iwdw: there has been some thinking about the universe as an actual game of life, Steven Wolfram’s New Kind of Science is the one that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are more reputable sources that he stole the idea from. I believe that this thinking runs into trouble with special relativity.
Speaking of which, has anyone ever attempted to actually model space as a graph of relationships between points, in a computer program? Something like the distance-configuration-space in the last post? It occurs to me that this could actually be a more robust representation for some purposes than just storing the xyz coordinates.
Eliezer: I actually have been getting the insights you speak of repeatedly throughout this series, and it’s one of the reasons why I find it helpful to post comments—because it forces me to think through the ideas well enough to get their occasional mind-bendingness. It’s also why I have continued reading despite all the what-is-Science business.
But I still think that the subjective time-like-ness of time, as well as the concept of causality, are all caused (ha-ha) by the universe starting out in a low-entropy state. So if you had a toy block universe in your hands, you would still see a direction in the block corresponding to time. There is no way to assign a meaningful distance in that direction for the whole universe because of the locality of physics, but the direction is global, isn’t it?
iwdw: there has been some thinking about the universe as an actual game of life, Steven Wolfram’s New Kind of Science is the one that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are more reputable sources that he stole the idea from. I believe that this thinking runs into trouble with special relativity.
Speaking of which, has anyone ever attempted to actually model space as a graph of relationships between points, in a computer program? Something like the distance-configuration-space in the last post? It occurs to me that this could actually be a more robust representation for some purposes than just storing the xyz coordinates.
Eliezer: I actually have been getting the insights you speak of repeatedly throughout this series, and it’s one of the reasons why I find it helpful to post comments—because it forces me to think through the ideas well enough to get their occasional mind-bendingness. It’s also why I have continued reading despite all the what-is-Science business.
But I still think that the subjective time-like-ness of time, as well as the concept of causality, are all caused (ha-ha) by the universe starting out in a low-entropy state. So if you had a toy block universe in your hands, you would still see a direction in the block corresponding to time. There is no way to assign a meaningful distance in that direction for the whole universe because of the locality of physics, but the direction is global, isn’t it?