Cristopher Moore: belief

Transcript context

…I don't know. I mean, is a computer computational? Right? So a computer is this thing made out of elementary particles, which are doing all sorts of crazy things. We exploit a small fraction of their dynamics to do to make pixels and do, you know, do anyway. Right? I mean, obviously, the laptop is doing all sorts of things other than the computation we want it to do. So is it at the fundamental level a computer I mean, I don't know. I'm not trying to slip out of the question. I like Feynman's question of if I have a space time box, a single cubic meter second of space time, is the amount of information processing, or shall we say computation, in there finite? And, you know, I'm inclined to think so, but I don't really know. I mean, I don't think that at the fundamental level things are cellular automata because I think that doesn't really work with quantum mechanics. I like this picture that at the Planck scale, something funny happens to space time so that you don't really have an infinite, infinitely divisible continuum of space and time. At the smallest scales, I don't think it's a lattice, but maybe it's something more amorphous. And, you know, people talk about causal networks and so on. And my first paper was about causal networks. Anyway, I mean, I'm inclined to think that at the end of the day, that the physical Church Turing thesis is true, that any that that the universe right. There there 1 form of that says that any device that we could actually build would be simulatable by, say, a quantum computer with finite resources. Then there's also a question about what does it do by itself. Right? Like, even in this box, there could be analog degrees of freedom that go all the way out to infinity. Like, you know, the states of this box could be real numbers that really have an infinite number of digits. And I spent some time in my my career thinking about analog computation, which, by the way, is a wonderful, cool history with Claude Shannon building mechanical computers and so on. So if you have real number computation, then in theory, there are an infinite number of bits there that you could call upon. The question is, can you read to them? Can you write from them? But even if we couldn't access them as engineers to do an infinite amount of computation, maybe it's still doing an infinite amount of computation itself, if you know what I mean. I'm inclined to think that's not the case. So, yes, I'm inclined to think that there is a finite amount of computation happening. And if you want to say that that means that it's computational. Although, if there were an infinite amount, we could say it's computational. It's just a really awesome kind of infinite hypercomputation. Yeah. Some of the work on hypercomputation is a little silly, but, you know, I mean, what happens in black holes? say it's computational. It's just a really awesome kind of infinite hypercomputation. Yeah. Some of the work on hypercomputation is a little silly, but, you know, I mean, what happens in black holes? And can you, you can set, set your grad students up in orbit around a black hole, Make sure that they have a hereditary monkhood, which will keep working on a problem. Then you wave goodbye and fall into the event horizon. And if they ever if their Turing machine ever halts, if they ever solve the problem, then they send you a signal, which, of course, will vaporize you because it will be blue shifted into gamma rays. But then, you know, in theory, maybe you could learn something about, you know, closed if you have a closed timelike curves, you can do really awesome things. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Part of it so physicists, which is my original culture, have an allergy have an have an an allergy. Why did I say that? Have a oh, have an allergic reaction, that's why I stress that syllable, to infinity. So for us, when something is blowing up, and like when an integral is diverging, say, or some infinite sum is diverging instead of converging, like you seem to be able to do an infinite amount of computation in finite time, for us, this is a sign that something is breaking down. Right? And so the attitude is, oh, well, the problem with this black hole idea is that there's cosmic censorship, which will actually prevent us from making, closed timelike curves, or there's going to be some sort of noise or firewall, whatever, at the event horizon, which will blow up our ability to do this. Or or, you know, as Sean Carroll says, the universe is expanding so fast that, it's rather grim in my opinion that we can only do a finite amount of computation before the stars go out from the accelerating expansion. You know, this just pisses me off. I'm like, you know, we'll do something about it. We should you know, the point is not to study the world, but to change it. So let you know, do we should do something about that, you know, which gets us into science fiction. So but for physicists, right, I mean, every time in particle physics, there's something which seems to give an infinite answer. We think that means that our theory is breaking down somewhere, and historically, that's been true. So that that gives us the sense that there aren't any real infinities. And in particular, that sort of fits with the idea that we're never going to be able to build a box or even find a box out there made of black holes or whatever that can solve undecidable problems. But we don't really know. Right? Ultimately, this is a claim about the world which may or may not be true. I'm inclined to think it is. And I guess, yeah, I mean, like, I I grew up on, like, Fredkin and Tuftely's digital physics and and reading Wolfram and playing with Cell Automatists. So, I kind of think something discrete ish is happening at the finest scales of space and time. Fascinating. And just before we go, Chris, we haven't really spoken about the algorithmic justice, so this something that you've…

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