If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.
[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.
If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.
We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.
The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.
Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.
One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?
Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.
The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.
I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.
Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.
I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it's capable of performing universal computation, but it's plausible that it is.
When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.
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