Related papers: The World is Either Algorithmic or Mostly Random

The quantum world is fascinating. It presents a description of nature that defies our most rooted concepts about what reality is. For example, quantum objects possess \lq\lq spooky\rq\rq\ properties that allow them to be in multiple places…

The recognition of the agency of the knower has enormously enriched our understanding of knowledge production. There is a growing realization that what we know about how we know affects our interpretation of reality. This realization…

This paper questions the generally accepted assumption that one can make a random choice that is independent of the rest of the universe. We give a general description of any setup that could be conceived to generate random numbers. Based…

As observers of the universe we are physical systems within it. If the universe is very large in space and/or time, the probability becomes significant that the data on which we base predictions is replicated at other locations in…

Some principles underpinning the running of the Universe are discussed. The most important, the machine principle, states that the Universe is a fully autonomous, self-organizing and self-testing quantum automaton. Continuous space and…

In the last couple of decades, the world has seen several stunning instances of quantum algorithms that provably outperform the best classical algorithms. For most problems, however, it is currently unknown whether quantum algorithms can…

With the relentless rise of computer power, there is a widespread expectation that computers can solve the most pressing problems of science, and even more besides. We explore the limits of computational modelling and conclude that, in the…

In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…

Quantum theory is extremely successful in explaining most physical phenomena, and is not contradicted by any experiment. Yet, the theory has many puzzling features : the occurrence of probabilities, the unclear distinction between the…

I propose a new class of interpretations, {\it real world interpretations}, of the quantum theory of closed systems. These interpretations postulate a preferred factorization of Hilbert space and preferred projective measurements on one…

The development of quantum algorithms based on quantum versions of random walks is placed in the context of the emerging field of quantum computing. Constructing a suitable quantum version of a random walk is not trivial: pure quantum…

We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…

The world of mathematics is often considered abstract, with its symbols, concepts, and topics appearing unrelated to physical objects. However, it is important to recognize that the development of mathematics is fundamentally influenced by…

In the very large debates on ethics of algorithms, this paper proposes an analysis on human responsibility. On one hand, algorithms are designed by some humans, who bear a part of responsibility in the results and unexpected impacts.…

It is first pointed out that there is a common mathematical model for the universe and the quantum computer. The former is called the histories approach to quantum mechanics and the latter is called measurement based quantum computation.…

The probability distribution P from which the history of our universe is sampled represents a theory of everything or TOE. We assume P is formally describable. Since most (uncountably many) distributions are not, this imposes a strong…

Algorithmic idealism represents a transformative approach to understanding reality, emphasizing the informational structure of self-states and their algorithmic transitions over traditional notions of an external, objective universe. Rooted…

I argue for an approach to the Foundations of Physics that puts the question in the title center stage, rather than asking "what is the case in the world?". This approach, algorithmic idealism, attempts to give a mathematically rigorous…

The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem…

Do completely unpredictable events exist in nature? Classical theory, being fully deterministic, completely excludes fundamental randomness. On the contrary, quantum theory allows for randomness within its axiomatic structure. Yet, the fact…