Matryoshka World


Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Ray Kurzweil: Reinventing Humanity


The Author of The Singularity is Near provides an article published in the March-April 2006 edition of Futurist Magazine that summarizes the predictions from his book regarding the near term future of human and technological evolution.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives


"Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives is a BAFTA winning television documentary broadcast in 2007 on BBC Scotland and BBC Four television documentary in which American rock musician Mark Oliver Everett talks to physicists and the former colleagues of his father—Hugh Everett— about his father's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics."

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Update: Computers fail Turing Test


Still a long way to go on the AI front...

Computers at a loss for words.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Intelligent Computers Put to the Test


We are probably at least a few decades away from a computer that can truly pass the Turing test, but some are already trying....

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Will the dead twitter by the end of the century?

Cliff Pickover discusses mind uploading and simulated afterlife as he makes a sales pitch for his book on these topics: The Heaven Virus.

The future of gaming is all in the mind


The near future of virtual reality.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Extracts from the final chapter of Fabric of Reality

This excerpt includes commentary and review from Frank Tipler, in response to Deutsch's discussion of Tipler's Omega Point Theory (See "Cosmological Limits on Computation", International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 25, 617-661 [1986])

Fabric of Reality

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Gardner- Biocosm, New Scientific Theory of Evolution

James Gardner's book Biocosm advanced the idea of evolution and reproduction on a universal scale. I have not read Biocosm, however Gardner's subsequent book The Intelligent Universe followed up and expounded on the theory.

Common criticisms of this theory (and many other ideas set forth here) include the difficulty in performing experiments or providing other proof to confirm the theory, thus arguably placing it outside the realm of science.

However, Gardner asserts there are some predictive and testable aspects to the theory.
As Gardner explains in this article, any explanation of our reality will ultimately have to account for the incredible fine tuning necessary for life, or any complexity for that matter, to exist at all.

The essence of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the universe we inhabit is in the process of becoming pervaded with increasingly intelligent life—but not necessarily human or even human-successor life. Under the theory, the emergence of life and increasingly competent intelligence are not meaningless accidents in a hostile, largely lifeless cosmos but at the very heart of the vast machinery of creation, cosmological evolution, and cosmic replication. However, the theory does not require or even suggest that the life and intelligence that emerge be human or human-successor in nature.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

David Deutsch - Quantum Constructor Theory

Deutsch explains how a quantum theory of computation is fundamental to our understanding of reality, however it does not capture the whole of physics. Therefore a full understanding and future theories of everything will have to fall under the larger umbrella of a constructor theory which should provide a true theory of everything.

Quantum Constructor theory

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations

Bruno Marchal, IRIDIA, Université de Bruxelles,
"I will first present a non constructive argument showing that the mechanist hypothesis in cognitive science gives enough constraints to decide what a "physical reality" can possibly consist in. Then I will explain how computer science, together with logic, makes it possible to extract a constructive version of the argument by interviewing a Modest or Löbian Universal Machine. Reversing von Neumann probabilistic interpretation of quantum logic on those provided by the Löbian Machine gives a testable explanation of how both communicable physical laws and incommunicable physical knowledge, i.e. sensations, arise from number theoretical relations."


Paper explores Marchal's ideas on how our physical laws and understanding of our perception of reality can be derived from his "comp" theory, often discussed with his participation on the Everything List.

The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Universal Dovetailer Concept



The idea of the Universal Dovetailer (UD), is basically the idea that there is a simple program that could list and execute every possible program that could run on a universal computer, which is a computer capable of running everything that is computable. In theory, a universal computer running a UD program given sufficient time and resources would create every experience and reality that is computable.

Universal Dovetailer

Computable Universes Links

From universes.org site.

computable universes page

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Jürgen Schmidhuber's Computable Universes & Algorithmic Theory of Everything


His publications on computable universes are linked down the left hand side of his page.

Jürgen Schmidhuber's Computable Universes

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics

"This variation on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics allows us to derive the Born probability rule via finite world counting and no new physics."

When Worlds Collide

Friday, June 20, 2008

Monday, June 16, 2008

Monday, May 26, 2008

Friday, May 23, 2008

Many lives in many worlds


Article by Max Tegmark in July, 2007 Nature on Many Worlds theory (as posted on 12 Degrees of Freedom).

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

General relativity as proof of virtual reality?


Paper by Brian Whitworth who has a theory that certain aspects of relativity theory could point to our living in a virtual environment.

I found this paper interesting in that I had recently thought about the relative nature and (for instance) slowing of time for objects moving at a high rate of speed and whether these aspects of reality could be related to finite processing capability at specific points in space.

Universe as a virtual reality

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Plausibility of the Existence of all Possible States


http://www.physica.freeserve.co.uk/pa01.htm
The argument for the existence of all possible worlds has in the past been deemed problematical due to the failure of induction it implies. In this paper I argue that by focussing on an approach that distinguishes a hidden reality from the world of appearance, and on a corresponding generalisation from 'all possible worlds' to 'all possible states', this problem is readily surmountable. Moreover the positive success of inductive reasoning and the lack of observed paranormal events emerge as a natural consequence.

--ALASTAIR MALCOLM