{"id":454,"date":"2010-07-24T12:54:50","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T16:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=454"},"modified":"2010-07-24T12:54:50","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T16:54:50","slug":"my-diavlog-with-anthony-aguirre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"My diavlog with Anthony Aguirre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bloggingheads has\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/bloggingheads.tv\/diavlogs\/29649\">just posted an hour-long diavlog<\/a>\u00a0between the cosmologist Anthony Aguirre and your humble blogger. \u00a0Topics discussed include: the anthropic principle; how to do quantum mechanics if the universe is so large that there could be multiple copies of you; Nick Bostrom&#8217;s &#8220;God&#8217;s Coin Toss&#8221; thought experiment; the cosmological constant; the total amount of computation in the observable universe; whether it&#8217;s reasonable to restrict cosmology to our observable region and ignore everything beyond that; whether the universe &#8220;is&#8221; a computer; whether, when we ask the preceding question, we&#8217;re no better than those Renaissance folks who asked whether the universe &#8220;is&#8221; a clockwork mechanism; and other questions that neither Anthony, myself, nor anyone else is really qualified to address.<\/p>\n<p>There was one point that sort of implicit in the discussion, but I noticed afterward that I never said explicitly, so let me do it now. \u00a0The question of whether the universe &#8220;is&#8221; a computer, I see as almost too meaningless to deserve discussion. \u00a0The reason is that the notion of &#8220;computation&#8221; is <em>so<\/em> broad that pretty much\u00a0<em>any<\/em> system, following any sort of rules whatsoever (yes, even non-Turing-computable rules) could be regarded as <em>some<\/em> sort of computation. \u00a0So the right question to ask is not whether the universe <em>is<\/em> a computer, but rather what <em>kind<\/em> of computer it is. \u00a0How many bits can it store? \u00a0How many operations can it perform? \u00a0What&#8217;s the class of problems that it can solve in polynomial time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bloggingheads has\u00a0just posted an hour-long diavlog\u00a0between the cosmologist Anthony Aguirre and your humble blogger. \u00a0Topics discussed include: the anthropic principle; how to do quantum mechanics if the universe is so large that there could be multiple copies of you; Nick Bostrom&#8217;s &#8220;God&#8217;s Coin Toss&#8221; thought experiment; the cosmological constant; the total amount of computation in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[15,12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-csphysics-deathmatch","category-metaphysical-spouting","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}