No, the universe is not a brain.

At Forbes, Ethan Siegel asks if the universe may be alive. This might bring us to the question what it means to be alive. When biologists started their field, they could only define it by extension (e.g. animals, plants and other similarly animated things), but did not yet have a functional definition of what made the living stuff so special, and came up with vague and wrong ideas (like a motive force, a vis vitalis, permeating living tissue). Now, a few hundred years later, biologists have agreed that they study the class of systems that are organized into one or more cells and self-organize and stabilize based on information stored in DNA. By that definition, the universe is quite certainly not alive.

However, Ethan Siegel (and a few others, like Bernardo Kastrup) suspect that the universe might be conscious, i.e. that the structure given by its stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters might lend itself to a giant information processing architecture.

Arguably, the field of cognitive science is still comparable to early biology when it comes to defining its object of study: researchers somewhat agree that higher mammals, birds and octopi have minds, cognition, a degree of intelligence and awareness, but we do not have a universally accepted functional definition of these properties. Fortunately, cognitive scientists have discarded the vis vitalis equivalent of the mind: the soul, and most of them will agree that minds are motivated information processing systems that make sense of their environment. In a biological organism, this information processing is facilitated by the exchange of signals between different types of neurons and possibly involving glia cells, by means of electrical impulses and chemicals that either act on large portions of the nervous system, or locally at the interface between individual neurons.

It is not clear what environment our universe should make sense of, but contemporary physics tells us something about the limits of its information processing.

Both Siegel and Kastrup (and Clifford Pickover, and oh well, you know who you are) like to illustrate their arguments with the following image:

This image sends a clear message: if we squint a little, then a well-chosen cutout of a false colored image of a golgi stained pyramidal neuron will look like a red down feather, and a well-chosen cutout of a differently false colored galaxy cluster also looks like a purple down feather, and therefore it is extremely likely that the universe is a giant brain.

Why I don't think that Quantum Computers will work, ever

I have just made a bet that quantum computers will not turn out to be better than classical computers within the next fifteen years. I would rather want to bet on "ever", but how could I win such a bet? We could also do a lifetime thing: if you die before the first superclassically fast quantum computer is built, I inherit all your stuff, but that might set the wrong incentives for me. So, 15 years it is. Now let me go out on a limb and explain my intuition that quantum computation will turn out to not really be a thing, ever.

Cat: Do you expect me to compute?

Evil quantum computer scientist: No, Mr Cat, I expect you to die, and to not die, in simultaneous superposition.

Four Gods

When I follow discussions between atheists and enlightened catholics, I notice that they often talk past each other, due to entirely different ideas about what is meant by 'God'. After I found God for myself (not a religious one, but an Aristotelian one), I discovered that there are at least four different aspects of the God concept, which involve quite different assumptions. (This is not exhaustive in any way, of course.)

These are the Four Gods:

1. The God of a religious, institutional narrative. This is a (often personalized) entity with distinct properties and duties that are documented in canonical teachings. Typically, this entity holds strong opinions about the morality of individuals, metes out rewards and punishments, and his prescriptions tend to be aligned with certain political and societal goals. 

2. The God of the spiritual experience. This god is the principle of a universe that is intentional, is conscious, and usually partial towards the individual, but reveals itself independently of allegiance to any religious institution. You will often find that this principle is benevolent and loving, and its interests are well-aligned with your values (see Deepak Chopra), but that is not necessarily the case (Philipp K. Dick's god of 'Valis' comes to mind).

3. The principle of transcendental meaning: God is the question that the universe answers. In the weakest sense, this god is the reason why there is something rather than nothing (an ontological duty that hardly conflicts with any expected future results of scientific inquiry). However, it implies a telos, i.e. the universe inherits a purpose. I think this is the god of Thomas of Aquinas, as apparent in his Fourth and Fifth Proofs for the existence of God.

4. The Prime Mover: rather than assuming that physics is entirely self-contained or that the universe is essentially static (and only appears to be moving due to the way we observe it), there must be something that moves things along. This first mover (primum movens) is arguably the god of Aristotle. 

Rethinking Quantum Mechanics and Inverted Spacetime from a Computationalist Perspective

Warning: Speculative physics bullshit by a non-physicist

Tl;dr: If Maldacena and van Raamsdonk are correct, then spacetime might not be real, but weakly emergent. The computer that runs the universe does not index particles within a spacetime matrix, but only maintains a tensor network with quantized properties. The apparence of spacetime is the result of entanglement.

