Related papers: Is the Universe roughly-tuned for computing?
In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…
The anthropic principle has been proposed as an explanation for the observed value of the cosmological constant. Here we revisit this proposal by allowing for variation between universes in the amplitude of the scale-invariant primordial…
The usage of the anthropic principle in modern cosmology is reviewed. It is argued that its recent use to explain the observedvalues of cosmological parameters as most probable values for an ensemble of universes, is not justified. However,…
The nature of quantum computation is discussed. It is argued that, in terms of the amount of information manipulated in a given time, quantum and classical computation are equally efficient. Quantum superposition does not permit quantum…
We conjecture and present evidence that any effective field theory coupled to gravity in flat space admits at most a finite number of fine tunings, depending on the amount of supersymmetry and spacetime dimension. In particular, this means…
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…
The central idea of this work is the concept of prespace, a hypothetical structure that is postulated to underlie the fabric of space or space-time. I consider how such a structure could relate to space and space-time, and the implications…
This paper reviews connections between physics and computation, and explores their implications. The main topics are computational "hardness" of physical systems, computational status of fundamental theories, quantum computation, and the…
We claim that human mathematics is only a limited part of the consequences of the chosen basic axioms. Properly human mathematics varies with time but appears to have universal features which we try to analyze. In particular the functioning…
The idea that the Universe is a program in a giant quantum computer is both fascinating and suffers from various problems. Nonetheless, it can provide a unified picture of physics and this can be very useful for the problem of Quantum…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
Due to common misconceptions about the Church-Turing thesis, it has been widely assumed that the Turing machine provides an upper bound on what is computable. This is not so. The new field of hypercomputation studies models of computation…
Recent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on universal representations of reality. Here, we…
According to the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), effective formal behaviours can be simulated by Turing machines; this has naturally led to speculation that physical systems can also be simulated computationally. But is this wider claim true,…
The accelerating universe is closely related to today's version of the cosmological constant problem; fine-tuning and coincidence problems. We show how successfully the scalar-tensor theory, a rather rigid theoretical idea, provides us with…
This paper examines whether unitary evolution alone is sufficient to explain emergence of the classical world from the perspective of computability theory. Specifically, it looks at the problem of how the choice related to the measurement…
Recent work by Faizal et al. (2025) claims that G\"odelian undecidability of non-algorithmic truths in our universe imply the impossibility of a formal, algorithmic simulation of the universe. This paper clarifies the distinction between…
We investigate a number of simple toy models to explore interesting relationships between dynamics and typicality. We start with an infinite model that has been proposed as an illustration of how non-ergodic dynamics can produce interesting…
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
The argument from naturalness is widely employed in contemporary quantum field theory. Essentially a formalized aesthetic criterion, it received a meaning in the debate on the Higgs mechanism, which goes beyond aesthetics. We follow the…