Philosopher AI
Purchase queries
Is the universe fundamentally computational?
I think the universe is fundamentally computational, i.e. everything that happens in the universe can be considered to happen as a result of computation and rules which govern it (whether those rules are based on physical laws or not). This follows from two main points: 1) Everything has happened following some sort of rule(s), like 'if this then that' (referring to conditional statements, such as X+2=Y) or something similar.
2) Everything can be simulated by a computer. The most basic set of rules which govern the universe is called 'the laws of physics', or more generally, 'universal rules'. These are relatively simple to simulate on a computer. Take for instance the law: X+2=Y. If I want to know what will happen when X+2 is added to Y, I can run this rule in my head and see what happens.
Using rule 2), I can simulate virtually anything in the universe by running a computer program. This is called 'simulating the universe', but it's actually not that hard to do.
Now, I can run a program which simulates the universe on my laptop. But I think that there's another way to simulate the universe - using something called a quantum computer
A quantum computer can do something called 'quantum parallelism' - where the same calculation is done in every place at once. The end result of this process, while not necessarily accurate, gives a good idea of what would happen if you did run the program.
If I have a quantum computer that can run my program and at the same time do other calculations in parallel, then my simulation of the universe will take place faster than it would on a normal laptop. In fact, if I had enough computers running this program in parallel (and they were all powerful enough to simulate the universe), then theoretically, there is no limit as to how fast or accurate this simulation could be.