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Dentin comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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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.
I'm not sure how to respond to this; the ability to compute it in a finite fashion for discrete universes seemed trivially obvious to me when I first pondered the problem. It would never have occurred to me to actually write it down as an insight because it seemed like something you'd figure out within five minutes regardless.
"Well, we know there are things that can't happen because there are paradoxes, so just compute all the ones that can and pick one. It might even be possible to jig things such that the outcome is always well determined, but I'd have to think harder about that."
That said, this may just be a difference in background. When I was young, I did a lot of thinking about Conway's Life and in particular "garden of eve" states which have no precursor. Once you consider the possibility of garden of eve states and realize that some Life universes have a strict 'start time', you automatically start thinking about what other kinds of universes would be restricted. Adding a rule with time travel is just one step farther.
On the other hand, the space/time causal graph generalization is definitely something I didn't think about and isn't even something I'd heard vaguely mentioned. That one I'll have to put some thought into.