It’s entirely possible that the universe that we live in is a computational process. If so, it does not appear to take any input, and could well not provide any output. If we were to find out that this were the case (I can see the headline now: ‘GOOD NEWS: FREE UNLIMITED ENERGY—BAD NEWS: RELIES ON FLOATING POINT ROUNDING ERROR’), I would not suddenly conclude that my life had no value. This being the case, I must extend the same sort of value to computational processes running under our universe.
A typical formulation of Turing machines stipulates that they take no input. For certain purposes, Turing machines have as their only output whether or not they halt.
Turing machines that take input take it only as the initial state of their tape. Those that produce output produce it as the final state of their tape.
It’s entirely possible that the universe that we live in is a computational process. If so, it does not appear to take any input, and could well not provide any output. If we were to find out that this were the case (I can see the headline now: ‘GOOD NEWS: FREE UNLIMITED ENERGY—BAD NEWS: RELIES ON FLOATING POINT ROUNDING ERROR’), I would not suddenly conclude that my life had no value. This being the case, I must extend the same sort of value to computational processes running under our universe.
A typical formulation of Turing machines stipulates that they take no input. For certain purposes, Turing machines have as their only output whether or not they halt.
Turing machines that take input take it only as the initial state of their tape. Those that produce output produce it as the final state of their tape.