Nature just published a short commentary on a possible quantum theoretical foundation of space time. In short, it suggests that spacetime is not the reason why particles get entangled with each other (i.e. they got close enough to influence each other), but that it is the other way around: spacetime is the emergent result of the entanglement of particles. The case is not strong yet, but it would have huge implications for a grand unified theory, and possibly also for the relationship between the quantum world and computation.

From Computation to Consciousness

During the 31st Chaos Communication Congress, I had the opportunity to talk about how a computational universe can give rise to consciousness.



(alternate Link)

A tale of two machines

How is it possible that we can be conscious of a universe that at the same time computes us? How can we observe the progression of a universe that we are part of? Assuming that our mind is fully embedded into our universe: If the universe would suddenly stop its computations, we could not notice. At every moment, we only exist in a single state. Single states cannot give rise to experience, as any mental process requires a sequence of states (for instance, to retrieve a memory and become aware of its contents).
"Cogito ergo sum" does not work for me: access to and interpretation of the idea that I seem to exist and cogitate in this moment requires a long computational process, which means that I have to introduce additional assumptions beyond the single state the universe offers in the present.
How can we resolve this?

Computationalist Essentialism

True Computation is only possible in a silicon substrate. Brains cannot compute. It might look as if a brain could compute, but brains can only simulate computation. Obviously, nature is not able to imitate the computation feats of a silicon processor, but just as a thought experiment, some philosophers have suggested that a brain could take in the same inputs as a silicon chip, and return the same results. But that would not be True Computation. Just as a simulated thunderstorm cannot make you wet, and simulated money cannot make you rich, simulated computation lacks an essential element that can only be supplied by the intrinsic powers of silicon transistors.

A puzzle game that makes us build a complete computer

If you should happen to be interested in how to turn an abstracted version of basic electronic circuitry into a puzzle game, read on.

My favorite casual computer games are puzzles that allow me to pore over the solutions for hours. I want lots of little things to go whirr! and click! and then do my bidding. If you have not played Trainyard yet, I strongly recommend checking it out! (You can start with the free edition, Trainyard Express, which thankfully does not have any advertising or in app purchases, by the way.) Trainyard lets you draw tracks with your finger, and little locomotives are traversing them in funky patterns, changing their colors on the way, before either crashing or finding their destinations.

Trainyard is in principle Turing complete (i.e. you could build a computer in it), but Trainyard's playing area is limited to 7x7 fields, and you cannot place any of the interesting stuff yourself (like replicators and color changers), so practically, that's not possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is Minecraft, the famous open-ended, almost infinitely large brick-laying playground. Among other things, Minecraft is a three-dimensional cellular automaton, with a playing field that is 30 million cells wide and deep, and 255 cells high. Cells may interact with each other up to a distance of 15, with most of the interaction limited to the directly adjacent cells. Using specific materials that act as conductors, isolators, switches and repeaters, players can wire up their virtual fortresses with button-operated trap-doors and lighting. And some relentless players have figured out how to build computers in the game.

The world is not a physics engine, or The Death of (Physicalist) Realism

Chris Lee just wrote a nice introduction regarding the disenchantment of physicists with realist notions. Rather than re-explaining the experiments (see Bell's theorem, for starters), let me just point out what I consider to be the most important consequence for our cosmology, namely: the world is not a physics engine.

(Physics engine: computing the interaction of things located in time and space)

Obviously, it is impossible to know the nature of the world we inhabit while being entirely caught up inside it: the basic trouble with epistemology is that the world only shows us phenomena (Husserl), or, more basically but inaccurately: discernible differences, i.e. information, and not its structure itself. Thus, we cannot know if anything beyond the phenomena or the information exists. And if it does, what do we mean by "existence"?

Why the Western World View Abhors Artificial Intelligence

The dear, famous, Yoda like and sadly late Joseph Weizenbaum (the very guy we have to thank for the mother of all chat bots: Eliza) spent quite a bit of his time complaining about humanities overreaching optimism when it comes to the realization of Artificial Intelligence (see his: "Computer Power and Human Reason", for instance).

The charming, but totally misguided Weizenbaum documentary "Plug and Pray" cherishes that same popular thesis. It is hard to see how somebody could see any justification for it, though. Contemporary AI research is a very humble affair, occupied with obscure exercises in applied mathematics, boring standardization of protocol languages or tinkering with soccer playing or car driving robots. Any vision for generally intelligent artificial minds plays an extremely marginal role at best. At the same time, AI research has always been extremely productive: most of the stuff in computer science, from speech recognition to computer vision, from planning to data base systems, from data compression to data mining, has been concocted in some AI lab or other.

So what's the reason for the popular hostility towards Artificial Intelligence? Hmm, hmm: these guys are saying that the mind is a computer!
Why is that such a blasphemy?