Hi Ibliss,
Sorry for the delay in continuing this thread. Before continuing the discussion, and taking into account the direction this thread is going, please tell me that you have no hidden "intelligent design" agenda, because I wouldn't like to waste my time under such circumstances. I highly doubt this is the case, but one can never know. I would appreciate a honest answer to this issue.
Ibliss: "It may be that the fundamental laws are a consequence of deeper principles in which the concept of information plays a more important role. In the modles proposed by schmidhuber this is quite obvious, although it is not clear to me that his models are consistent with the known laws of physics."
Somehow, as much as this idea sounds appealing, I don't think this is the case. Information is lost and created at every moment in time. Unless you have a set of "fundamental bits" that are eternal and indestructible, or unless you account somehow "informationally" for the principle of general invariance, I don't see how this is possible, beyond some simple and unrealistic cosmological models(like Schmidhuber's models).
Ibliss: "I'll try to find the articles by Seth Lloyd."
Would be interesting.
Ibliss: "Well, in a Newtonial world you could build a machine that cannot be simulated on a Turing machine. So, if you only consider computable universes in your ensemble, then such a classical world is excluded."
And? If a newtonian world (which is not exactly a realistic one for our purposes) cannot be computationally representable, why would I even bother to try a computational representation of a quantum universe? As I said before, I do not entirely agree with the combinatorial view of the quantum world conjectured by Penrose. While for simple geometries and topologies it is true that a quantum theory can be purely combinatoric, I personally doubt that such combinatorial properties are preserved in a realistic quantum cosmological model. Think about it.
Ibliss: "Yes, the idea being that reality is the model itself. So, you eliminate the question: ''what is physical reality?''. You just postulate that it is precisely the (unknown) mathematical model in which we live."
Oh, come on Ibliss. In this form, this is a very cheap version of Kantian philosophy, and much worse, it is principially at odds with the scientific approach. The Newtonian model was solved long before the beginning of the last century, and yet people have continued to try and look beyond the (known) Newtonian model, towards new phenomenology, newer "models" and so on and so forth, you know the drill. You cannot eliminate the question of what is physical reality, because then you loose the consistency of description. In other words, everyone becomes a mental case with his own perception, no matter what the perception of others is.
Ibliss: "The fact that science works at all is evidence such a scenario."
I am not so sure that the fact that "science works at all" is evidence of anything of the sort you mention. It should "damn well work", so to speak, because it ia based on the observation of the physical reality. And while mathematical models are necessary for "manipulating" different aspects, you do not always need math/models to describe the different levels of "reality".
