I think it’s really interesting to see the similarities between what Wolfram is saying and the work of Julian Barbour on time being an emergent property. Both suggest a similar underlying ontology for the universe: a timeless, all-encompassing realm containing all possible states / configurations of everything. But what’s really fascinating is that they reach this conclusion through different implementations of that same interface. Barbour talks about a static geometric landscape where time emerges objectively from the relational (I won’t say causal) structures between configurations, independent of any observer. On the other hand, Wolfram’s idea of the Ruliad is that there’s a timeless computational structure, but time emerges due to our computational limitations as observers navigating this space.
They’ve both converged on a timeless “foundation” for reality, but they’re completely opposite in how they explain the emergence of time: objective geometry, vs. subjective computational experience
I was literally thinking of the same similarities. Barbour's exposition of the principle of least action as being time is interesting. There's a section in The Janus Point where he goes into detail about the fact that there are parts of the cosmos that (due to cosmic inflation) are farther apart in terms of light-years than the universe is old, and growing in separation faster than c, meaning that they are forever causally separated. There will never be future changes in state from one that result in effects in the other. In a way, this also relates to computation, maybe akin to some kind of undecidability.
Another thing that came to mind when reading the part about how "black holes have too high a density of events inside of them to do any more computation" is Chaitin's incompleteness theorem: if I understand it correctly, that basically says that for any formal axiomatic system there is a constant c beyond which it's impossible to prove in the formal system that the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is greater than c. I get the same kind of vibe with that and the thought of the ruliad not being able to progressively simulate further states in a black hole.
Actually, the parts of the universe receding from us faster than the speed of light can still be causally connected to us. It’s a known “paradox” that has the following analogy: an ant walks on an elastic band toward us at speed c, and we stretch the band away from us by pulling on the far end at a speed s > c. Initially the ant despite walking in our direction gets farther, but eventually it does reach us (in exponential time). The same is true for light coming from objects that were receding from us at a speed greater than c when they emitted it. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_on_a_rubber_rope
They will never reach us because the rate of expansion is accelerating.
That article doesn't back up your claim.
> There will never be future changes in state from one that result in effects in the other.
You are assuming that the Principle of locality is true and proven. This is far from being the case from my understanding.
I generally like the idea of most everything being emergent, but where does it stop? Is it emergence all the way down?
I think that time isn't what we think it is - but I don't think it's all already set; rather I think that the past can be constrained by the future just as the future is constrained by the past.
I don't think that there's spooky action at a distance (it's fundamentally equivalent to retrocausality, and the consequences of the distant foreign event cannot outpace its light cone anyway).
I think its a superposition of states of a closed time-like curve thing being fleshed out as its contradictions are resolved and interactions are permitted between its colocated non-contradictory aspects.
But I'm not a physicist, so that's probably all just bullshit anyway.
It is simpler than that. Wolfram has a long history of plagiarizing ideas and passing them off as his own.
That’s the history of 99.9999% of ideas based on the average token generation rate of humanity.
The mother of someone who was a friend in the 90s used to always pepper her speech with attributions for almost everything she was saying (in any "serious" conversation). "I think it was Popper who said ..." "Schenk developed this idea that ...")
It was * so * annoying to listen to.
We should hold dinner-table conversations and scientific letters to different standards.
Real scientists tend to try to be careful about attribution and especially don't just blatantly regurgitate the last thing they read and pass it off as their own. That is highly frowned upon in polite academic society.
Without time you’d be everything all at once, which isn’t capable of having an experience, that is to also say: a location.
To have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time.
More like a play head on a tape, you’re the play head traversing and animating your own projection.
The universe doesn't need to evolve for us to have experience. We would experience evolution through the state space because its structure is oriented such as to experience evolution through time. Each point in experience-time (the relative time evolution experienced by the structure) is oriented towards the next point in experience-time. Even if all such points happen all at once, the experience of being a point in this structure oriented towards the next point is experienced subjectively as sequential. In other words, a block universe would contain sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential.
The real question is why would such a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws.
This makes a good argument that the block universe can't exist: https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einst...
(search "block")
That's not saying it can't exist, it's just saying you can't go outside the universe to look at it.
> have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time
You’re describing timelike experience. Photons “experience” events as in they are part of causality. But they do so in a non-timelike manner.
