Evidence suggests that the universe is composed of qualia. The ability to build a mathematical model that fits our scientific measurements (= a probabilistic description of the correlations between qualia) does not remotely suggest that the universe is an algorithm.

The downvote corporatist system of this site is extremely annoying.

I'm really curious: What work is the word "corporatist" doing in this sentence? In what sense is the downvote system "corporatist"?

Your above comment could be phrased better (it makes a valid point in a way that can be easily misinterpreted as proposing some mushy-headed subjective relativism), but I agree that people downvoting it are very likely overconfident in their own understanding of the problem.

My impression is that the concept of "algorithm" (and "computation" etc.) is dangerously close to being a semantic stop sign on LW. It is definitely often used to underscore a bottom line without concern for its present problematic status.

The guideline is to upvote things you want to see more of, and downvote things you want to see less of. That leaves room for interpretation about where the two quality thresholds should be, but in practice they're both pretty high and I think that's a good thing. There are a lot of things that could be wrong with a comment besides being irrelevant or not being argued. In this case, I think the problem is arguing one side of a confusing question rather than trying to clarify or dissolve it.

I prefer this formulation, because you emphasize on the representational aspect. Now a representation (a conceptualization) requires someone that conceptualize/represents things. I think that this "useful and clarifying way" just forget that a representation is always relative to a subject. The last part of the sentence only expresses your proud ignorance (sorry)...

I'm not sure you understand where quen tin is coming from. He would regard integers, list<strings> and "algorithms" in your sense as abstract entities, and maintain (as a point so fundamental that it's never spelled out) that abstract entities are not physically real. At most they provide patterns that we can usefully superimpose on various 'systems' in the world.

The point isn't whether or not abstract entities are observer-dependent, the point is that the business of superimposing abstract entities on real things is observer-dependent (on quen tin's view). And observers themselves are "real things" not abstracta.

(Not that I agree with this personally, but it's important to at least understand how others view things.)

I think it does.

{"hello", "world"} is a set of lighted pixels on my screen, or a list of characters in a text file containing source code, or a list of bytes in my computer's memory, but in any case, there must be an observer so that they can be interpreted as a list of string. The real list of string only exists inside my representation.

Inside your representation, I might be a person, and I do represent myself as a person sometimes.