Born to do Math 114 – Double Duty in a Minecraft World (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s touch base on the flexibility of information, the flexibility of an information processor view.
Rick Rosner: What we have been talking about since we have been talking about 4 years ago – ? – is the idea that the universe is made of information, you cannot really have a universe of information without it being an information processor with a lot of shared characteristics with the information processors that are our minds.
You can make a decent argument that the universe is a vast mind-like information processor. But, of course, we don’t experience it that way since we experience the information as spacetime and matter. That means the universe is doing double duty.
It is something looking like contained information in an information processor. That’s one hand. Another that it is spacetime and matter from which we have originated. It has galaxies, stars, and the apparent history of 15 billion years.
But we think it is a lot longer than that. Anyway, the universe is doing double duty. Which the naive assumption that we made is that every event that happens in the universe, e.g., an atom emitting a photon or another atom absorbing a photon, or hydrogen fusing into helium in the interior of a star.
All of that stuff – planets forming. All of that stuff has a specific meaning in the information world as if the events happening to matter are registering on a magic 8 ball. Every event that happens is the answer to a question in the information universe.
That seems like a huge task informationally. That everything that happens, all of the quintillions of micro-events in the universe correspond to information events – I would assume somewhat often macro-information-events in the information universe.
Lately, I have been thinking that, maybe, that doesn’t have to be so. This is my first stab at an analogy. So, it is not very good. In a Minecraft universe, everything has to fit together very specifically. If you’re going to make a sculpture of a horse in a Minecraft universe, you have to fit blocks together very specifically.
Unless, you get sloppy. But you’re not allowed to get sloppy. The rules of Minecraft, as Lego sculpture has become more complex, people have learned workarounds to achieve more effects with legos, sticking things together in ways that aren’t really according to the Lego rules of interlocking blocks – ways to cheat at legos.
I do not know if you can do that with Minecraft. I do not play Minecraft. Anyway, you get the point. Things have to stick together in very systematized ways.
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