar theories… see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_philosophy
What does “at a high level” mean in this context?
Btw, thanks for posting this.
Indeed. I have a domain devoted to digital physics: http://finitenature.com/
Sufficient evidence to promote and think more about a hypothesis (we weren’t talking about “forming” before) is when the expected value of so promoting and thinking is positive. So for example, I wouldn’t spend much philosophical speculation on the idea that the universe is actually running on a really big computer with the operating system Windows XP. It’s possible, it has lots of nice properties, but it’s simply not worth the energy of even writing a blog post about.
But yeah, sure, if by “like the game of life” you meant “any system that’s local and discrete in space and time,” then that’s an nigh-infinitely bigger chunk of hypothesis-space, and I won’t knock it.