From Kurzweil:
A transcript of Jürgen Schmidhuber’s TEDx talk in Belgium: I will talk about the simplest explanation of the universe. The universe is following strange rules. Einstein’s relativity. Planck’s quantum physics. But the universe may be even stranger than you think. And even simpler than you think.
Is the universe being created by a computer program?
Many scientists are now taking seriously the possibility that the entire universe is being computed by a computer program, as first suggested in 1967 by the legendary Konrad Zuse, who also built the world’s first working general computer between 1935 and 1941. [1] Zuse’s 1969 book Calculating Space discusses how a particular computer, a cellular automaton, might compute all elementary particle interactions, and thus the entire universe. The idea is that every electron behaves the same, because all electrons re-use the same subprogram over and over again. First consider the virtual universe of a video game with a realistic 3D simulation. In your computer, the game is encoded as a program, a sequence of ones and zeroes. Looking at the program, you don’t see what it does. You have to run it to experience it. Reality has still higher resolution than video games. But soon you won’t see a difference any more, since every decade, simulations are becoming 100–1000 times better, because computing power per Swiss Franc is growing by a factor of 100–1000 per decade.A few decades imply a factor of a billion. Soon, we’ll be able to simulate very convincing heavens and hells. It will seem quite plausible that the real world itself also is just a simulation.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a computer, everything looks like a computation.
More here.
