Why the Universe may be a Computer afterall: Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata, and Rule 110

VonDoomen - I loved this thread, a really great read, well put together. I'll read again as a refresher in due course. S&F goes without saying, there I said it.

So I'm just a object in a bunch of some kind of cellular code I always thought I was a variable, perhaps thats closer to the truth than I thought.

Seriously I like this far more as an explanation to what might be our virtual world. Its been said before one day we may do the same a create a virtual world but knowing this would we commit to going that far if we could not support the (shall we say application) for an eternity. I'm guessing we could have an out in the running app that says the sun will run out of steam - end of program.

Anyhow fascinating

MJ2

VonDoomen and all

This wasn't linked in the original post and I haven't read each and every post since, so not sure if its linked but I'll catch up eventually.

Here is a good read one I'm ploughing through right now.

The Physical World as a Virtual Reality," written by Brian Whitworth and published by Massey University's Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science in Auckland, New Zealand

link

Its a pdf so good to print and read anytime.

Cheers
MJ2

reply to post by VonDoomen


I certainly want to thank you for this post; I caught on during page one (surprised me) apparently before anyone else did.

You certainly have a unique way of teaching a lesson that is mind boggling beyond a lot of peoples comprehension (yes even here on ATS).

I never considered we were all players on the grid; God really is beyond comprehension, but you sure made it abundantly clear how we all fit into the game of however we are animated depending on how we react to a multitude of stimuli, and whether we can actually know the real meaning of love, and knowing God is Love.

The only difference is that at higher levels of play the bad guys are gone, leaving just the good guys (unless God wants to fool em lol).

Thank you Master Teacher 10^99. I bow to your great wisdom.

reply to post by TheUltimateEnd


Well, I realized I have a lot of replies to put into this thread.

I wish you would elaborate more on what "secrets" you know/.

reply to post by troubleshooter


Thank you for this link! I read through it the other day, and it is astounding! Like I mentioned in an earlier post,

It feels so plausible that there is some inherent intelligence to the universe wether we like it or not.

But I still have to wonder, Is it really intelligence, or just the fact that out of ALL possibility, something had to work?

That is the real question

I can agree with all of this except where each and every one of you think you are so important as an entity and have your own special place.

you are not special.

reply to post by VonDoomen


So basically what you're saying is that some other "source" is playing a big fat game of intergalactic "Sims?"

It's a miracle I haven't burned down my house yet. Every time I made my "Sim" try to cook, he inevitably burned the house down and he died inside.



In all seriousness, I am thankful for threads like yours on ATS. The information that you dug out and provided for us to read is not only interesting, but thought-provoking on a level that I may never be able to fully comprehend. Then again, I still get that "glazed over" look every time I look up at the stars. The concept of the universe as one giant computer program is one that I have been pondering for quite a while. It really does make a lot of sense in my simplistic view of the information that you have presented. It may take me the rest of my life to fully wrap my head around this stuff.

The biggest question I have is: Who is behind the keyboard of the giant computer, and what is the purpose of this "program?" Gosh....now I know I won't be sleeping tonight.


Thanks once again for your amazing thread. I wish I could contribute more to the actual content, but I am not very versed in programming, logic, etc. I am but a humble musician.




Peace be with you.

-truthseeker

reply to post by hypattia


Thanks for the positive response!

I will have to check out the other books you mentioned.

Ray Kurzweil is awesome! I really enjoyed his age of spiritual machine, and this thread was organized from his book "The singularity is near" which i would highly recommend for anyone else interested in this topic!

reply to post by majestictwo


At one level, it does take some code to describe us. However, I would have to feel the real universe is more complex than the system I described at the start. My main point I wanted to show with this thread was that EXTREMELY BASIC and SIMPLE rules can apparently create some what random and organized outputs. Which is important. What seems to be a deterministic process being capable of creating unusual behavior.

I read through some of the PDF you linked, they have some very interesting topics in it! I really enjoyed reading:
" Creation from nothing. Given enough energy, matter can suddenly appear from an “empty”
space (where there was no matter before)"

"Physical effects without causality. Quantum events like gamma radiation occur randomly,
and no physical cause for them has ever been identified."

two topics for another post for any go getters out there

WARNING PEOPLE

Don't let this screw with your brain, it did mine and you need to digest a bit, let it go and come back to it and keep living your lives just as you are doing because its all going to be the same results anyway.

Good post and i still have trouble getting my head around the double slit experiment but yes i would take a educated guess and say yes we are inside a computer program and i have a theory on what role we play but you would have to smoke a few joints to grasp the theory.

Anyway looking at this pattern, what do you see.



it's obvious to me that we are looking at a cross section of skin and the tisue underneath with a blood vessel going down to the bottom.

