Philosophy of Everything

"It's more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient. The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he's at a higher level of evolution" In "Lila, an Inquiry into Morals", Robert M. Pirsig brings intriguing reflections about the philosophy of moral using as pretext a river journey he had on a boat. Here I will bring my insights based on this book. Many of this reflections will be my own re-interpretations that were inspired by the book. Even my understanding on Pirsig's views might not fully correspond to the original author's intention.

A virtual machine is a common example of simulation. It can take the description of a (virtual) "computer" state and continue the execution from that point on. You can simulate a huge computer given a computer with more memory than the virtual machine, although it might be way slower. However, such virtual machine does not answer the problem because it normally simulates a computer with less memory. The question is, can a computer to simulate a virtual computer that has the same capabilities as itself? Before answering this, let's exclude some trivial (forbidden) cases of "simulations": A calculator will always do exactly what it does, it will be identical with itself, we will not call this a simulation of itself. Copying the exact state of another identical computer in a "twin brother" will not be considered simulation. Starting 2 identical computers with the same input will not be considered like one is simulating the other.

“There are two types of people in the world, those who divide everybody into types and those who do not”. I am part of the second type ;) Is the text above true or false?

A friend told me once that we are living in an Universe full of unprovable truths. He was referring to the Gödel's incompleteness theorems . Without being very formal, this says that there are many mathematical propositions that might be true but we cannot prove them using a computer program or any predictive way of checking, no matter how huge amount of time we can spend. We can find the proof for some, by luck, but for most of them we cannot find either a proof or disproof. In fact this "unprovable" propositions are way more many than the provable propositions. The provable propositions are like the set of natural numbers "N" and the unprovable propositions are like the set of real numbers (R).