Computable Universes & Algorithmic Theory of Everything: The Computational Multiverse

Digital Physics: Is our universe just the output of a deterministic computer program?

As a consequence of Moore's law, each decade computers are getting roughly 1000 times faster by cost. Apply Moore's law to the video game business. As the virtual worlds get more convincing many people will spend more time in them. Soon most universes will be virtual, only one (the original) will be real. Then many will be led to suspect the real one is a simulation as well. Some are already suspecting this today.

Then the simplest explanation of our universe is the simplest program that computes it. In 1997 Schmidhuber pointed out [1] that the simplest such program actually computes all possible universes with all types of physical constants and laws, not just ours. His essay also talks about universes simulated within parent universes in nested fashion, and about universal complexity-based measures on possible universes.

Here a few video clips on this from the World Science Festival 2011 in NYC: 1. Short video clip of JS & Ed Fredkin talking about Konrad Zuse, pioneer of digital physics. 2. Short clip of JS talking about the information content of the universe. 3. Short clip of JS talking about all computable universes. From Rebooting the Cosmos - Panel Discussion Video: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?

Prior measure problem: if every possible future exists, how can we predict anything?

Unfortunately, knowledge about the program that computes all computable universes is not yet sufficient to make good predictions about the future of our own particular universe. Some of our possible futures obviously are more likely than others. For example, tomorrow the sun will probably shine in the Sahara desert. To predict according to Bayes rule, what we need is a prior probability distribution or measure on the possible futures. Which one is the right one? It is not the uniform one: If all futures were equally likely then our world might as well dissolve right now. But it does not.

Some think the famous anthropic principle (AP) might help us here. But it does neither, as will be seen below. 

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