I wonder if it is even meaningful to ask what the ‘plain text’ might look like.
Suppose we somehow managed to decrypt the universe and obtain its Theory of Everything. Then we notice that there’s a pattern in the Theory which can be easily compressed (maybe a repeated constant bitstring). Wouldn’t we then appeal to Kolmogorov and say the ‘real’ Theory of Everything is the shorter program which generates our larger Theory with its repeating constants?
And so on, for all the patterns we find, until we wind up with a Theory which looks like a substring of Chaitin’s Omega—all completely random bits? At which point, why do we think we actually decrypted the random observations into this random Theory-string?
But maybe I’m just saying something someone else has said here or is implied by the general line of thought?
I wonder if it is even meaningful to ask what the ‘plain text’ might look like.
Suppose we somehow managed to decrypt the universe and obtain its Theory of Everything. Then we notice that there’s a pattern in the Theory which can be easily compressed (maybe a repeated constant bitstring). Wouldn’t we then appeal to Kolmogorov and say the ‘real’ Theory of Everything is the shorter program which generates our larger Theory with its repeating constants?
And so on, for all the patterns we find, until we wind up with a Theory which looks like a substring of Chaitin’s Omega—all completely random bits? At which point, why do we think we actually decrypted the random observations into this random Theory-string?
But maybe I’m just saying something someone else has said here or is implied by the general line of thought?