Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I think I am not qualified enough to really understand this very long article and the abstract concepts it discusses. However, it sets off my BS detectors. Is this article written by Wolfram himself? It doesn't have a clear indication of the author, but presumably it is him because there are parts of the article using the word "I". Wolfram has long been obsessed with computational models to explain the physical world. You could say this was his goal in A New Kind of Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science). Personally I found that book's title and premise to be arrogant, since cellular automata are pretty simplistic and seem more like a curious novelty rather than a game-changing piece of science.

This article repeatedly mentions a "machine code" for the universe. What does that mean? Does he simply mean that computational power and advancements in machine learning allow us to model physical phenomenon better and to understand how complex ideas are actually emergent behaviors arising from some fundamental pieces we already know about? It seems like that's the type of exploration performed in other articles, such as the one on consciousness (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou...). But I find it strange to see such explorations mixed in with what feels like marketing for the Wolfram language in here.

Regardless - ultimately, what Wolfram is promising when he uses phrases like "a truly fundamental theory of physics", is a Grand Unified Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory). I am not certain that he's found it, because I feel his past works suffer from delusions of grandeur, and also because I don't think humans have all the necessary inputs/data/sensors to actually characterize the universe fully (for example what is dark matter). Without those pieces, how do we know that what we have is "truly fundamental" versus just another emergent layer on top of some more fundamental piece?

Or maybe I am wrong and there is lurking genius in all these words and someone smarter than me or someone with more time will see it more readily.

Wolfram has been banging this drum and self-promoting for approximately ever (see also his similarly badly-in-need-of-an-editor book "A New Kind Of Science", which generated plenty of commentary see http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html).

He's is own worst enemy in many ways, as he undermines some actually interesting work with an outsider complex, a pathological need to self-aggrandize and a tendency to claim others work as his own.

Yes. About 20 years ago I heard him speak on his idea that the underlying structure of the universe was 2D cellular automata. How this coupled to the observed physical universe was not clear. He now seems to have generalized the cellular automata model to something much more complicated.

Who's evaluated these ideas?

As I understand the main idea, that information propagation through space and time can be described by a computational model like cellular automatons. So instead of describing the movement of particles via a wave function or field equations or similar, it's described by computational steps of a (preferably simple) cellular automaton.

As some automatons are computationally complete, and some of the functions we use to describe physics are computable, I would not be surprised that some descriptions of the world coincide.

Wolfram's idea is, that all particle behaviour, etc., can be described this way, instead of the field equations we're currently looking for in physics.

I don't know whether Wolfram has a model of information propagation that is so much more useful than wave functions and field equations but they will agree for the simple cases.

Keep in mind that 'information propagation' is pretty fundamental: we can use it to define light cones (if A can propagate information to B, then A/B are in each others past/future light cones). We can use light cones to define time (past/future) and space (neither). That's a pretty standard approach to relativity (I can't remember whether I covered it as an undergraduate, but I certainly encoutered it around that time).

(Shannon) information theory is also closely related to probability, and quantum theory is a form of probability theory (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0101012 ).

Hence it's not entirely out-there to think that an informational/computational approach like Wolfram's might bear fruit. In fact, I was hoping that someone smart(er than me) would investigate such connections a bit deeper; if only to rule them out! Note that "causal set theory" seems to be going that direction too (although I'm not overly familiar with it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_sets

I also find it promising that ideas from quantum computing (qbits, circuits, teleportation, protocols, etc.) have gone from a quirky engineering footnote (in the 90s), to become a core part of how many physicists now think about the world.

> Regardless - ultimately, what Wolfram is promising when he uses phrases like "a truly fundamental theory of physics", is a Grand Unified Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory).

He's actually searching for an even loftier goal - a Theory of Everything [0] that is also a Grand Unified Theory (that is, a single mechanism underlying gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force). Good luck to him, though I see no reason to imagine he will succeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

I don't claim to be fully educated on NKOS physics. But here's how I see it, if it helps:

A statement like "If A implies B, ~B implies ~A" is true whether or not there is a god, or a prime mover, or even an A or a B. Doesn't matter; the statement is still valid.

Now, you can expand that statement with all sorts of niceties that are equivalent: "If (A and B) implies B, ~B implies ~A". You're limited only by your imagination here, and the number of true equivalences is infinite.

The list of true statements might expand at a consistent rate across a series of complicated, embiggening rules...reminiscent of the Big Bang? And maybe within that expansion you could see a train of As moving to the left sometime, like a photon going the speed of light, which might sometimes beget a "reaction" when encountering an expression like (~B or A) when they meet, that sends a train of Bs heading out the other direction.

If such interactions are complex enough, eventually huge structures can be created, like self-reproducing entities that eventually develop consciousness. To those entities, there is nothing imaginary about what they perceive and experience. Their universe has been created, simply because it was possible.

Disclaimer: I could be all wrong as far as Wolfram's view, but this happens to be my own and I think Wolfram is getting at the same thing.

I'm not familiar with NKOS at all although I find it really fascinating what I've heard about it. Regarding these really simple A, B, ... kinds of statements, this reminds me of a talk from a theoretical physicists and a science philosopher at university. There it was also pointed out that this is a particularly clean way of describing laws of nature (if that is an option anyway). Especially speaking about causality and singularities.

That makes me wonder when there's a differential equation, when solved numerically it's also solved in this very basic iterative way.

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