So you are saying there is a version of me that is king of the universe in some timeline?
If the universe is infinite then there is a possibility that you are a king of an observable universe somewhere.
Infinite does not mean that all the permutations are possible.
You being you and you becoming a king might simply not be a combination which is compatible.
You vastly misunderestimate infinity if you don’t recognize that anything feasible will happen.
In a skin enclosed universe you are already King Meatbag, ruler over your mind and body.
I think he's a quack trying to torture an explanation of the universe out of his pet theory that uses a lot of words to say simple things but doesn't predict anything. If "time is what progresses when one applies computational rules" then how is the order in which the rules are applied defined in the first place?
Computational irreducibility is a neat idea but i'm not sure its novel or something that explains the entire universe. My basic intro course on differential equations taught us that the vast majority of them cannot be solved analytically, they have to be approximated. I don't know if the irreducibility idea is anything fundamentally different than saying some problems are hard, whether its non analytical equations or NP hard problems.
I think you’re slightly misunderstanding his concept of computational irreducibility. It’s more like the halting problem than anything: basically he’s saying that dynamic systems can’t be reduced to an equation that is easier to calculate and so you just have to simulate the entire system, run it, and watch what happens. This means we can’t ever predict the future within these systems.
Well I wouldn't put it quite like that either.. because you have to be careful what you mean by 'simulate' and 'easier'.
There could be multiple ways to simulate the same system, i.e. produce the same evolutionary output steps. Wolfram tends to imply there is only one most-expensive way for systems that are computationally irreducible and that way is grinding through a recursive computation. I think that's partly because the simple experiments, like cellular automata, he used to come up with this principle actually explore the 'space of simple rules', not the 'space of ordered sets of states of systems'.
Of course the latter is a much more computationally expensive things to do but it seems to me it would generalise better to the universe. Because in the universe what we're really observing is the evolution of states not the outputs of rules. There may be other hidden assumptions in the principle if you assume that all systems can and do evolve from simple rules as much of Physics does. Nevertheless, you need a high bar if you're going to state universal principles.
Perhaps the simplest way to state the principle is: say we set up a simple iterative computation where the input to step n, is the output of step n-1. Then there's no way to compute state n without having previously computes states n-2, n-3 etc. That's what he means by irreducible. In other words it's "necessarily recursive" which may be a better and more focused term.
I'm cautious about making it mean more than that, since Wolfram tends to write in great leaps of conclusions without showing us his working. Nevertheless I enjoy following his ideas, and I did find aspects of this article quite thought provoking.
Your comment makes me think about statistical mechanics and microstates. That is to say ... in a complex system with properties that are a function of microstates, whether the internal structure of the microstates that correspond to a given property matter can depend on your point of view or interest in the system.
Heat, for example, is a statistical property of a system, and a given temperature can correspond to a vast number of possible microstates of the system. For some purposes, you care precisely which microstate the system is in; for others, you do not, and the temperature property is entirely adequate to describe the system.
Rules may describe the microstate, but may be (depending on your POV) be irrelevant to the property.
Using Wolfram's model of the world, there may indeed be a cellular automata following rules that underlies the property, but there may be no reason to care about it in a given instance; instead you're interested in the "evolution of states" (i.e. values of the property).
Some complexity scientists are quite taken with this idea of not needing to care about the lower levels of a system when consider higher level behavior. In their view (and rightly so, IMO [0]) you don't always need to consider the rules that drive (say) physics when considering (say) psychology.
[0] except that I think that Hofstadter's "heterarchy" idea is likely to be even more accurate - interesting systems are the ones in which there are complex feedback systems between different levels of the system.
> I think that's partly because the simple experiments, like cellular automata, he used to come up with this principle actually explore the 'space of simple rules', not the 'space of ordered sets of states of systems'.
I think it’s the opposite actually. He chose to study these recursive systems because they seem to describe reality, and then when he found more evidence that they do a good job describing reality, he kept studying… so on and so forth. Basically a sort of hermeneutic circle type deal.
You do a much more thorough job of describing it. I should’ve mentioned the recursive part earlier. I just kinda assume we all already know we’re talking about recursion and time steps and that’s not a useful assumption
That smells like the Universe is the best Computer for computing the future of the Universe tautology.
