From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!esquire!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!davidson Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: Can determinism be proven? Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.2296 Posted: Mon Aug 23 05:48:00 1982 Received: Thu Aug 26 01:47:26 1982 References: ihuxv.213 Interestingly, it does not necessarily involve an infinite regress to have part of a system completely model the whole system. It does, however, require that the system be describable with less information than it contains (and there are other requirements too). An analogous situation is with the common programming exercise of writing a program which prints itself out. Indeed, a deterministic universe with simple physical laws and a simple initial state is easily modelled completely from within. A non-deterministic universe, on the other hand, can not be completely modeled at all. This brings up one of my favorite speculations about the universe: assuming that the universe is finite in extent, or taking a finite subset of it, does the universe or that subset contain a finite or an infinite amount of information? That is, could one completely specify an instantaneous time slice with a finite amount of information? The answer to this question depends, I think, on whether space, as well as everything else, is quantized.