aaronsw comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong

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: aaronsw 29 November 2012 11:40:30PM *  1 point [-]

I don't totally understand it, but Zuse 1969 seems to talk about spacetime as a sort of discrete causal graph with c as the generalization of locality ("In any case, a relation between the speed of light and the speed of transmission between the individual cells of the cellular automaton must result from such a model."). Fredkin and Wolfram probably also have similar discussions.