Our computers are base one, zero and ones , binary but DNA is not much better, it's base four with the DNA strands containing the program for person objects (Oop's) such as jump, feel , die however do not ask me what operating system these objects are used in or when we refere to god if we are talking about the program, chips, operating system or even the programmer because the best thing to program a computer is another computer (Not wasting time with you always need a human programer, not true)

Surly anyone that thinks we could be part of a computer program would dispell Darwin and evolution where we all started life lower than a worm but having wrote complex computer programs myself i can tell you we often start out with something very basic, none functional and slowly build up to something usefull or put another way we install DOS before we install windows, well not quite true anymore but you get my drift.

I might make the effort to explain my theory on where we fit in but only if a few of you think i'm so mad that i could be right but if you check you're history books you will see that nearly all the great men of science were in nut house during some stages of their lives, a few killed themselves and einstein was on speed when he talked about surfing the tip of a light beam.

Good post as i said and clearly you have done a lot of research, more than me but you are at odds with many in this field with what you say below.

"I believe right now our technology has the computational capacity of around 10^14-16 bits per second. However the upper limits of the computational capacity of the known universe lies around 10^90-99 BPS. and that would require basically almost ALL of the matter in the universe to be organized in a manner that allows it to take part in computation. "

In theory they say the size of a computer to simulate every thing on earth needs be no bigger than a sugar cube and that we will have this amount of raw processing power within 50 years to do it ourselves and this was backed up with calculations and numbers.

The argument that made this possible is that nothing needs to be shown unless someone is looking and if someone/thing wanted to look closer then the extra detail would be filled in on demand in much the same way as tiles are used in computer games.

Now i know a simple blood cell has turned out to be a million times more complex than they beleived just 30 years ago but the point is we don't need to model down to that level or keep the state of every single blood cell in a body else i'm sure any computer to model just me would be even bigger than me.

Google earth HD (when it comes) could be housed in a single data center and if you take out the heating problom then it would fit in a room and thats without using optics for the CPU which is the way things will go from my limited understanding.

Funney people think we are smart but the nurons inside our brains can only fire 400 times a second and thats real ssssssssssllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

reply to post by Master_007


"In theory they say the size of a computer to simulate every thing on earth needs be no bigger than a sugar cube and that we will have this amount of raw processing power within 50 years to do it ourselves and this was backed up with calculations and numbers. "

"Now i know a simple blood cell has turned out to be a million times more complex than they beleived just 30 years ago but the point is we don't need to model down to that level or keep the state of every single blood cell in a body else i'm sure any computer to model just me would be even bigger than me. "

Well your going to have to draw a line here somewhere. you cant "model" the entire planet without modeling every blood cell in every human. Im having a hard time finding anywhere on the interest that says this.

"To appreciate the feasibility of computing with almost no energy or heat, lets consider the computation that takes place in any ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 10^25 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actualy extremely active. Despite its apparent solidarity, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. all of this activity represents computation, though not MEANINGFULLY organized
In terms of computation, and just considering the electromagnetic interactions of a 1 kilogram rock, there are atleast 10^15 changes in state per bit per second, which represents about 10^42 (million trillion trillion trillion) calculations per second. YET THE ROCK REQUIRES NO ENERGY INPUT AND GENERATES NO APPRECIABLE HEAT -Singularity is near"

I think your kind of confusing what I say. what I was trying to point out is, the theoretical maximum computational ability allowed by our current knowledge of physical laws and the size of the visible universe.
Computational Capacity of the universe
Ultimate physical limits to computation

Merely by existing, all physical systems register information. And by
evolving dynamically in time, they transform and process that information.
The laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system
can register (number of bits) and the number of elementary logic operations
that a system can perform (number of ops). The universe is a physical system.
This paper quantifies the amount of information that the universe can register
and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed over its
history. The universe can have performed no more than 10^120 ops on 10^90 bits.

reply to post by Communicater


Thank you for the positive response as well!

I have to admit, your thank you at the end gave me biggest laugh ive had yet on ATS

I love reading about this stuff!

reply to post by VonDoomen


I'm certainly glad you were able to feel humor from my comments. That's always a positive note. Even though I am completely self-taught on computers I was able to comprehend exactly what you were alluding to regarding the possibility or perhaps probability that our Creator is the biggest game player ever theorized.

The thought I had was a crystalline structure functioning at an extremely high multi-frequency (no real size or proportion came to mind) that animated every life form in all of its random possibilities (known ahead of time) everywhere in existence.

If that were the case we would just be puppets on the grand stage (with free will) to run all of the possible parameters that were designed into each life forms reality of their existence.

That would probably make ATS one of the favorite websites for all the different types of thought patterns found doing investigations and talking about so many possibilities of things going on around our perceived reality.

