The Mathamatical Universe

I'm not blogging much: posting and high doses of codeine are not compatible. I'm doing three days on and two days off - both to prevent tolerance developing and to avoid the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, that means I'm either too morphed out to blog or I'm so distracted by the pain and discomfort that I really can't be bothered.

Also, when I do have lucid time, I've been using it to work through Max Tegmark's paper The Mathamatical Universe(pdf).

Here's the abstract:

I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and Gödel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Gödel’s sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems.

Fascinating.