Digital Philosophy and Religion

[Rayaan]

The universe behaves nothing like a computer because by far the most common thing in the universe is empty space.

1. Empty space is not actually empty (in case you didn't know that).

2. Pretty much anything consisting of various combination of arrangements made up of a finite set of components, and is capable of showing emergent properties, can be regarded as a "computer." So at a larger scale, all the atoms in the universe are analogous to the bits inside a laptop or a computer, and through the countless atomic collisions and rearrangements we can think of the universe as performing a massive computation. The laws of physics are analogous to a software, the initial matter and energy are the input, and the results of the computation are the output. In that sense, physical reality is indistinguishable from a computer, or a quantum computer, more precisely. As professor Seth Lloyd wrote in his book Programming the Universe:

"The universe is made of bits. Every molecule, atom, and elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction between those pieces of the universe processes that information by altering those bits. That is, the universe computes, and because the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits. The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation." (Lloyd, 3)

3. This contemporary view of a computational universe is also deeply related, via the concept of information, to a contemporary field of mathematical research called algorithmic information theory. And I learned that this view has a consistent and a reasonable application to the whole of our observable reality - including life itself.

In fact, a mathematician and computer scientist, Gregory Chaitin, has worked on some key ideas and problems in the field of biology - especially on complexity and evolution - to basically understand how they relate to algorithmic information theory and mathematics. This eventually led him to the development a workable and very interesting mathematical theory of biology, where he synthesized some key concepts from biology and mathematics into a computational view of reality. You can listen to a lecture about this at the video below:

Life as Evolving Software - Gregory Chaitin

I honestly tend to find this sort of thing just a stream of non sequiturs about various scientific facts.

I'm not sure what those non-sequiturs are, though. So a little more elaboration might help to understand that comment better. I mean, the OP is basically an interpret ion of some religious ideas in relation to a philosophical/theoretical framework as I described above. I can understand if you said that the ideas that I presented here are "too insane," or "inconsistent," or "incompatible with science/reality" ... or something along those lines. But I don't quite see what the non-sequiturs are.