Funny you should say this, because most work on the halting problem is reducing the systems down to equations that are easier to calculate.
He treats computation as if it is a fundamental law of nature, but I don’t find that assertion compelling. I’m also more of a pilot wave theory advocate, which although incomplete, cuts off several diseased (renormalized) branches of quantum physics.
I wrote up more or less the same idea ten years ago, but in what I think is a more accessible presentation:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-a...
I have read and appreciated your writings going back to the comp.lang.lisp days, but a blog post that starts with “if you haven’t read the previous post, please do before reading the rest of this one” is not what I would consider accessible. …and that previous post then asks the reader to first read a paper or watch a video before proceeding. While a decade later than what you wrote, Wolfram’s article is much more self contained and complete.
Thank you so much for this.
Whenever people criticize Wolfram the comeback is often, he’s just trying to discuss big ideas that mainstream science won’t talk about. Of course that’s not the reason for the criticism at all and I think your work here shows that it’s totally fine to speculate and get a little philosophical. The results can be interesting and thought provoking.
There’s a difference between big ideas and grandiosity. It also shows big ideas can stay scientifically grounded and don’t require making up corny terminology (Ruliad? lol).
It is possible to make quantitative statements that I think capture many of the intuitions you assert. Here was one attempt:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...
That particular proposal was mathematically wrong for reasons I still find physically perplexing (it turns out that for some events quantum theory allows for stronger memory records - defined via classial mutual information - of entropy decreasing events!). A simple example is in here: https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1726 (I am second author).
Do physicists think time actually exists? I wonder if someone has reasoned that time is an accounting method that humans have developed to make sense of their experienced change of systems.
Wolfram uses the words progression and computation a lot in his essay, but there’s an implicit bias there of assuming a process is deterministic, or has some state it’s driving towards. But none of these “progressions” mean anything, I think. It seems they are simply reactions subject to thermodynamics.
If no one observed these system changes, then the trends, patterns, and periodicity of these systems would just be a consequence of physics. It seems what we call “time” is more the accumulation of an effect rather than a separate aspect of physics.
For example, I wonder what happens in physics simulations if time is replaced by a measure of effect amplitude. I don’t know, tbh, I am not a physicist so maybe this is all naïve and nonsense.
Time "exists" in physics in the same way everything else in physics does - namely, the value we measure with clocks in the real world satisfies all of the same properties (at least in certain regimes of the universe) as the thing we call "time" in various physics theories like relativity/classical mechanics. And those theories make (reasonably) correct predictions about the values we measure in the real world.
Is it possible that these properties are the result of some other interactions that have very different laws at a lower level? Absolutely! But the discovery of particles didn't cause the sun to disappear, if that makes sense.
> Do physicists think time actually exists?
Yes, spacetime is important for General Relativity, cosmology and thermodynamics. Whether it's fundamental or emerges from something more fundamental is an open question though.
Time is just a measure of change. No change. No time.
We are interested in a peculiar rate of time based on the heart beat of our experience.
Every time I read stuff like this I get super drawn to thinking about Sunyata* - In Mahayana buddhism, my understanding is that Sunyata doesn't mean absolute nothingness or no existence, but all things are devoid of intrinsic, independent existence. Everything is empty of inherent nature because everything is interdependent... phenomena exist only in relation to causes and conditions. This relational existence assumes that things do not possess an unchanging essence... the ultimate sense, there is no fixed reality. What might seem like "everything" is actually permeated by "nothingness" or "emptiness" and that phenomena arise dependent on conditions, without intrinsic, permanent nature.
Sunyata comes from Sunya, which in Sanskrit means "zero", another idea invented by the Indians.
I like thinking about hypergraphs that continually rewrite themselves. I've thought about it in terms of literary critique, or in "compiling" a novel. It reminds me of petri nets in a sense, where at any given moment, a character has a static model of the world, which can be diagrammed through a causal graph of conclusions and premises. Then, an event happens, which changes their understanding of the world; the hypergraph gets rewritten in response.
I've toyed with this with my own graph software when writing novels. It's of course impossible to fully document every characters' model before and after every event that affects them, but even doing so at key moments can help. I've wished more than once that I could "compile" my novel so it could automatically tell me plot holes or a character's faulty leap in logic (at least, one that would be out of character for them).
