In this blog post, we explore Seth Lloyd’s fascinating argument, presented in his book ‘Programming Universe’, that views the universe as a single quantum computer.
Anyone who has waited knows
Is there anything in the world as heart-wrenching as waiting?
At the place where you were supposed to come, here where I arrived first
Every person who opens the door and enters
Was you
Was you, was going to be you
Then the door closes again
Beloved
Waiting for you who never came, I finally go to you“Hwang Ji-woo, while waiting for you”
The anticipation when waiting for a loved one. The anxiety and restlessness that comes when the person you wait for doesn’t arrive. The flutter or pain of first love. Even while reading a single work, the emotions each individual can evoke are countless. This is because readers possess different life backgrounds and experiences. Reading the work above, people will recall their own experiences of love and feel various emotions based on those experiences. The feelings about love embedded in each person’s experience may lead to empathy with the work, or conversely, to a lack of empathy. Because individual experiences are so diverse, a single literary work takes on the new form of the reader’s experience and settles in the reader’s heart in various ways. But what if the emotions and thoughts that spring from these diverse experiences were the result of someone’s calculation?
In his book ‘Programming the Universe’, Seth Lloyd argues that the universe can be viewed as a quantum computer. He contends that the molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles composing the universe all contain information, and that the universe, as this computer, created the world by processing this information. According to his argument, nothing in this world is accidental. For example, physics was programmed by quantum forces to give birth to chemistry, and chemistry gave rise to life. Life was programmed by mutation and recombination to produce Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was programmed by experience and imagination to write Hamlet. In other words, Hamlet is also the result of the universe’s calculations, and experience and imagination are also outcomes born from programming. Thus, everything existing in the universe, even the thoughts of each individual, is not accidental but the result of the universe’s deliberate calculation.
Two questions can be raised regarding Seth Lloyd’s claim. The first concerns the origin of the rules governing the universe as a quantum computer. The universe appears complex but operates according to its own set of rules. For example, the planets in the solar system move according to Kepler’s laws, and light travels following Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So how did these rules come into being? Seth Lloyd answers this as ‘randomness’. According to his argument, the fundamental rules of the universe themselves were randomly generated. This contradicts his own claim. While asserting that everything is the result of deliberate programming and thus not random, claiming that the fundamental rules of that programming were randomly generated ultimately implies the outcome is also random. Furthermore, while explaining the various components of the universe through programming, he fails to explain the underlying rules of that programming, leaving them to chance. This leaves the mechanism of the cosmic computer incompletely explained.
The second question concerns the claim that everything is a computational result. Seth Lloyd asserts that everything we see and everything we don’t see is the result of calculations performed by a quantum computer. This implies that even individual thoughts and emotions are born within the universe’s programming. However, philosopher Karl Popper stated that a theory which cannot be falsified by any possible event is unscientific. Seth Lloyd’s claim is similar. While asserting that everything is a computational result, he bases his argument solely on the outcome, excluding the actual process and principles of computation. Therefore, from this perspective, his claim carries a somewhat unscientific aspect. This is regrettable when viewed against his ambition to approach cosmology from a completely new scientific viewpoint.
Seth Lloyd’s claim that the universe itself is a quantum computer, and that all the principles and components forming the universe are the result of that computer’s calculations, is a hypothesis born from a thirst to unravel the mysteries surrounding the universe. The period during which humans began seriously exploring the universe is not very long compared to human history. Even about Earth’s neighboring planets, Venus and Mars, much remains undiscovered, and research on Pluto, once considered the solar system’s outermost planet, has only just begun in earnest. In other words, the universe remains largely unknown to humanity, and this unknown opens up many possibilities for how we view it. Seth Lloyd’s hypothesis is one such possibility for interpreting this unknown universe. Though it carries the flaws of relying on ‘chance’ to explain its fundamental operating mechanism and being indefensible against counterarguments, his attempt to reinterpret the flow of the universe from the perspective of information is certainly worthy of applause.
