>>42
I've read the abstracts, going to read the full papers, but I believe I agree with them. Although I'm the poster who strongly believes that mathematics is emergent from computation, and so it doesn't really exist (we've discussed this matter before). So Max Tegmark's ``The Mathematical Universe'' should ideally be retitled.
Incidentally, I happened to have watched Max's recent talk at the last Singularity Summit, and he appears to have come around to a more strict computational viewpoint himself since writing that. Unfortunately, his talk is mostly popular physics and philosophy for the layman, so it's not really worth the bother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GctnYAYcMhI
(Pan-)computationalism is obviously the
only valid philosophy of mind to anyone who has worked in computation. Drawing that conclusion might be premature, but the evidence is all around us, and the evidence to the contrary is fallacious at best. It's merely the normals who don't know of the fundamentals of how computers work, and therefore lack the necessary mindset and language in understanding the universe itself who are unable to come to terms with the
one true philoshophy.
Maybe it's possible to shield a volume of our Universe from its eventual death so that it may survive into or direct/influence the birth of another or continuation of our own by harvesting external Universes. That would allow macroscopic computational processes to continue.
But until we understand the nature of what lies beyond computation within our universe looks strongly as if it will come to a screeching halt.
In other words, our ``paper tape'' got cut short.