

The World Is a Functional Program - baweaver
http://baweaver.com/blog/2015/02/20/the-world-is-a-functional-program/

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chinpokomon
I started another comment, but it looks like it may have been lost. So I
apologize if this is a duplicate.

I'm currently working through SICP, so I appreciate your concept. For about a
decade, I've been considering a tree structure to represent the Universe, but
data/code, perhaps my view isn't so different.

Regarding free will however, I think you are making assumptions that are not
definitely established. Why must what we perceive as free will rely on
callbacks? It seems just as likely that there is hidden state within the
closure that determines the output of that function.

While the complexity of decisions, choices, and actions seem to be free will,
I've seen no evidence to suggest that it isn't actually predetermined. Given
the shear number of possibilities, why can't free will just represent a
traversal of some massive tree?

Quantum Mechanics imposes an interesting twist on this view point. If the wave
function doesn't collapse until the lazy evaluation of the quantum state, it
too could be a contributing factor to determining free will. I'm unaware of
any finding that suggests there is a definite relationship between quantum
state and the macroscopic, but I haven't given up on that possibility.

Even if there was concrete evidence to support that theory, it could just be
that the model we use is just a very good approximation of the system and it
doesn't reveal the implementation -- after all, George implemented it and we
have abstracted that implementation away.

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baweaver
OP Here. Had a bit of fun playing around with world theory, decided to share
for kicks and giggles. More of a 'what if?' scenario than anything.

