All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.
Seth Lloyd

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.
Seth Lloyd

Something else has happened with computers.
Seth Lloyd

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.
Seth Lloyd

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
Seth Lloyd

Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.
Seth Lloyd

Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science.
Seth Lloyd

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.
Seth Lloyd