Peterdjones comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 November 2012 06:13:09AM 22 points [-]

Mainstream status:

I haven't yet particularly seen anyone else point out that there is in fact a way to finitely Turing-compute a discrete universe with self-consistent Time-Turners in it. (In fact I hadn't yet thought of how to do it at the time I wrote Harry's panic attack in Ch. 14 of HPMOR, though a primary literary goal of that scene was to promise my readers that Harry would not turn out to be living in a computer simulation. I think there might have been an LW comment somewhere that put me on that track or maybe even outright suggested it, but I'm not sure.)

The requisite behavior of the Time Turner is known as Stable Time Loops on the wiki that will ruin your life, and known as the Novikov self-consistency principle to physicists discussing "closed timelike curve" solutions to General Relativity. Scott Aaronson showed that time loop logic collapses PSPACE to polynomial time.

I haven't yet seen anyone else point out that space and time look like a simple generalization of discrete causal graphs to continuous metrics of relatedness and determination, with c being the generalization of locality. This strikes me as important, so any precedent for it or pointer to related work would be much appreciated.

Comment author: Peterdjones 28 November 2012 12:05:59PM *  10 points [-]

There are precedents and parallels in Causal Sets and Causal Dynamical Triangulation

CDT is particularly interesting for its ability to predict the correct macroscopic dimensionality of spacetime:

" At large scales, it re-creates the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime, but it shows spacetime to be 2-d near the Planck scale, and reveals a fractal structure on slices of constant time"

Comment author: Jach 29 November 2012 08:35:52AM 0 points [-]

I was going to reply with something similar. Kevin Knuth in particular has an interesting paper deriving special relativity from causal sets: http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4172