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I agree with you here, at least in the sense that the system is definitely not physical. You didn't answer my question, though. Is it real?


All information that exists is physical, encoded in a physical substrate. Beads in an abacus, holes in a punched card, distributions of charge in a computer memory. Hypothetical information that is not encoded physically cannot be causal. A book or computer program that have not been written can have no effects. Only information that exists in a physical encoding can be causal, by virtue of it’s physicality.


Not sure where you are going with this. What is causality? Is there a non-mathematical way of making it precise? And if I have found some way to make it precise, does it matter if I write it down here in this HN comment, or on a piece of paper, or just think it? Is the mathematical content different depending on how it is expressed in physical reality?




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