What is a quantum computer?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Leo said:

"...the observer can only observe a holographic representation of his own past and the past is that which no longer exists." Some people would say this is reality the way reality is understood. Making it the past doesn't make it less real than the present.

PhilX

[Philosophy Explorer]

Then this is your interpretation. Still it's a very long stretch to say that the universe is a computer.

PhilX

Depends what kind of computer you are talking about? But the idea has been around a long time, Zuse was one of the first I think and latterly Fredkin has had a nice take upon such matters.

This is the definition of a computer I recognize from my online dictionary:

"an electronic device for storing and processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program"

Therefore I still say that saying the universe is a computer is a huge stretch.

PhilX

[Arising_uk]

Take it up with the inventor of the world's first programmable computer, Konrad Zuse.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Take it up with the inventor of the world's first programmable computer, Konrad Zuse.

Take it up with my online dictionary and keep up with the times.

PhilX

[Arising_uk]

Take it up with my online dictionary and keep up with the times.
PhilX

Lmfao! Hmm...let me think Konrad Zuse's Caculating Space versus your online dictionary. Think I'll stick with the computing engineer thanks.

Did you even bother to look - up Zuse and Fredkin? Doubt it. As if you had you'd be with the times rather than just some weird kind of unpaid churnalist.

[Arising_uk]

This is the definition of a computer I recognize from my online dictionary:

"an electronic device for storing and processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program"

Therefore I still say that saying the universe is a computer is a huge stretch.

PhilX

Once again, care to say why? As nothing in that definition says against whereas the inventor of that electronic device thought otherwise than you.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Take it up with my online dictionary and keep up with the times.
PhilX

Lmfao! Hmm...let me think Konrad Zuse's Caculating Space versus your online dictionary. Think I'll stick with the computing engineer thanks.

Did you even bother to look - up Zuse and Fredkin? Doubt it. As if you had you'd be with the times rather than just some weird kind of unpaid churnalist.

Why should I look up ancient history when I have an authoritative dictionary?

PhilX

[Arising_uk]

Why are you even on a Philosophy forum?

Still, the reason why is that your dictionary has nothing to say about this issue. Whereas Fredkin is a physicist who is attempting to build upon the idea from Zuse the computational engineer who created the machine that your dictionary definition describes and the originator of a paper describing how the Universe could be the result of a computational process.

[Obvious Leo]

Leo said:

"...the observer can only observe a holographic representation of his own past and the past is that which no longer exists." Some people would say this is reality the way reality is understood. Making it the past doesn't make it less real than the present.

PhilX

What a crock of shit. I've never heard of anybody who would suggest that the past is physically real. The past is that which WAS physically real but is physically real no longer.

This is the definition of a computer I recognize from my online dictionary:

"an electronic device for storing and processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program"

That's not the sort of computer I'm talking about and you know this perfectly well because I told you what sort of computer the universe is. It is a Universal Turing Machine and such a computer requires no programme because it programmes its own input. Furthermore it is cyclical, it exists eternally and it can never repeat the same reality twice. Why don't you do some homework before you embarrass yourself further.

[Arising_uk]

It is a Universal Turing Machine and such a computer requires no programme because it programmes its own input. ...

Hmm...The arbitrary inputs still bother me slightly.

[Obvious Leo]

John Archibald Wheeler, possibly one of the most prestigious physicists of the 20th century was in no doubt whatsoever on this subject. He had already defined the universe as a computer at a time when computers were about as useful as an abacus.

[Obvious Leo]

Hmm...The arbitrary inputs still bother me slightly.

The inputs are not arbitrary. An evolutionary algorithm is completely deterministic but its determinism is immanent rather than transcendent. In other words the universe writes its own software.

[Arising_uk]

...
were about as useful as an abacus.

Hate to be picky but abacuses are seriously useful things.

[wtf]

This is the sole organising principle needed for the Universal Turing Machine which is our self-causal universe.

I'm always puzzled when otherwise sane people believe that the universe is a computation. For one thing, we already know of many problems that can't be solved by TMs, such as the halting problem and the busy beaver problem. Secondly, TMs can only deal with countable sets, and there's no reason to think the universe would be so limited. Do you think that the mathematical phenomenon of uncountability has no meaning, even if we imagine the physics of 1000 years from now? How can anyone believe that the theory of computation, which is around 80 years old (dating from Turing 1931, say) is the last word on the subject of how the universe works? In the past, hasn't scientific certainty been overthrown over and over? What makes you think the process stopped just because we have fancy calculating machines at our disposal?

[Obvious Leo]

...
were about as useful as an abacus.

Hate to be picky but abacuses are seriously useful things.

So are computers. However they can only perform linear tasks and they can only perform them in the way they've been programmed to. They can process information very efficiently but they can't generate new information, which is what the Universal Turing Machine does through the agency of networked and embedded emergent hierarchies. This process is exquisitely modelled visually in the Mandelbrot set.

This is the sole organising principle needed for the Universal Turing Machine which is our self-causal universe.

I'm always puzzled when otherwise sane people believe that the universe is a computation. For one thing, we already know of many problems that can't be solved by TMs, such as the halting problem and the busy beaver problem. Secondly, TMs can only deal with countable sets, and there's no reason to think the universe would be so limited. Do you think that the mathematical phenomenon of uncountability has no meaning, even if we imagine the physics of 1000 years from now? How can anyone believe that the theory of computation, which is around 80 years old (dating from Turing 1931, say) is the last word on the subject of how the universe works? In the past, hasn't scientific certainty been overthrown over and over? What makes you think the process stopped just because we have fancy calculating machines at our disposal?

These problems which you refer to are not applicable to a self-programming computer because it is not attempting to compute a solution to anything. The universe simply makes it up as it goes along and such self-organising systems inevitably evolve from the simple to the complex. That our universe is evolving from the simple to the complex is a proposition supported by 13.8 billion years worth of evidence and yet spacetime physics is wholly unable to account for this. In a programmed (or law-mandated) reality the arrow of entropy should be going the other way.