Blog Intro Post

Hello LW, as I've mentioned I'm starting a blog, here's the intro post! Intro 0.0.1 Hello, welcome to (the main sequence of) my website. 0.0.2 Its purpose is to collect various observations and thoughts of mine, centered around the question of.... 0.1 Why these laws of physics? 0.1.1 Of the various things humanity has learned about the nature of reality, perhaps the most striking is the discovery of the laws of physics: a set of computable mathematical rules which govern almost all of reality as it's known to us. Even the human mind seems to be the product of physical processes in the brain. 0.1.2 A further striking discovery of the 20th century was computational universality: there is a relatively low threshold beyond which a model of computation is capable of emulating any other. 0.1.2.1 Combined with 0.1.1, this seems to imply that all of reality can be thought of as a relatively simple form of computation, perhaps a Turing machine with a small number of states. 0.1.3 Or can it? Although the laws of physics seem to be computable, they have a mathematical structure that goes far beyond an ordinary Turing machine. They take place in continuous space and time, have manifold conservation laws and group theoretic symmetries. Perhaps most weirdly of all, they are quantum mechanical in nature. 0.1.4 This raises the question: why? If reality "could" have been a more generic Turing machine or a cellular automaton, why isn't it? Wait, or does this question even make sense? What does "why" even mean here? These questions will be the subject of this blog. 0.1.5 To give a brief preview of my answer, I believe there is a reason. The world contains various high-level structures recursively "built atop" the physical laws; the laws serve as a sort of "base case", or a consistency condition, and their mathematical form facilitates this. So our task is to understand the form of these structures. 0.1.5.1 The parts of physics most relevant to my account are (non-equilibrium) thermody