You tell me that's not a possibility. You might very well be wrong if you did.

(The white noise is deafening and accelerating). I definitely need to take a break from this site.

That's why I changed my location to "on the grid".

Salutations OP. Awesome thread & responses.

I typed a lot of nonsense. Deleted it. Started again. Deleted. Sat here for an hour trying to put into words something really can't be described in words.

It's impossible to describe something which cannot be observed in entirety. Since I can't see my own neurons firing or count them still I know they are somehow actualizing the chemical biological electrical variables necessary for me to experience this awareness. At any rate the programming of this reality is top notch.

I guess the best human language to describe the universe as a computer remains to be written. And the best philosophers even have trouble putting it down in literal terms.. always they resort to metaphors, technological analogies and abstract mathematics.

Perhaps the best way to describe it is in computer code. I think we'll have to wait for AI to help us figure out what the matrix really is.

Originally posted by Master_007

Anyway looking at this pattern, what do you see.

I see that one half of the picture is pure signal [digital 1]. There is a thin dividing line that is pure nothingness [digital 0]. This would be the on/off duality interface. Immediately behind the black line is a matrix of geometric complexity. The black triangles have to work together to sustain a barrier against the homogenous white sector.

The black triangles could be representations of programs that are up positioned at the edge of an empty sector of memory. But my interpretations are human interpretations. It would interesting to see an AI answer the question "What do you see when looking at this pattern?"

The base unit of our world is imagination.

Everything else is just a means to bringing imagination to life.

Man this is some mind blowing stuff.

But, why would it make me think of South Park?

I just don't know.

Originally posted by SayonaraJupiter

Originally posted by Master_007

Anyway looking at this pattern, what do you see.

I see that one half of the picture is pure signal [digital 1]. There is a thin dividing line that is pure nothingness [digital 0]. This would be the on/off duality interface. Immediately behind the black line is a matrix of geometric complexity. The black triangles have to work together to sustain a barrier against the homogenous white sector.

The black triangles could be representations of programs that are up positioned at the edge of an empty sector of memory. But my interpretations are human interpretations. It would interesting to see an AI answer the question "What do you see when looking at this pattern?"

Human interpretations being what they are, looking towards the outside of our perceived [ ] window of conscious reality are indeed as you stated SJ humanistic by their nature leaving multitudinous unanswered questions drifting within our sphere of (perceived) intelligence.

To my consciousness that would lead my thought patterns to conclude that they only possible way any of us could actually conceive what reality would appear as would be to find the way to exit our reality, or parallel it as a second reality to actually enter another reality to see if there would be any differential experienced by our own (perceptions-interpretations) of what that reality might be...that would necessarily apply to AI in addition to every other one. That would also lead to another question...could we parallel reality #1 without having effect on reality #2 by switching off #1 while viewing in #2 and having an alternate return connection back to #1? That could lead to the need to have two separate processing abilities within #1.

I think you can see where my thought patterns were leading me. Taking the assumption (and that can be somewhat dangerous at times lol, possibly leading to all sorts of illogicities) that everything in existence must be a part of a whole, or a complete system of consciousness (making the assumption they would have to be to be able to interact on some level); the only possibility I can summon from my portion is that each portion would have to find the theoretical opening, then figure out how to unlock a door of some kind to make entry into that new realm (that could also be assumptional) of consciousness (which also could be conceived as a form of unconsciousness) since it is not perceived (by us) as actually our own, but that of another, even if we are paralleling our own perceived consciousness as someone not actually aligned with our own, but as an outside independent observer of what other possible realities, could, should, or might be...whether conceived as humanistic or artificial.

That would lead to the question...could we actually perceive ourselves or a parallel of ourselves as being an independent observer? i.e. the perfect logical emotionless entity examining some thing at its core (again assuming that that sort of entity can or does exist within our sphere of understanding from either parallel look).

It would be interesting to hear everyones thoughts.

I'm in agreement with others VD; this has to be the finest/best thread ever conceived to look at things in a different light from our normal experienciality. It seems (there again, perception) to make us summon a little more of our potential thought abilities.

Another thought was just summoned...it would be interesting to hear thoughts from another we could at least have a possibility of knowing in our own intelligence levels, exceed our own by one or several magnitudes; if thoughts of those could actually be put into words relating terms in human consciousness understanding levels.

Actually VD could just really be sneaky wanting to see if some higher functioners actually exist here lol.

I exceeded the 4 hour time you have to edit a post here.

Perhaps this should have read:
Another thought was just summoned...it would be interesting to hear thoughts from another we could at least have a possibility of knowing in our own intelligence levels, exceed our own by one or several magnitudes; if thoughts of those could actually be put into words relating terms in human consciousness ("or unconsciousness") understanding levels.