From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2007 - 05:34:19 MST
On 2/28/07, Norman Noman <overturnedchair@gmail.com> wrote:
Great story, I was just thinking along similar lines in the context of
> infinite regress, namely:
>
> If rather than pulling some kind of bootstrapping first cause or looped
> time thing, the universe is infinitely nested, it seems likely-to-inevitable
> that some of the nestings would be artificial rather than natural, and that
> given an infinite number of artificial nestings it seems again
> likely-to-inevitable that some percentage of them would not be pure,
> hermetic simulations, but would have errors or back doors or just easter
> eggs where the programmers' names scroll upwards accompanied by an upbeat
> orchestral soundtrack.
>
> Apparently infinite layers of messing around somehow adds up to a
> completely natural seeming world, assuming any of what I said is true to
> begin with, which seems unlikely but plausible.
If an infinite computer is is possible hand-coding of individual universes
is not necessary: a simple program such as a universal dovetailer will
compute all possible worlds, including an infinitely nested set of
emulations. This means that if an infinite computer exists anywhere, almost
certainly we are being emulated on it now. The idea is related to to the
theory that all mathematical structures exist, explored by people such as
Max Tegmark, Jurgen Schmidhuber and Bruno Marchal.
Stathis Papaioannou
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:57 MDT