How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything

Its harsh to say it, but Wolfram tried his best at a computational theory of everything and failed.<p>We didn&#x27;t know this is in the eighties, when the first cellular automata ideas were conceived. So it was a worthy thing to explore in earnest. But it did not work. There is nothing to show for it. It did not strike a vein. These things happen. All the time. You have a great startup idea but no market fit. In this case the market is the Universe. And you cant fake it till you make it with the Universe.<p>The universe most certainly has a mysterious affinity with mathematics. And computation is a mathematical concept. So its a decent hypothesis. But there are a lot of mathematical concepts that dont manifest in any shape or form in physical reality.<p>From the simple geometric thinking of ancient cultures to Newton&#x27;s and Leibnitz&#x27;s calculus and then all the subsequent glories of 19th and 20th century physical theory, when new mathematical concepts &quot;fit&quot; the way the universe works there is just an avalanche of prediction, verification, learning, refinement, further prediction etc.<p>Its wrong to think we have reached the end of &quot;mathematical physics&quot;. So new ideas are needed, and computation is as good an inspiration as a falling apple. But prunning dead-end ideas is a faster way to get closer to the truth.

Related: Why philosophers should care about computational complexity by Scott Aaronson [1].<p>If you have even a faint interest in philisophy and have taken algorithms 101 you will find something mind-blowing in this paper. My favorite part is about how the “Chinese room” problem takes on totally different character depending on your assumptions about the type of machinery behind the black box.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;philos.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;philos.pdf</a>

It&#x27;s pretty wild to have gone from watching a lecture from Neil Turok (who is currently my favorite theoretical physicist with a &quot;here&#x27;s my idea for what physics currently has wrong with its model&quot;) and looking at Wolfram&#x27;s rambling.<p>Between this and the recent &quot;techno-optimist&quot; rant, I get the sense that maybe we shouldn&#x27;t give popular voices platforms for things outside the scope that made them famous in the first place, and if they really have something interesting to say, it should be determined as such by the content of its argument and not the pseudo-authority of its author.<p>Michael Jordon didn&#x27;t have a stellar baseball record and likely wouldn&#x27;t have made the cut for a team if he wasn&#x27;t Michael Jordon. And what I see a lot of these days are people that made a name for themselves metaphorically playing basketball suddenly blogging about baseball and getting way too much attention for what are fundamentally 0.202 batting average ideas.

This is hard to read. I don&#x27;t think the core narrative is implausible, but it&#x27;s pretty hard to imagine someone this self-aggrandizing being a sufficiently critical adversary of his own theory, and he doesn&#x27;t seem to have convinced anyone else of his claims.

Without diminishing Mathematica&#x2F;WA, have any of his ideas produced tangible, actionable results post-1990?<p>It&#x27;s a serious question rather than snark as I am only moderately familiar with his work. I appreciate some of his thoughts (ex: computational irreducibility), but I feel like I&#x27;ve got at least 20 years of asking &quot;So what?&quot; when he publishes. And yet here we are, discussing him, again.

I&#x27;m trying to evaluate this and like everyone else I&#x27;m unconvinced defaulting to doubtful (great claims need great evidence).<p>Perhaps it would help if he had clarified what he meant by:<p>`So then here’s the big result. What observers with those characteristics perceive in the ruliad necessarily follows certain laws. And those laws turn out to be precisely the three key theories of 20th-century physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics and the Second Law. `<p>So it sounds like he&#x27;s saying that if you take an arbitrary system of generating infinite rules and apply it to itself, you&#x27;ll make a system that shares traits of our universe, which if true is actually fascinating in itself. Curious if any advocates can speak to evidence of this claim.

A classic philosophical question is &quot;why is there something rather nothing?&quot; The follow up question &quot;why is there something but not everything?&quot; is the domain of physics. If the universe is computable, then there is a program in any model of computation that reproduces our observed physics. Why is one model of computation (Wolfram&#x27;s) considered deeper or more fundamental than another (Turing machine)? Is it more useful because it is easier or more natural to encode the known laws of symmetry in the &quot;program&quot;? There seems to be a lot of theories of everything that have the issue of predicting a lot more than we can possibly observe, where everything we consider real physics is a small point in a massive parameter space. Be its string theory with its landscape of vacua, or flavors of inflation, or many worlds. Our universe in the theory is underdetermined. Somewhere in the parameter space is our observed universe but also a lot of dream worlds sitting side-by-side inaccessible to us. Some take it as deep and profound insight but I am skeptical that it is in the spirit of physics. I think deeper principles await to rule out this embarrassment of ontology

There’s something I’ve always enjoyed about Wolfram’s willingness to put the rules aside and formulate theories based on intuition and out-of-the-box thinking. I don’t think he’s right here, but it’s that kind of thinking that sometimes leads to important scientific discoveries.

I think that the &quot;ruliad&quot; concept here is pretty interesting. I&#x27;m not too sure how to apply it to real life, though.<p>&quot;Ruliad&quot; represents the abstract and unique object that arises from the application of all possible computational processes or rules; the totality of all potential computational processes, an infinite, complex network of all possibilities that can ever exist. Wolfram explains that our perceptions of the universe, and our understanding of the laws of physics themselves, are influenced by our specific sampling or experience of the ruliad.

Computational irreducibility is a very useful concept; among other things, it is an elegant way to have free will in a deterministic universe.

Always nice to take pictures in the woods helping nature to achieve purpose and then re-entering the ruliad matrix posting the pictures with overlay <i>save the forest memes</i> thus taking part in the awesome work defining what humans want and completing one of the great circles that great minds run in.

Why are none of these things wikipedia articles? Or getting any traction in google scholar? I actually am not against what Wolfram is saying and it&#x27;s interesting to see the link between general relativity and quantum mechanics in this line of thinking, but come on, something is fishy.

It&#x27;s convolution. All of it.