The article missed the chance to include the quote from that standard compendium of information and wisdom, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
> Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
I am assuming integrating over all possible configurations would be a component of The Total Perspective Vortex.
After all, Feynman showed this is in principle possible, even with local nondeterminism.
(this being a text medium with a high probability of another commenter misunderstanding my intent, I must end this with a note that I am, of course, BSing :)
The real problem is you need a real-number-valued universe for this to work, where the measurer needs access to the full real values [1]. In our universe, which has a Planck size and Planck time and related limits, the statement is simply untrue. Even if you knew every last detail about a piece of fairy cake, whatever "every last detail" may actually be, and even if the universe is for some reason deterministic, you still could not derive the entire rest of the universe from it correctly. Some sort of perfect intelligence with access to massive amounts of computation may be able to derive a great deal more than you realize, especially about the environment in the vicinity of the cake, but it couldn't derive the entire universe.
[1]: Arguments are ongoing about whether the universe has "real" numbers (in the mathematical sense) or not. However it is undeniable the Planck constants still provide a practical barrier to any hypothetical real valued numbers in the universe that make them in practice inaccessible.
> Wouldnt you need the T_zero configuration of the universe for this to work?
Why? We learn about the past by looking at the present all the time. We also learn about the future by looking at the present.
> Also we are assuming there is no non-deterministic processed happening at all.
Depends on the kind of non-determinism. If there's randomness, you 'just' deal with probability distributions instead. Since you have measurement error anyway, you need to do that anyway.
There are other forms of non-determinism, of course.
> We learn about the past by looking at the present all the time. We also learn about the future by looking at the present.
We infer about the past, based a bit on some material evidence we can subjectively partially get some acquaintance with. Through thick cultural biases. And the actual material suggestions should not come to far from our already integrated internal narrative, without what we will ignore it or actively fight it.
Future is pure fantasm, only bound by our imagination and what we take for unchallengeable fundamentals of what the world allows according to our inner model of it.
At least, that's one possible interpretation of the thoughts when an attention focus on present.
In Buddhism we have dependent origination : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
Also the concept of implicate order, proposed by the theoretical physicist David Bohm.
> Bohm employed the hologram as a means of characterising implicate order, noting that each region of a photographic plate in which a hologram is observable contains within it the whole three-dimensional image, which can be viewed from a range of perspectives.
> That is, each region contains a whole and undivided image.
> "There is the germ of a new notion of order here. This order is not to be understood solely in terms of a regular arrangement of objects (e.g., in rows) or as a regular arrangement of events (e.g., in a series). Rather, a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time."
> "Now, the word 'implicit' is based on the verb 'to implicate'. This means 'to fold inward' ... so we may be led to explore the notion that in some sense each region contains a total structure 'enfolded' within it."
Wouldnt you need the T_zero configuration of the universe for this to work?
Given different T_zero configs of matter and energies T_current would be different. and there are many pathways that could lead to same physical configuration (position + energies etc) with different (Universe minus cake) configurations.
Also we are assuming there is no non-deterministic processed happening at all.