TheAncientGeek comments on If Many-Worlds Had Come First - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 May 2008 07:43AM

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Comment author: TheAncientGeek 04 September 2014 09:10:45PM *  0 points [-]

QM is computable. rQM doesnt change that. If an observer wants to do quantum cosmology, they can observe the universe, not from nowhere, but from their perspective, store observations and compute with them. Map-wise, nothing much has changed.

Territory-wise, it looks like the universe can't be a (classical) computer. Is that a problem?

Comment author: shminux 04 September 2014 09:34:57PM 0 points [-]

Territory-wise, it looks like the universe can't be a (classical) computer. Is that a problem?

As I understand it, any quantum computer can be modeled on a classical one, possibly with exponential slowdown.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 04 September 2014 09:47:29PM 0 points [-]

Be modeled doesn't mean be.

Comment author: shminux 04 September 2014 10:07:21PM 0 points [-]

I guess that's the root of our disagreement about instrumentalism.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 September 2014 10:20:03AM -1 points [-]

The dictionary seems to be on my side.

I can see how your conclusion follows from that assumption, but the assumption is as strange as the conclusion. Ideally, an argument should proceed from plausible premises.

Comment author: shminux 05 September 2014 03:42:56PM 1 point [-]

Disengaging due to lack of convergence.

Comment author: nshepperd 05 September 2014 02:17:42AM *  -1 points [-]

"The universe is not anything that can even be conceived as existing in a classical view-from nowhere style" also means that the universe can't be modeled on a computer (classical or otherwise). From a complexity theory point of view, this makes the rQM cosmology an exceptionally bad one, since you must have to add something uncomputable to QM to make this true (if there is even any logical model that makes this true at all).

The fact that you can still computably model a specific observer's subjective perspective isn't really relevant.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 06 September 2014 12:53:48PM -2 points [-]

Out of the box, a classical computer doesn't represent the ontology of rQM because all information has an observer-independent representation, but s software layer can hide literal representations in the way a LISP gensym does. Uncomputability is not required.

In any case, classical computability isn't a good index of complexity. It's an index of how close something is to a classical computer. Problems are harder or easier to solve according to the technology used to solve them. That's why people don't write device drivers in LISP.

Comment author: nshepperd 07 September 2014 03:24:39AM 2 points [-]

Um, computability has very little to do with "classical" computers. It's a very general idea relating to the existence of any algorithm at all.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 07 September 2014 02:55:43PM 0 points [-]

Uncomputability isn't needed to model the ontology of rQM,