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I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.
Seth Lloyd -
Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.
Seth Lloyd
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Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.
Seth Lloyd -
What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
Seth Lloyd -
Quantum mechanics is just completely strange and counterintuitive. We can't believe that things can be here in one place and there in another place at the same time. And yet that's a fundamental piece of quantum mechanics. So then the question is, life is dealing us weird lemons, can we make some weird lemonade from this?
Seth Lloyd -
Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.
Seth Lloyd -
I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it's capable of performing universal computation, but it's plausible that it is.
Seth Lloyd -
Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.
Seth Lloyd
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Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.
Seth Lloyd -
If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.
Seth Lloyd -
Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.
Seth Lloyd -
There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.
Seth Lloyd -
At some point, Moore's law will break down.
Seth Lloyd -
Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.
Seth Lloyd