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When we ask a child what $2 \times 3$ is, we expect him/her to spend time thinking and only give us an answer after some energy has been spent solving the question.

When we swipe in an app on our phone, we expect the operation to be computed by the phone, spending energy on this computing operation.

When we drop a ping pong ball on the edge of a table, we expect it to just "solve" it's path on it's own, and "just" figure out where it will go. It's actually a complex computation going on to determine the path that ping pong ball will take.

So my question is: Is there a computing force in the universe? Is there a theory that accounts for these "universal computations"? Is this a study field?

Thank you for your input and sorry for my lack of knowledge. I'm really curious about this!

Rumplestillskin
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lami
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  • How exactly would you define a "computing force"? The reason why our computation methods work is because they use physics to create a system where we can perform operations that represent something else. There's no clear line to draw. – JMac Jun 28 '17 at 09:41
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    Possible duplicate of Is our universe an emulation? – sammy gerbil Jun 28 '17 at 10:13
  • Not quite the same, but Maxwell's demon might interest you. This paradox shows that 'knowledge' of a system can be used to decrease entropy and thus make energy. The solution to the paradox is that erasing information costs energy so no laws are violated. – AccidentalTaylorExpansion Jun 28 '17 at 10:20
  • JMac : I make the hypothesis that physical laws do not "just work", they are consuming something in exchange for that. – lami Jun 28 '17 at 23:18
  • sammy gerbil : I do not assume the world is simulated, I am asking about what is making physical laws work in the universe. – lami Jun 28 '17 at 23:20

1 Answers1

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I think that your question arises from a lack of clarity of the concept of computation that you're using.

In your examples, some computations are performed by different devices, and in the case of the ping-pong ball that device is the "universe". I'm not sure if we can call what the universe does a computation in the sense of the other examples. If you think about it, the computations made by the child or the phone, are sustained in physical processes inside the brain or the chips (which are both, by the way, electrical in nature). So that computations are based on "universal computations" as you say, alike to the ping pong ball's, but note that in the ping pong ball's case there's no "basing", it's directly computed by the "universal computation".

So I think that you're mixing two things: how the physical world works (that universal computations) and some higher level processes that we call computations (child, phone, etc.). Obviously they work on different levels, so you can't mix them without getting to troublesome questions like the one you arise.

(If you do indeed mix them, you'll have to accept the possibility of asking the question of what computes the "computing force" that you theorize, and ad infinitum.)

user3301482
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  • +1 not least for your use of the word "troublesome" to describe the problem. :) –  Jun 28 '17 at 10:09
  • So then my question is basically about "how the physical world works". It seems taken for granted that "it just works". But how? It's not so obvious that physical laws just work "for free", without consuming anything in return. I guess it would actually break entropy laws. Maybe time is what is being consumed? – lami Jun 28 '17 at 23:16