Quote Originally Posted by Laurentio II View Post
I see your point. But what I meant (blame my bad wording) was that a theoretical world has to be analogical in nature, as a finite number or permutation would be, probably, not workable. Meanwhile, I remembered that, in a particular fashion, quantistic physics allows "jumps" as opposite to linear continual progression, but it's hard to believe that it could apply to (any) real world on a human scale.
I strongly disagree. The world of Conway's Life Game (to take a famous example) is 100% discrete in time and space, and permits only extremely short-range effects (cells affect only their immediate neighbors), yet has been proven to be computationally complete. A sufficiently large space (i.e. one with an astronomical number of cells) over sufficiently large time could produce ecosystems and civilizations, given suitable starting configuration; if the space is large enough and enough time is allowed, a completely random starting configuration would do it. Assuming that there is no supernatural component to intelligence, there is no known reason why intelligent beings should not be able to form. Scientists in such a world might have difficulty even conceiving of analog systems; such things would not exist in their world except as approximations on a macroscopic scale.

CLG currently only exists, as far as we know, in computer simulations. Yet the rules on which it operates are much simpler than the subatomic rules on which our own universe appears to run. It's perfectly feasible to envisage a world that operates according to a totally digital, discrete system like this.