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Mitchell_Porter comments on What are our domains of expertise? A marketplace of insights and issues - Less Wrong
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No. I have nothing more exotic to suggest than a spherical expansion of ultrarelativistic constructor fleets, building Matrioshka-brains that communicate electromagnetically. All I'm saying is, if you think you have an unbounded demand for computation, I see no computational reason to expand at anything less than the maximum speed.
How do two such civilizations react when they collide?
Is "memory" a mathematical concept? We are talking about Tegmark's theory, right? Anyway, you go on to say
and the moment you talk about "processes", you have implicitly reintroduced the concept of time.
So you're doing several things wrong at once.
1) You talk about process as if that was a concept distinct from and more fundamental than the concept of time, when in fact it's the other way around.
2) You hope to derive time from memory. I see two ways that can work out, neither satisfactory. Either you talk about memory processes and we are back to the previous problem of presupposing time; or you adopt an explicitly timeless physical ontology, like Julian Barbour, and say you're accounting for the appearance of time or the illusion of time. Are you prepared to do that - to say simply that time is not real? I'll still disagree with you, but your position will be a little more consistent.
3) Finally, this started out in Tegmark's multiverse. But if we are sticking to purely mathematical concepts, there is neither a notion of memory or of process in such an ontology. Tell me where time or memory is in the ZFC universe of sets, for example! The root of the problem again is the neglect of representation. We use these mathematical objects to represent process, mental states, physical states and so forth, and then careless or unwary thinkers simply equivocate between the mathematics and the thing represented.
I agree. That's why I was careful to ask the advice of physicists and not computer scientists. I am a computer scientist myself.
I don't know. But these cyclic cellular automata were an influence when I was thinking about these ideas. http://www.permadi.com/java/cautom/index.html (Java applet)
Your critique is misdirected. If I, a time-based creature, write a long paragraph about a timeless theory, it is not surpising that accidentally I will use some time-based notion in the text somewhere. But this is not a problem with the theory, this is a problem with my text. You jumped on the word 'process', but if I write 'pattern' instead, then you will have much less to nitpick about.
Little more consistent then the position you put into my mouth after reading one paragraph? This is unfair and a bit rude. (Especially considering the thread we are still on. I came here for some feel-good karma and expert advice from physicists, and I was used as a straw man instead. :) Should we switch to Open Thread, BTW?)
To answer the question: yes, I am all the way down route number 2. Barbour has it exactly right in my opinion, except for one rhetorical point: it is just marketing talk to interpret these ideas as "time is not real". Time is very real, and an emergent notion. Living organisms are real, even if we can reduce biology to chemistry.
Please read my answer to ata. I'm not a platonist. I don't do such an equivocation. I am a staunch formalist. I don't BELIEVE in Tegmark's Multiverse in the way you think I do. It is a tool for me to think more clearly about why OUR Universe is the way it is.
Continued here.