Seth Lloyd views the universe as a quantum computer and claims that everything is the result of a calculation. However, his theories are controversial because the rules of the universe are randomly generated and his theories are unscientific.
We all know someone who’s been waiting
There is nothing in the world more heartbreaking than waiting.
To be where you’re supposed to be, where I’ve already been.
When the door opens and everyone who walks in
Was you.
It was you, it was supposed to be you
The door closes again
My beloved
Waiting for you who don’t come, finally I go to you
“Huang Jiu, while waiting for you”
The feeling of anticipation when waiting for a loved one. The anxiety and impatience of waiting for someone who doesn’t come. The excitement or pain of first love. There are countless emotions that can be evoked by individuals while reading a single work. This is because readers have different life backgrounds and experiences. When reading the above works, people will recall their own experiences with love and feel a variety of emotions based on those experiences. The feelings about love that are embedded in their own experiences may lead them to empathize with the works, or they may not. Because individual experiences vary, a piece of literature can take on a new form in the minds of readers, wearing the clothes of their experiences. But what if the emotions and thoughts that come from these various experiences are the result of someone’s calculations?
In the book Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd argues that the universe is a quantum computer. He argues that the molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles that make up the universe all contain information, and that a computer called the universe computes this information to create the world. According to his argument, nothing in the world is accidental. For example, physics was programmed with quanta, which gave rise to chemistry, which gave rise to life. Life was programmed with mutations and recombination to produce Shakespeare, who was programmed with experience and imagination to write Hamlet. In other words, Hamlet is the result of a cosmic calculation, and experience and imagination are also the result of programming. In this way, everything that exists in the universe, even individual thoughts, is not an accident, but the result of the universe’s calculations.
Two questions can be raised about Seth Lloyd’s claim. The first is the origin of the rules for the universe as a quantum computer. The universe, despite its seeming complexity, behaves according to certain rules. For example, the planets in our solar system move in a way that satisfies Kepler’s laws, and light travels according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But how did these rules come about? Seth Lloyd answers “randomly.” According to his argument, the basic rules of the universe are themselves randomly generated. This contradicts his argument. If you say that everything is not accidental because it is the result of deliberate programming, but the ground rules of that programming are randomly generated, then the outcome is also random. In addition, I think we have not fully explained the working mechanism of the cosmic computer in that we explain the various components of the universe by programming, but we do not explain the rules underlying the programming, leaving it to chance.
The second question is about the claim that everything is the result of computation. Seth Lloyd argues that everything we see and everything we don’t see is the result of a calculation by a quantum computer. This means that even our individual thoughts and emotions are the result of the universe’s programming. However, philosopher Karl Popper once said that a theory that cannot be refuted by any possible event is unscientific. Seth Lloyd’s argument is no different. He claims that everything is the result of a calculation, but he is arguing only with the result, leaving out the process and principles of the calculation. From this perspective, his argument is somewhat unscientific. This is unfortunate given his ambition to bring a completely new scientific perspective to cosmology.
Seth Lloyd’s idea that the universe itself is a quantum computer, and that all the principles and components that make up the universe are the result of calculations made by that computer, is a hypothesis born out of a thirst to unravel the mysteries surrounding the universe. Humans are not very old when it comes to exploring the universe in earnest. We don’t know much about our nearest neighbors, Venus and Mars, and we’ve only just begun to study Pluto, once the last planet in our solar system. In other words, the universe is still a mystery to us, and that mystery makes us look at it with a lot of open-mindedness. Seth Lloyd’s hypothesis is one possible interpretation of this unknown universe. Although it suffers from the problem that it does not properly explain the essential working mechanism by leaving it to chance, and his claims are not refutable, it is worth applauding the attempt to reinterpret the flow of the universe in terms of information.
