[ExI] Do we live in a universe that allows infinite computation?

[Stefano Vaj]

2011/8/12 john clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>
> That's Eternal Return, Friedrich Nietzsche had a similar idea

As a Certified Priest of the Nietzschean Church, what I can say is
that the Eternal Return has two basic meanings (and interpretation).

The first one is historical and metaphorical and "educational", and
has little to do with cosmological models.

There is however little doubt that N. himself was considering the
concept as a cosmological view. Basically, this goes as follows: since
we must believe that universe is finite (otherwise we would be
transferring monotheistic concepts of deity on Nature), given an
unlimited amount of time any conceivable configuration of the universe
would be returning after a sufficient number of steps.

OTOH, this idea is denied by the Second Principle of Thermodynamics:
we must accept that some things happen, but they do converge towards a
status where nothing more will, let alone things that previously did.

Steinhardt's and others' cosmologies, however, find rather persuasive
reasons how this could be escaped. And in their multiverses, given an
infinite number of universes, nothing would contradict the fact that
all the possible configurations thereof should be replicated
simultaneously, and in time, any number of time one could care to
think of.

--
Stefano Vaj