English

Can we debug the Universe?

Other Computer Science 2009-10-26 v2

Abstract

Roughly, the Church-Turing thesis is a hypothesis that describes exactly what can be computed by any real or feasible conceptual computing device. Generally speaking, the computational metaphor is the idea that everything, including the universe itself, has a computational nature. However, if the Church-Turing thesis is not valid, then does it make sense to expect the construction of a computer program capable of simulating the whole Universe? In the lights of hypercomputation, the scientific discipline that is about computing beyond the Church-Turing barrier, the most natural answer to this question is: No. This note is a justification of this answer and its deeper meaning based on arguments from physics, the philosophy of the mind, and, of course, (hyper)computability theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0910.2859,
  title  = {Can we debug the Universe?},
  author = {Apostolos Syropoulos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.2859},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

An early version of this paper was read in the "Future Trends in Hypercomputation" Workshop held in Sheffield U.K., 11-13 September 2006

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:58:42.519Z