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Comment by wegfawefgawefg | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think the universe is a cellular automaton rule. Particles dont exist they are just percieved gliders in rule following substrate.

A wave in the ocean doesnt exist any more than any other part of the water that isnt in the wave. We just focus on the wave because our brains are good at seeing moving shapes for hunting.

The substrate graph is updated by travelling rule applicators which dont require energy. Theyre like the updating edge of stacking faults between planes in crystalography.

Gravity slowing down light is just due to the travel speed of rule applicators being fixed. Higher graph density but fixed node updates per time means it takes longer to update a given volume.

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And here's Tom with the weather.

This would require spacetime to be quantized (presumably at the Planck length or something smaller) though, yes?

I've always thought entanglement makes more intuitive sense on a graph substrate of some kind, where the "spooky action at a distance" is actually just an anomalous edge in the graph connecting two vertices which would otherwise be more distantly separated. This begs the question of how the edges in the graph came to be or whether they're modifiable at all though.

I thought it yes but maybe not necessarily. There could be infinite nodes but the rule is such that at a slightly larger scale it can only result in near instantanious graduated shifts between states. Like a phase transition in material. Where below the scale that these phase transitions appear insufficient substrate complexity exists to support any other features, so youd just be better off setting your minimum abstraction level at the "discrete" one. Or maybe it is just discrete idk.

As for weird behaviour like far reaching spookiness. Could be multiple overlapping substrates at different scales.

Or, the rule directly includes a mechanism for remote information transmission.

Wolfram, is that you?

What do you mean by "travelling rule applicators"? Also by "travel speed of rule applicators being fixed"? Is there a fundamental space and time in which the rule applicators exist?

You wouldnt need an explicit time.

The rule applicator just traverses the graph and updates a node based on adjacent nodes.

Time for us is just the difference in relative sequence lengths between updates applied to volumes at our scale.

So how would we test that hypothesis?

Im agnostic until we have very tiny microscopes.

Until then we are stuck at a funky high level abstraction. The table of quarks and particles we have is like what would happen if we were trying to figure out what our computers were made of by interacting with a url bar, and coming to the conclusion that the fundamental components of a computer are like... a table of HTTP response status codes.

Not to say that its useless, just that its not zoomed in enough.

Ask the string theorists.

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