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352 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
This Universe could be preprogrammed with every theory we could
ever discover within it. (There would be no arbitrary problems.)
This argument neatly sidesteps Turing’s theorem by specifying
there is no such thing as an arbitrary problem - a random problem
picked from the infinite set of problems. At the same time, it sets certain
characteristics of such a Universe and I believe we can test these...
A computable Universe must already know the solution to every
problem it will encounter above the logic limit: It cannot discover
knowledge on the fly. For many problems, a small number of fundamental
rules can account for everything. Although our galaxy and the beautiful
nebulae we see through our telescopes look complex, they might be
the result of some such simple set of rules — just like a fractal. That’s
Stephen Wolfram’s solution to the mystery of our Universe. But some
problems are complex. The solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem is an 80
page document consisting of 5 million bits of information. All this must
be stored somewhere in the Universe. It might not be stored as a string
of bytes, it could be found in a set of equations governing the motion of
the atoms such that at some point — in 1995 to be exact — they all line
up in Andrew Wiles’ brain to direct his fingers to type out the proof. In
this case, the Universe has solved a mathematical puzzle because it was
specifically set up to do so from the time of the Big Bang, but this raises
three questions:
Where does the Universe store this enormous amount of
information?
How does The Universe hold the information reliably?
How did the pre-Universe solve the problem, so it might program
the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang?
The first question is probably answerable. The Universe is a big place
and could store sufficient information to solve the mysteries that puzzle
the inquisitive creatures that inhabit its planes. There are many practical
problems to consider, such as how to preserve the information through
all the strange evolutions of our Universe; inflation, star formation, and
so on. But it could be done.
The second question is insurmountable and presents the counter
argument to the determinists. Our Universe appears to be composed of
non-deterministic objects. Such objects exist in the mathematical world;
Kochen-Specker cubes, for example. Unfortunately for the determined
determinist, bosons behave according to the same principles. In case
you're thinking thinking bosons are rare, light is formed of bosons. Our
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