Rex Kerr
1 min readJun 26, 2024

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It doesn't imply such a thing. It merely admits such a thing. Because observed microphysics can support arbitrarily good Turing machines, it is principle as good of a computational system as any other.

Even leaving aside whether there is an ontological assumption (which I dispute, and which we're covering on the other thread), because computation is universal, our universe with microphysics as-is is good enough. You don't need anything nested or recursive.

The ruliad, for instance, is very cool mathematically, but that doesn't mean it's a good explanation of physics. If it could work, it would be very convenient because it would answer the "why this way" question as: "this is literally every way it could be all at once". But while this might motivate us to investigate, the universe is under no obligation to answer our why's, so we can't transcendental argument our way out of the need to show that it works.

Anyway, I certainly admit that it could be computation all the way down (not merely arbitrarily well-approximated in computational models). That would be fine. I don't think it addresses the consciousness issue either, though, because you just move from an ontological difference that seems insurmountable to a binding problem that seems insurmountable.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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