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Civilizations
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Systems · branch

Computation

A computer is a physical system that transforms information. Everything later called “simulation” hangs here.

This hangs on Information is physical, Mathematics.

See on the tree

Church and Turing gave the modest, devastating idea: a wide class of effective procedures can be carried out by a simple machine. The rest of the industry is engineering on that trunk: faster, wider, hotter, cheaper.

Elon’s public simulation argument is not a computer-science paper. It assumes this branch: that games are computations, that computations improve, that improvement has not obviously hit a wall that would stop them becoming indistinguishable from experience.

On 29 March 2025 he wrote: Everything is computer. Digital intelligence, his phrase on Lex, hangs here too. A mind made of the same stuff as the game engine is a leaf this branch can at least support as a possibility.

The 2015 AMA names the inside of that work in the same comment as the tree. That sentence hangs here.

I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context switching penalty is high and my process isolation is not what it used to be.
Elon Musk2015Reddit AMA
Everything is computer
Elon Musk2025X

Hangs on

What hangs from here

Sources