I am not sure how we can answer that without more observational evidence supporting or contradicting string theory, and concerning the nature of dark energy.
What I’ve said doesn’t depend on whether there is computation happening, just that one model of producing random numbers is via infinite computations as described, and that having access to randomness allows computations otherwise feasible with such infinite means. But in the end, any scientific modeling is just coming up with a structure capable of reproducing observed phenomena, so to the extent it does that, it’s a perfectly good model of the phenomena. That’s not to say no other model might be possible, of course.
My advice, just ignore the String Model entirely, until and unless it can make some actual testable predictions and those predictions are tested.
Isn’t part of the problem that String Theory is untestable? Not a lack of tech that may come someday but literally untestable forever?
There are tests that could find evidence for aspects of string theory - but so far they’ve failed
Here’s a report on one test
If extra dimensions of space exist, they must be smaller than about half the width of a human hair, according to new measurements of the strength of gravity at short distances. Researchers found that the same law governing the gravitational pull between planets continues to work when objects are separated by as little as 56 micrometers. The finding rules out extra dimensions of 44 micrometers or larger, they report in this week’s Physical Review Letters.
I don’t know whether String Theory is disprovable - you could always add a new reason that the expected evidence didn’t show up. But that’s a classic problem with science - what counts as disproving.
When I was 14, I got deep into mathematics, and found it both easily intuitive and intensely mind-boggling that some of the many varieties of א aleph are rigorously demonstrably bigger than others.
I think there are some fairly solid predictions that would require ludicrous levels of energy to test? But I’m not sure about that.
IIRC I read it would need a cyclotron the size of earth’s orbit around the sun.
Maybe someday. 
Size of the galaxy is what googling the issue gets me.
Here’s what you actually said:
You’re either making an empirical claim – of randomness entailing infinite machinery – or else “equivalent to” is meaningless here.
Anyway, I’ll leave it there because I don’t want another thread spoiled. Go ahead have the last word or whatever.
Unless ‘equivalent to’ means ‘exactly that thing and nothing else’, I don’t get your meaning here. It’s as I wrote, there is something equivalent (in computational power, as clarified) to an infinitary process at work where random numbers are produced, because we know that such processes can produce random numbers. That does in no way entail a claim that there is any infinitary machinery present.
Just because I haven’t encountered this particular line of thought before, how would an infinite computer produce randomness?
I’m pretty sure what happened is that the laymen books I read did present the universe as infinite as a possibility, but I dismissed the idea entirely and justified it by the fact that it was not stated definitively. For all I know, every book I read did this and I just kept dismissing it each time. It’s not so much that I forgot, it’s that I chose to never accept the “possibility.” In one ear and out the other, as it were.
Compounding this (for me) would be all the talk of how big the universe was x seconds after the Big bang. Like right now if you Google how big the universe was one second after the Big bang it will say 10 light years in diameter. But apparently those factoids are just about how big the observable universe was at whatever time after the big bang.
As an example, googling tells me the shortest time we can describe after the big bang is called the Planck epoch (10^-43 seconds), and then if I Google what the density of the universe was at the Planck epoch I get this:
During the Planck Epoch, the universe was unimaginably dense, approaching the Planck density (around 10^93 to 10^94 grams per cubic centimeter), where all four fundamental forces were unified and physics as we know it breaks down, requiring a theory of quantum gravity to fully understand its extreme conditions.
- Planck Scale: The universe was at the Planck length (10^-35 meters) and Planck time (10^-43 seconds), the smallest meaningful units of length and time in physics.
Except “the universe” wasn’t at the Planck length and Planck time. The observable universe was. “The universe” was infinitely large. So an infinitely large universe all at Planck density. Honestly, it boggles the mind. Or my mind, at least.
You can see how the wording easily confused me. I don’t know why it doesn’t explicitly say that that’s how big the observable universe was instead of sloppily just calling it the universe.
Unless I am misunderstanding something here, which is always possible. Corrections welcome.
A computer capable of traversing infinitely many steps in finite time (sometimes called a Zeno machine) can solve the halting problem for any ordinary Turing machine, and therefore, successively enumerate that TMs halting probability, an algorithmically random number.
I sometimes wish I had the kind of mathematical mind Gauss or Euler possessed, one capable of producing a formula that could tell us whether the universe is truly infinite. Instead, I’m left with my imagination. I’m usually a realistic, practical person, yet lately my imagination has become my favorite place to be.
The sheer amount of dark energy in the universe astonishes me. If it belongs solely to the visible universe, then we know almost nothing about it and should be careful not to leap to conclusions. But if dark energy originates in regions we can’t see (or from some higher reality beyond our reach) then imagination might be the only tool we have to even approach the mystery.
As for me, I’ve long believed that what we call “the universe” (both the visible slice and whatever lies beyond) is just a speck in the spacetime of a far larger, turbulent reality we’ll never fully grasp. And when the exceptionally stable climate of the Holocene eventually comes to an end, there will be no one left to care whether the universe is infinite.