@DavidDeutschOxf I couldn’t resist and started exploring both of your books.

@DavidDeutschOxf I couldn’t resist and started exploring both of your books. Since I want to understand as quickly as possible, perplexity annotates key theses for me. It turns out to be efficient. I read a key thesis, find the most important one, ask for an elaboration, and repeat the iteration. It's something like fractal search. This way, I manage to weed out secondary, insignificant concepts and find the most important ones. Currently, the most promising chain appears to be:

universal computation ->

universal Turing machine ->

the Universe can be considered a computer ->

the human mind as a universal calculator ->

information is considered a fundamental entity ->

information may be more fundamental than matter ("It from bit") ->

the concept of the Universe as a computer leads to philosophical questions about the nature of reality. Nick Bostrom suggested that our reality might be a computer simulation (though this concept is over 5000 years old) ->

this concept is related to the anthropic principle, which considers the conditions necessary for the existence of observers in the Universe. If the Universe is a computer, then we can consider ourselves part of its "program" or "computation" ->

if the Universe is a computer, it could have profound implications for the development of artificial intelligence. Perhaps creating strong AI will mean creating a "mini-universe" within our Universe.

Here, you hit a dead end.

The reason is (IMHO) that you identify four fundamental threads that together explain the nature of reality:

- quantum physics,

- epistemology,

- computation theory, and

- evolution.

This is typical reductionism for any STEM representative.

You completely missed two significantly more fundamental meta-concepts (or threads, as you call them), namely:

- Dramaturgy

- Game design

Obviously, since you are already of advanced age, modern games have passed you by, as well as Bostrom and other aged intellectuals.

Therefore, you remain within the framework of rather old approaches (this effect is explained in Thomas Kuhn's famous book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Of course, the key dead end is that physics allows for subjectivity, i.e., the "observer," but categorically rejects intentionality, as this inevitably leads to creationism, starts smelling of sulfur, and makes you want to cross yourself, while Dawkins starts hiccuping.

This, in fact, is the imposed timidity of modern science, as it is necessary to stay in the mainstream to continue receiving a salary, tenure, grants, and increasing the Hirsch index, i.e., doing everything incompatible with the scientific ethics you refer to in the face of Popper’s epistemology.

You emphasize the importance of Popper's ideas about the growth of scientific knowledge through conjecture and refutation but do not delve into the source of these very "conjectures."

Fortunately, many great minds (including Einstein) wrote about thinking about what no one else is thinking. Of course, this is a compromise.

Because often we don’t think about something simply because it doesn’t come to mind, but sometimes also because we feel a threat to our worldview and well-being by thinking about what societal consensus considers marginal.