Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

Feeling of Computing

"Is the whole universe a computer?", ask Jack Copeland, Mark Sprevak, and Oron Shagrir in chapter 41 of the book The Turing Guide. They split this question in two, first asking whether the universe itself is a computer, then whether the universe could even be computed. These are lofty, unanswerable questions, sure, but they encroach on our territory — philosophy, automata, nonsense. So, in our usual reverent style and with attentive pacing, the three of us explore the paper, the questions, the answers they choose to highlight, and even share a few perfectly reasonable answers of our own.

Links

$ Patreon

In no particular order:

• Carl Sagan
• What it means to be open was Lu's talk at Heart of Clojure
• Rudy Rucker
• Is the brain a digital computer? by John Searle
• The Plankth of time.
• C is Not a Low-Level Language by David Chisnall
• The Connection Machine!!
• Komgloverav… Komolgorov…
• Outer Worlds?
• Outer Wilds?
• The Witness

Music featured in this episode:

• No! That's a spoiler. No way I'm telling you.

! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us while you still can:

• Carl: Mastodon • Website
• Jimmy: Mastodon • Website
• Lu: Mastodon • Website

See you in the future!

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/74

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

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