I've also tried the more common advice of using a spreadsheet where you have a column for each character, and rows indicating the passage of time. There you're not drawing hypergraphs but in each cell you're just writing raw text describing the state of the character at that time. It's helpful, but it falls apart when you start dealing with flashbacks and the like.
Thought experiment on the nature of reality:
- In a much larger universe, write down in a log book every event to every particle at every instant, from the Big Bang to the restaurant.
- Put it on the fireplace mantle and leave it there.
This is basically a log of a simulation. It exists in much the same way as an ongoing simulation would, except that its time dimension isn't shared with the simulating universe. But every observer within has had the same observations as if it did.
There's a hidden condition here.
How do you know every event to every particle?
The answer to that will literally change what gets written in the log book.
This assumes that a map, if sufficiently detailed, is identical to the territory.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t - but it is a highly debatable metaphysical assumption. I’m not sure how seriously we should take some people’s claims that they “know” that such an assumption is actually true
It's an argument about simulations, not about reality. If reality is a simulation, then arguments about simulations apply to it, but that's the big if.
Not necessarily. Suppose that consciousness/qualia/etc is “something extra” which has to be added to non-mental reality, as some dualists believe. Then, it would be possible that we live in a simulation which contains consciousness because that “something extra” has somehow been added to it. And yet, maybe the “much larger” universe which contains our simulation also contains such a “log book” of a very similar universe to our own, also containing intelligent life - and yet, if the “something extra” has not been added to that “log book”, it would lack consciousness and qualia, unlike our own universe.
I’m not arguing that a dualism (of this sort) is actually true, merely that we don’t (and can’t) know for a fact that it is false. But if we can’t know for a fact that it is false, then even if we (somehow) knew our reality was simulated, that wouldn’t give us grounds to make confident inferences about the nature of other simulations, or the nature of simulations in themselves
I agree with your post. However, I was using the most mechanical meaning of simulation: "the production of a computer model of something, especially for the purpose of study," which implies determinism and excludes the "something extra."
It doesn’t actually exclude the “something extra”, it is neutral as to whether or not there is any “something extra”
Panpsychists claim everything is conscious, even rocks, even atoms. Again, I don’t claim this is true (I’d be rather shocked if I somehow found out it was), but we can’t know for a fact that it is false. Yet if panpsychism (or at least certain versions thereof) is true, every simulation (even a simulation of the weather, or of crop growth) is conscious, simply because absolutely everything is. But I don’t think most standard definitions of “simulation” are excluding that possibility - on the contrary, they are agnostic with respect to it, treating its truth or falsehood as outside of their scope
It also doesn’t necessarily imply determinism because some computer simulations use RNGs. Most commonly people use pseudorandom RNGs for this, but there is nothing in principle stopping someone from replacing the pseudorandom RNG with a hardware RNG based on some quantum mechanical process, such that it is indeterministic for all practical purposes, and the question of whether it is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic depends on controversial questions about QM to which nobody knows the answers
> It doesn’t actually exclude the “something extra”, it is neutral as to whether or not there is any “something extra”
Roger, that's even better. I tried to clarify the log book idea in another reply.[1] The question is whether you can have reality (from the observer's perspective) just based on whether coherent information exists in any setting.
Basically the question is whether we can go from "I think, therefore I am" to "something is constructing information." The latter is obviously a simpler, lower-level proof than other concepts of existence.
That brings us back to the "something extra." Is it required for our observations to be possible, i.e. can we rule out the log book conjecture? I don't think we can, but I might be wrong.
And yet, maybe the “much larger” universe which contains our simulation also contains such a “log book” of a very similar universe to our own, also containing intelligent life - and yet, if the “something extra” has not been added to that “log book”, it would lack consciousness and qualia, unlike our own universe.
In that case, the non-conscious people in the log book would spend a lot of time pontificating on their experiences of consciousness and how mysterious it is and whether it's possible for there to be other universes that contain entities like themselves except not conscious. They'd be having these discussions for reasons that have nothing to do with actually being conscious, but coincidentally their statements would perfectly correspond with our actual perceptions of consciousness. Maybe not logically impossible, but it seems extremely improbable.
(This is pretty much the argument at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zo... which I find persuasive).
