Dear Edwin Eugene,
even though I know that you are a realist opponent of my point of view, I very much appreciate your post, since it allows me to peek more inside the realist's mind, and enrich my arguments. From the fact that I need to tell a tale, made of real objects and persons, in order to help the reader have an intuition of what is "emergent space", you conclude that the world must be really made of objects and matter, since we cannot imagine a world made of pure software without having an intuition made of hardware. You are exactly the incarnation of a "matter-realist" (no offense). You say that, ultimately, my tale represents a process of abstraction, from real things toward mathematical notions. You should just consider that space itself in your view is pure abstraction. And the same is motion. But what is substance then? Quantum theory (QT) thought us a really stunning lesson about reality, and to what extent the lesson is amazing can be realized exactly from your post. A physical theory, QT, is now capable of destroying our most obvious intuition: that of "substance". The matter-realistic substitutes of QT, as the Bohm's theory, are indeed very poor from the materialistic point of view: particles are point-like, their trajectories are indiscernible by definition, and they change instantaneously and non-locally when we locally change the boundary. What is the Bohm's potential made of? Is it what you mean by hardware? Are such abstract point-like particles an hardware? Besides, Bohm's theory is doomed to never be able of achieving quantum field theory. We know that a better interpretation of "substance" is a force field, and that what we feel as substance is indeed empty space (the various kind of "radius" for particles are just heuristic notions). What is then pure energy? What is a field? Is it hardware?
What matter for a theory to be good is to minimize the assumptions to explain everything we see, and in the automata theory, we just assume quantum bits in interaction, and very basic principles, as homogeneity, isotropy, locality, unitariety. My point is that we shouldn't be obsessed by our matter-realism, and we should keep our minds open to simplification of theories, and to a corresponding change of our intuition of how the world is made. We should never forget that our intuition--what somebody calls our "ontology"--is only a powerful tool, and, as such, is temporary. Think in this way: you are wearing powerful glasses that hugely improve your vision, to e.g. a Tera-pixel per microsecond. But your brain is not capable of processing such a large amount of information: it synthesized it, and this is what you actually see. What is your ontology now? What you actually see? Or the full Tera-pixel image?
My ontology is a space-time being a huge 3d digital screen made of quantum pixels. You may not like this new ontology, but my seven-year-old daughter loves it. We must be more open minded, not be crystalized on our old way of looking at things, but look at reality from a new angle, and coherently pursue the new point of view. This always provides new powerful insights.
My best regards
Mauro
