David Deutsch - Is the Cosmos a Computer?

David there seems to be a fad in physics today that information is the most fundamental thing in the universe it's not that just that information describes matter and energy and fields but at the bottom of matter is information information is the most fundamental and as a consequence the universe itself is not a metaphor like a computer but in fact is a computer and that's what reality is yes I I'm opposed to that view I think it it misses the point it misses the lesson of what is really important about the link between computation and physics computation and with it information is indeed very fundamental but it's not the most important thing it's not the thing that the universe is made of as it were so their various their variants of this theory like the universe is a computer or that the universe is a program running in God's computer or something like that it seems to me that those theories all miss the point about the the universality of computation which is the way that computation links with physics through the existence of a universal computer a computer that can compute anything that can be computed and can therefore simulate any physical object if this computer were outside the universe it wouldn't be very remarkable the you can always imagine some kind of computer with some kind of way of operating that would simulate any laws of physics no matter what they were and so you lose the fact that our actual laws of physics are intimately connected with computation what is the connection it's not that there's a computer outside the universe it's that we can make universal computers inside the universe that is a token of the computability of the laws of nature it's the reason why it's the reason for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the Natural Sciences it's the reason for the existence of life and the possibility of science those things are explained by the existence of computers in the universe but wouldn't be explained if the if the universe was in a computer if that is true how do you account for this growing sense that at the bottom the bedrock of reality is information that that it stuff comes from bit information it's a it's perhaps a natural mistake to make given the fundamental nosov computation but I think that the and perhaps it's it's the reason for the mistake now that I come to think of it is that we are accustomed to explaining things in reductionist terms so instead of the idea the new idea is instead of explaining things in terms of space-time atoms and forces we explain it in terms of qubits or bits or qubits and and computations but that is that is not an advance in explanation for the reason that I just said and the the real connection is the computability of the laws from within the universe and so that makes information part of the process of the universe but not sitting at the fundamental nature of the well it its existence is indeed fundamental but it's not fundamental in the reductionist sense it's fundamental in the sense that there is a law of nature that the universe is computable or that a universal computer exists and would this computation this information work on various levels in a hierarchical sense or would it only exist on the most fundamental level as you understand information yes well computers are emergent objects there is no such thing as a computer at the subatomic level or if you did make a computer at the subatomic level it wouldn't be universal and therefore wouldn't be fundamental the fundamental computers are the ones that are universal and they are the ones that are quite big they're like the universe mutants that we actually have and use in everyday life but information could could operate on the most fundamental level it could and does but that as I have argued can't underlie that that's just an alternative way of talking about atoms okay but but this concept of information even if it's not at the most fundamental level when it exists as you see it does it exist at each level of the hierarchy of the laws of nature or is it only existing at the level of physics yes a good question information exists at every level including at the fundamental level of atoms whether an atom is there or not is a fundamental thing piece of information but at the level of laws of nature information comes in at a particular level of explanation namely the level at which there are computers and the level at which there are people thinking about stuff that that level of explanation how then does it that way of thinking allow us to understand reality better because almost always that the laws of physics could be do not have the property that a universal computer could exist

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 40,381

Keywords: David Deutsch, Closer To Truth, Physics, Cosmology, Computers, Quantum Physics, Universe

Id: UohR3OXzXA8

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2016