Important: Website Heath Warning

I subscribe to the view that the only authoritative scientific views are those produced by professional scientists who are associated to recognised research establishments and whose work is subject to a rigorous peer review process. Therefore I have to make it clear that
  • I am not a professional scientist.
  • I am not associated with any academic or research organisation.
However in my defence; this is not an ‘evangelical’ website. I do not believe that the universe is computational, but only that the proposition is one that deserves greater inspection by the scientific community.  Also:
  • I have a degree in physics from the University of London.
  • I have post graduate qualifications in computer technology.
  • I have spent twenty years at the highly technical end of the computing industry.
  • I endeavour at all times to ensure to the best of my abilities that my views and my own research are based upon authorised scientific knowledge.
If this part of the RealityMatters website has intrigued you then I strongly suggest that you view the work of respected scientists who support, and those that strongly disagree with the proposition.  Some key players are listed below:
  • Konrad Zuse
  • Professor Ed fredkin
  • Stephen wolfram
  • Professor Tommaso Toffoli
  • Norman Margolus
  • Nick Bostrom (philosophical argument)

2 comments

  1. What, exactly, do you perceive as ‘objective reality’?

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    1. Hi
      For my full view on what constitutes objective reality in a physical sense please see my new page, ‘what is physical reality’.

      The quick view is as follows.
      In general objective reality is a view of reality that minimises what Descartes called, ‘hyperbolic doubt’ and to this I would add that such a view has also to remove any bias caused by human emotions and our quirks of thinking. In general we see what we want to see and although science strives to reduce doubt and bias it still exist.
      In a physical sense ‘objective reality’ is what Descartes considered to be ‘external reality’, which is the reality that exists when we do not. ‘Internal reality’ is the reality that we each perceive and to a significant degree it is a view that is unique to each individual.
      I like simple ways of seeing things so I imagine a black box that has lots of inputs into which we can feed numbers and it has lots of outputs on which numbers appear, the values of which depend upon what we put on the inputs. Physics allows us to use mathematics to predict what the output will be given some inputs and this is a shared internal reality. The objective reality is unknown to us because we cannot see inside the black box to see what is generating the numbers. Physics likes to interpret the mathematics to make an educated guess as to what is in the box but the interpretation always has doubt. There are some statements we can make about external reality that have less doubt, for example the fact that we can apply mathematical models to make predictions in a varied set of circumstances suggests that external reality has some uniformity and coherence but it is quite difficult to pick out the statements that have little associated doubt.

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