Never heard of this before, but according to his site...

-- Quote

More specifically, the principle of computational equivalence says that systems found in the natural world can perform computations up to a maximal ("universal") level of computational power, and that most systems do in fact attain this maximal level of computational power. Consequently, most systems are computationally equivalent. For example, the workings of the human brain or the evolution of weather systems can, in principle, compute the same things as a computer. Computation is therefore simply a question of translating inputs and outputs from one system to another.

-- /Quote

Basically it seems down to boil down to the unprovable assertion that pretty much everything of interest in the real world can be exactly simulated on a conventional computer.

Unprovable doesn't mean false, here.

It might be true, but even if it was, there's no way to prove it true. And it's not easy to prove it false either because you'd have to show that something *can't* be simulated on a computer, not just that we currently haven't been able to figure out how to do it, or current computers aren't fast enough or whatever.

We can prove some theorems about what conventional computers can't do, like the halting problem (you can't write a program that can check any program and decide for sure if it always terminates) but presumably he doesn't count those kinds of problems as interesting real world systems.

Personally, I can't see any reason to think this assertion is true.

It's a bit like back in time people thought they could understand everything with calculus and linear algebra. Turned out they were so busy analysing everything that could be done with those tools they hardly stopped to notice all the many things they had no clue about how to tackle, imagining that more of the same would do the trick.

More discussion of these things here:

http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/08/quantum-computational-equivalence.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Principle_of_computational_equivalence

http://www.juniata.edu/faculty/rhodes/intro/theory2.htm
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