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When we ask a child what $2 \times 3$ is, we expect him/her to spend time thinking and only give us an answer after some energy has been spent solving the question.

When we swipe in an app on our phone, we expect the operation to be computed by the phone, spending energy on this computing operation.

When we drop a ping pong ball on the edge of a table, we expect it to just "solve" it's path on it's own, and "just" figure out where it will go. It's actually a complex computation going on to determine the path that ping pong ball will take.

So my question is: Is there a computing force in the universe? Is there a theory that accounts for these "universal computations"? Is this a study field?

Thank you for your input and sorry for my lack of knowledge. I'm really curious about this!

Rumplestillskin
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laurent lahmy
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1 Answers1

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I think that your question arises from a lack of clarity of the concept of computation that you're using.

In your examples, some computations are performed by different devices, and in the case of the ping-pong ball that device is the "universe". I'm not sure if we can call what the universe does a computation in the sense of the other examples. If you think about it, the computations made by the child or the phone, are sustained in physical processes inside the brain or the chips (which are both, by the way, electrical in nature). So that computations are based on "universal computations" as you say, alike to the ping pong ball's, but note that in the ping pong ball's case there's no "basing", it's directly computed by the "universal computation".

So I think that you're mixing two things: how the physical world works (that universal computations) and some higher level processes that we call computations (child, phone, etc.). Obviously they work on different levels, so you can't mix them without getting to troublesome questions like the one you arise.

(If you do indeed mix them, you'll have to accept the possibility of asking the question of what computes the "computing force" that you theorize, and ad infinitum.)

user3301482
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