Laws of nature, and creatures like us.

[vectorcube]

The following is something i read, and attempt to reproduce. I made no claim for originality. For anyone that wants the title of the book, and page number. I will find it, and post it. ( I remember the author is an adjunt professor at rockefeller university)

The universe U is a computer. Under this analogy, the laws of nature is the software, and stuffs( matter, energy, space-time, particles) are the hardware.

Suppose a creature( ie: human) C in U( universe) found this ultimate law L( the laws of nature), such that L is the solfware of U.

Claim 1: The The intelligence of C constraint the possible form of the laws of nature.
The claim is that the intelligence of C to attain(found) L constraints the possible form of L. That is, L cannot be too complicated for C to find.

Claim 2: the creature needs to be sufficiently smart to obtain the laws of nature.
Suppose C is very smart, but to attain L. C needs to be sufficiently smart to found L. Therefore, there is a lower bound on how smart C needs to be to attain L.

 

[HallsofIvy]

I don't see that it says anything. It has nothing to do with a computer model or laws of nature: a creature cannot discover something it is not smart enough to discover! That's a tautology.

 

[vectorcube]

I don't see that it says anything. It has nothing to do with a computer model or laws of nature: a creature cannot discover something it is not smart enough to discover! That's a tautology.

It is saying something, and you obviously don` t know it( because you say so). Let me think of a nice explanation. Say we have some ultimate law L. One can ask why L hold in this world. That is to say, given we have L, it does tell us something about our cognitive ability. We are sufficiently smart. This is obvious, but we can also imagine being not smart enough. We might be able to find L by luck.


conversely, given our cognitive ability, and suppose we do find L, then it does tell us something about L, namely, it has to be simply enough for us to obtain. Does it have to be simple? Not really. The underlying law might be complicated, but we just happen to see something that is simple.


As you can see, it is not a tautology, since it denial does not commit any logical contradiction.