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When someone makes a prediction based on these discrete computer metaphors...
Pardon, but when was the purpose of metaphor - or the purpose of layman descriptions of highly technical fields - to be predictive? Such an expectation is absurd on the face of it.
There are distinctions between physical laws and organizing principles that seem to escape the author. I think Miller confuses objective, necessary cause and effect -- heat energy input causing the rise of mercury in a glass tube -- with the subjective, incidental information effect which depends upon (it is "caused by") evaluation by a programmed observer (a human or other animal, or human instrumentation, evolved or designed to register and report within subjective structures of meaning). The thermometer is not in itself conveying any particular packet of information, it is only behaving and affecting its environment according to laws of physics. The general trend of all effects which cause subsequent effects -- these of course might be measured and thereby become information -- is entropy. However one defines entropy, it is not organization (it is not programmed) so it cannot be informed. Therefore the entropic universe is not literally a computer (nor is a really really awesomely huge computer a good metaphor for the universe).
The quantum effect indicated by Schroedinger's (Co-dependent) Cat does not contradict but rather confirms this logic. For it is not the universe which looks in the box; it is an organized, evolved or designed, energized observer. And remember that the box itself, with its "superpositioning" device, has been effected by an organized, purposive agent, who, like the observer, runs counter to entropy.
Whenever I read an article like this, I am reminded of Dennis Ritchie's phrase: "intoxicated with metaphor."
Tiny particles
can be two places at once;
Never satisfied.
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