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[universe] God Is the Machine — Kevin Kelly wonders if the Universe is a computer … ‘If the universe is a computer, where is it running? Fredkin says that all this work happens on the “Other.” The Other, he says, could be another universe, another dimension, another something. It’s just not in this universe, and so he doesn’t care too much about it. In other words, he punts. David Deutsch has a different theory. “The universality of computation is the most profound thing in the universe,” he says. Since computation is absolutely independent of the “hardware” it runs on, studying it can tell us nothing about the nature or existence of that platform. Deutsch concludes it does not exist: “The universe is not a program running somewhere else. It is a universal computer, and there is nothing outside of it.”‘ [via Haddock]

Everything is Computation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 20th, 2002 at 9:25 am and is filed under Science, Weird.

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