The word "simulation" is it self a simulation. So is the word "is".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Reality is a multi-disciplinary domain, but it gives off the appearance of being physics only, because of its metaphysical nature.
Except for the randomness introduced in Quantum Mechanics.
If they ever solve the randomness, then if the map is down to every particle, then yes, the map and reality could be the same. But think at that point you need a computer the size of reality to keep track of every particle.
Or, maybe the entire universe is one giant wave equation. But again, I think you need a computer the size of the universe to solve it.
We don’t know for a fact that QM contains irreducible indeterminism. If many worlds is true, then QM is ultimately deterministic. Same if hidden variables is true. A large class of local hidden variable theories have been ruled out by Bell’s theorem, but non-local hidden variable theories survive it (such as the Bohm interpretation and the transactional interpretation), as do local hidden variable theories which deny the Bell theorem’s assumptions about the nature of measurement, such as superdeterminist local hidden variable theories.
An MWI universe would be hard to simulate though. There's an unknown vast number of branches.
Are you saying that some things are just not simulable, given a sufficiently large and powerful computer, or that the universe is or might be infinite?
If the universe is real, not simulation.
If you know the position and speed, everything, about every particle, then you should be able to extrapolate the future by calculating it. The problem is you need a computer the size of the universe to do that calculation.
So even thought the map is the territory, equal scale, and you have the map. It is little worthless because the map ends up being reality.
Edit: Little different than the idea that if this is simulation, you can do clipping and only render what we see. I'm saying the entire universe is 'real'.
If the universe is not infinite, and if individual particles and waves are calculable, it follows that one can postulate a larger universe capable of simulating it, or a large enough log book in this example.
What I find interesting is looking at whether some observable things look like they might be performance optimizations, or even "magic seeds" (as in RNG seeds.)
No proof of a simulation obviously, but maybe hints.
> If you know the position and speed, everything, about every particle, then you should be able to extrapolate the future by calculating it.
But isn't that the exact thing that quantum mechanics refutes? You cannot know the future just from the past; you can only know the probabilities of different futures.
OK, but if you own the machine, you can just pick the outcome you want, or draw it from the distributions at random. We (observers inside the machine) cannot know the future of course.
Yes. I referred to the randomness that would prevent this, "once that is solved".
Guess I'm in the camp that eventually we'll find some model or discover something new, to discover what is behind the randomness, so it is no longer just random. But, yes, that is big IF.
Until then, with current theories, we couldn't do these calculations. They'd just be approximations accounting for some randomness.
Many-Worlds doesn’t contain or require any randomness.
I guess for whatever reason you don’t consider that to be the correct discovery?
> The problem is you need a computer the size of the universe to do that calculation.
I’m not sure were you get that idea from. The amount of calculations we can do, per say, 1 000 000 molecules dedicated to the calculation has absolutely skyrocketed, and will continue to skyrocket.
"The amount of calculations we can do, per say, 1 000 000 molecules dedicated to the calculation "
Lets say it takes 100 molecules in a circuit to calculate 1 particles state. Then you already would need a universe 100X the size to calculate our 1X size universe.
I'm assuming all particles, not that this is somehow clipping and only rendering what we see. I'm not talking about the brain in box simulation, I'm talking about idea that entire universe is out there. What would it take to calculate every position of every particle.
If I took the binary representation of that log and XOR'ed it with a random binary string, then would the result also have observers with the same observations?
Good question? :) I'd say no.
How about an exact copy of the log book, but with one bit flipped. Voila, mostly universal physics.
Ok but the act of writing it down would always take longer than the actual unfolding of the universe itself. Just like the halting problem, we can’t skip ahead at any point and we have no idea what will come next.
Sure, but the timebases are different. Maybe it took the butterflypeople a thousand butterflyweeks to write it out.
Let me restate the metaphysics a bit differently. Let's say there's no us, no butterflypeople, nothing at all. Entropy reigns supreme, no information is organized.
Now add the butterflypeople. They write the humanpeople's log book. Information exists in organized form. The humanpeople's bits have been divined out of the great entropic nothing. Maybe that's all it takes?
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/505/
Is there anything testable or falsifiable here? Otherwise it's just preaching beliefs.
I don't understand how computational irreducibility matters for the perception of time. Surely, even a computationally reducible universe could be so insanely expensive to predict that it wouldn't matter?
