“We are such stuff as dreams are made on;
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
W. Shakespeare, “The Tempest“, Act 4, scene 1.
In a previous post on Privateer Science, one phrase caught my attention:
“all physics is an algorithm”
I believe this is worthy of further analysis.
Can we reduce everything to an Algorithmic formulation? Are we living in a digital universe or a simulation? There is much blood spilled over such claims, which makes it interesting to trace their history backwards.
The earliest version was offered by a pioneer of digital computers, Konrad Zuse. In 1967, he published a treatise with the name “Rechnender Raum”, [Ed. in English: Calculating Space], which conceived of the Universe as a set of interconnected parallel processors. The problem of quantum correlations is not there resolved but is attributed to “external” machinery of some sort.
Later, the American physicist Edward Fredkin developed this story. He tried to build a realistic model based upon the conception of parallel automata given by Von Neumann. Later, this became known as “Cellular Automata” as in the computer game “Life”. This philosophy was renamed the “Fredkin-Zuse Hypothesis” in analogy with the famous “Church-Turing Thesis”.
It is unclear how to build the Standard Model as Cellular Automata and how many properties and symbols these should have. Such systems, if properly defined, have a vast number of combinations so any disproof is difficult.
The most recent creative attempt is a book by Stephen Wolfram, “A New Kind of Science”. At 1200 pages, this colossal tome claims that a short collection of Cellular Automata might reproduce the complexity of the Universe as we perceive it.
There remains the problem of consciousness, or freedom of will, and a serious attempt by the Roger Penrose. In his masterpiece, “Shadows of the
Mind”, he claims to present a complete and rigorous proof for the non-algorithmic nature of the human mind. The key is the intuitive capability of proof, as shown by mathematicians.
Others think differently, including Marvin Minsky and John Searle.
Let us be dispassionate. Personally, I would not be surprised if these questions turn out to be undecidable!
What is interesting to me is that the history of such claims goes way back in ancient Greek philosophy. Indeed, the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in the “Republic”, describes how people can live chained like prisoners. They perceive the shadows of things as reality projected on the walls of the cave from an external source of light which is always behind their back.
If by accident, or by favor, one of the prisoners ever grasps the
external reality, he finds it impossible to explain it to the rest of his comrades. They still prefer the shadows into which their minds are accustomed from the actual reality. This is the mystery of Life.
Later Plato’s followers and intellectuals like Carneades and the Pyrrhonists established a kind of “Academic Scepticism” which in a sense precludes the Kantian notion of the ever inconceivable “Being in itself”. Soon after, the Pre-Christian tradition of the Gnostics went a step beyond, by claiming to have discovered an external constructor or “programmer” of our reality in the face of the evil mad god “Demiurge or “Yaldabaoth” in the effort to also answer the famous “Problem of Evil“.
Strangely enough, modern sociology and anthropology was also influenced vby the notion of simulated reality. This is evident in the works of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard, especially the Baudrillard’s
work “Simulacra and Simulation“. In this and similar works, modern sociology sees a kind of “Apo-Semiosis” or designification where the Sign is finally deprived of any need for a signified “true” object to gradually become an empty signifier. This is reminiscent of all the “quantum this and quantum that” hype or the “All Popes and no God” attribute mentioned earlier in this blog.
One of the most important works of fiction that made heavy use of such a paradigm was the 1992 novel “Snow Crash” based on a 3D Metaverse, a kind of fully “Immersive Reality“.
In an acute critic, Richard Rorty mentions that the most important symptom of such a worldview is not so much its artificiality but rather the total lack of inspiration. In another important work by Walter Michaels, titled “The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History”, the following phrase still echoes concerns expressed in this blog.
“So a world in which everything – from bitmaps to blood – can be understood as a “form of speech” is also a world in which nothing actually is understood, a world in which what a speech act does is disconnected from what it means.”
The above really sounds so “Quantum” if so “Copenhagen” that one cannot avoid the temptation offered by direct comparison!
And by another stranger coincidence, one can even be tempted to ask of what it would mean if a kind of “Entangled Brains Hive” could exist where not just two separate dreamers but a myriad of them could tune into one and the same common dream!
Would such a dream be able to materialize and what kind of elusiveness would such a dream matter appeared to have? What would the scientists and intellectuals inside the World Dream conclude on the nature of the Dream-matter? Would it be as elusive as the
wave-particle duality appears to be?
I cannot avoid a last comparison in here with the verses from a very common popular song, the well known “Hotel California”
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! “
Speech, in this context, doesn’t need to be the output of a literal communicator. It’s simply the relation commonly indicated by quote marks. It maps logical propositions to logical objects.
Quotation allows arbitrary expressions, even if ill-formed, to participate in classical reasoning. This is the only way QM can ever be understood. It allows us to treat the paradoxes of QM, metaphorically, as the utterances of an illogical portrayer. We can then speculate what kinds of physical processes would appear this way.