I mean, but our universe is not Conway’s Game of Life.
Setting aside for now the problems with our universe being continuous/quantum weirdness/etc, the bigger issue has to do with the nature of the initial state of the board.
Whether or not math would beunreasonably effective in a universe made out of Conway’s Game of Life depends supremely on the initial state of the board.
If the board was initialized randomly, then it would already be in a maximum-entropy distribution, hence “minds” would have no predictive power and math would not be unreasonably effective. Any minds that did come into existence would be similar to Boltzmann Brains in the sense that they would come into existence for one brief moment and then be destroyed the next.
The initial board would have to be special for minds like ours to exist in Conway’s Game of Life. The initial setup of the board would have to be in a specific configuration that allowed minds to exist for long durations of time and predict things. And in order for that to be the case, there would have to be some universe wide set of rules governing how the board was set up. This is analogous to how the number “2″ is a thing mathematicians think is useful no matter where you go in our universe.
Math isn’t about some local deterministic property that depends on the interaction of simple parts but about the global patterns.
I mean, but our universe is not Conway’s Game of Life.
Setting aside for now the problems with our universe being continuous/quantum weirdness/etc, the bigger issue has to do with the nature of the initial state of the board.
Whether or not math would be unreasonably effective in a universe made out of Conway’s Game of Life depends supremely on the initial state of the board.
If the board was initialized randomly, then it would already be in a maximum-entropy distribution, hence “minds” would have no predictive power and math would not be unreasonably effective. Any minds that did come into existence would be similar to Boltzmann Brains in the sense that they would come into existence for one brief moment and then be destroyed the next.
The initial board would have to be special for minds like ours to exist in Conway’s Game of Life. The initial setup of the board would have to be in a specific configuration that allowed minds to exist for long durations of time and predict things. And in order for that to be the case, there would have to be some universe wide set of rules governing how the board was set up. This is analogous to how the number “2″ is a thing mathematicians think is useful no matter where you go in our universe.
Math isn’t about some local deterministic property that depends on the interaction of simple parts but about the global patterns.