I also don't understand why our inability to predict the future is related to our perception of time.
Overall, my impression is that this is an essay in philosophy (i.e, devoid of any content) rather than science.
Is any of what he’s saying here, something he hasn’t essentially already said before?
The parts of this which were a little surprising to me (e.g. the bit about comparing time to heat, and the bit about running out of steps to do at an event horizon) iirc all linked to a thing posted a while ago?
I don’t share his enthusiasm for the phrase “computational irreducibility”. I would prefer to talk about e.g. no-speedup theorems.
There's "digital physics" which goes back to the late 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics.
The connection between heat/entropy and time is well explored. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_as_an_arrow_of_time
It has been said before, but by Stephen Wolfram.
It feels like this could be a perfectly decent article if he toned down his ego and referenced existing work (other than his own).
But I don't think that's possible for him.
How would a bag shaped universe experience time? https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?si=9Ga7PCeac4EV4Y4_
Seems like an appropriate post on a day when the Nobel of Physics was awarded not for Physics discoveries but for computer science...
But from Wheeler's "it from bit" to Wolfram's computational universes, the question is: where is the beef.
Now, there might be ultimately something worthwhile with the obsession with digi-physics. Mental models that seemed disparate may merge and become fruitful. It doesnt even have to be a fully formed toolkit. Newton's invention of calculus was kinda sketchy. But he was explaining things with it, things that were not undestood before.
Wolfram does offer an interesting alternative to viewing the universe as a manifold with a tensor (the GR view). He believes it's a graph with computational rules. Are they the same? Mathematically, manifolds have a clear notion of dimension. This affects things like the inverse square rule. Wolfram's view of the ruliad, an evolving graph with rules, does bring up the question of dimension.
But at the end of the day he needs to make a concrete prediction that differs than the current view in order to have people devote a lot of time studying his world view. He's a brilliant guy and the Wolfram Language is fantastic, but he really needs to humble himself enough to value the work of convincing others.
Worth noting this is ultimately the problem with string theory: String theory does provide a suite of mathematical tools which can solve real physics problems and give valid answers but they're known physics problems that can also be solved with other tools.
To be useful as a theoretical framework it always needed to be able to predict something which only string theory could - as a "more accurate view of reality".
Which is the same problem here: you've got to make a prediction, an accessible prediction, and ideally also not introduce any new incompatibilities.
Where it's nowadays standard practice in science to conceive of time as the dimension along which events are tagged, I would suggest the opposite: process, as a sequence of events, induces time. But also in the modern conception, time is derived from atomic events produced by a nuclear source. So, fundamentally the two conceptions are the same, but the process conception allows for greater freedom in what the underlying process may entail.
Physics does not explain flow of time at all. If one films a thrown ball, physics can tell from few frames its speed or where the ball is on the following or previous frames. But it tells nothing about why, when see the film, we perceive the ball moving. Articles like the above misses this.
In fact there is no even notion of direction of time in physics. All physical models are time-reversible. And even if we observe violation of, say, CPT, in nature, it still will not explain while we perceive time flowing in a particular direction.
This is very well discussed in the book “Time’s Arrow” by Huw Price.
The author discusses some of these points. One excerpt:
> But even at a much more mundane level there’s a certain crucial relationship between space and time for observers like us. The key point is that observers like us tend to “parse” the world into a sequence of “states of space” at successive “moments in time”. But the fact that we do this depends on some quite specific features of us, and in particular our effective physical scale in space as compared to time.
> In our everyday life we’re typically looking at scenes involving objects that are perhaps tens of meters away from us. And given the speed of light that means photons from these objects get to us in less than a microsecond. But it takes our brains milliseconds to register what we’ve seen. And this disparity of timescales is what leads us to view the world as consisting of a sequence of states of space at successive moments in time.
> If our brains “ran” a million times faster (i.e. at the speed of digital electronics) we’d perceive photons arriving from different parts of a scene at different times, and we’d presumably no longer view the world in terms of overall states of space existing at successive times.
> The same kind of thing would happen if we kept the speed of our brains the same, but dealt with scenes of a much larger scale (as we already do in dealing with spacecraft, astronomy, etc.).
