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Life in a Given Universe

Recognizing life. What is life? The answer depends on the observer. For instance, certain substrings of Ek may be interpretable as the life of a living thing Lk in Uk. Different observers will have different views, though. What's life to one observer will be noise to another. In particular, if the observer is not like the Great Programmer but also inhabits Uk, then its own life may be representable by a similar substring. Assuming that recognition implies relating observations to previous knowledge, both Lk's and the observer's life will have to share mutual algorithmic information [#!Chaitin:87!#]: there will be a comparatively short algorithm computing Lk's from the observer's life, and vice versa.

Of course, creatures living in a given universe don't have to have any idea of the symbol strings by which they are represented.

Possible limitations of the Great Programmer. He does not need not be very smart. For instance, in some of His universes phenomena will appear that humans would call life. The Great Programmer won't have to be able to recognize them.

The Great Programmer reappears. Several of the Great Programmer's universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers. If our own universe allowed for enough storage, enough time, and fault-free computing, then you could be one of them.


next up previous
Next: Generalization and Learning Up: In C. Freksa, ed., Previous: Are we Run by
Juergen Schmidhuber
1999-03-15


Related links: In the beginning was the code! - Zuse's thesis - Algorithmic Theories of Everything - Generalized Algorithmic Information - Speed Prior - The New AI