This still misses the biggest question about the nature of time. The problem is not that we perceive the world as a set of space-like frames. The problem is why our consciousness perceives the frames moving from one to another at all and in particular direction.
Is it a question about nature of time or about our perception of time though?
Because the universe is evolving from a low entropy state to a high one.
Surely Wofram deserves the Nobel as much as Hopfield and Hinton? Not for this stuff of course (which I doubt many take seriously), but because he also provided us with an amazing computational tool without which physics would be very far behind where it is today?
[And at least I knew his name already unlike our current laureates whom I just had to look up!]
This year is an exception because of the AI Gen AI Artificial Intelligence AI AI zeitgeist.
If we keep giving the physics Nobel to people building computer tools, soon it will have to be renowned physicist Linus Torvalds, whose computational platform underlies every big physics experiment.
I'm not sure physicists would be thrilled if we keep going in that direction.
I think this is one of the rare times I feel comfortable speculating that had he not created Mathematica than someone else would have.
There was a demand and plenty of people with interest.
He was just in the right place with the right set of skills to execute on it before others and won the market in its infancy. Also it's a small enough market that the like of Mircosoft didn't feel the need to come in and crush him like they did Lotus 1-2-3.
I suspect you are right - but multiple Nobel prizes have gone to people who got there only very slightly ahead of others in the race. Would be tough to argue that there are many prizes which are for work that wouldn't have been done within a decade of when the winner actually did do it.
So you can't go back in time for the same reason you can't go left in Super Mario Bros.
Fascinating, but I really wish this work was being published as a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals. Otherwise it’s hard to take the work seriously.
Its certainly interesting, though the language its couched in wouldn't be found in any philosophical discussion on time. This is all to say that it deals with concepts that have been discussed in philosophy for a long time, and these insights wouldn't be considered "new" to someone from say mid-19th century Prussia. Certainly the "progressive unfolding of the truth," in qualitatively different steps which Wolfram adopts here as his concept of time is no different from Hegel's concept of time and the movement of history. I would recommend, for anyone interested in this sort of thing, to just read the "Preface" to his Phenomenology of Spirit.[0]
[0]https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%2...
Okay. Time is a computation. Patterned or otherwise predictable computations can be performed instantly and thus are not time. Only results that can’t be precomputed are part of our perceptions. That’s what I got out of it.
You have to figure time would carry on even if nothing else was happening . . .
. . . at the time ;)
I believe it's simply a unit of measurement we use to understand the movement or rhythm on which the universe operates, so it could be termed the "progress of computation" if that makes more sense but it's all in the same effort.
Discussed in Permutation City
The bit in Permutation City about siphoning compute by exploiting the magnitudes of vector computations as a kind of scratch space out of algorithms that only needed the resulting angles… wonder if you could modify the DoRA parameter-efficient finetuning algorithm to do something like that lol, since it also splits up the new weights into angular and magnitude components..
Yeah. I'm in the middle of writing a book about this, but in a sense it was also discussed by the Pythagoreans. And they (correctly, I think,) went a step further:
"The Pythagoreans too used to say that numerically the same things occur again and again. It is worth setting down a passage from the third book of Eudemus' Physics in which he paraphrases their views:
‘One might wonder-whether or not the same time recurs as some say it does. Now we call things 'the same' in different ways: things the same in kind plainly recur - e.g. summer and winter and the other seasons and periods; again, motions recur the same in kind - for the sun completes the solstices and the equinoxes and the other movements; But if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur - that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else - then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.’"
- Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 732.23-33.
Branching paths, "all possible mathematics," etc. In a universe which appears to be discrete, which can support finitist arguments, and where the potential number of paths is starkly finite -- this eventually leads to the conclusion that all paths eventually recur.
Strictly speaking, it only leads to the conclusion that eventually the universe will enter a loop passing through a finite number of states.
There’s no requirement that the current state is part of the loop. Or indeed that any state containing conscious observers is.
He literally only cites himself in that article…
https://media1.tenor.com/m/v6Awsd0YO7IAAAAd/metal-gear-risin...
when you die, people say that your time has ended. Does anyone know scientifically speaking what happens to time for a dead person
The web became trashed over a decade ago.
Time and space probably belong to consciousness, rather than the real world. The objective "true" reality may be utterly incomprehensible in its complexity, but we can imagine a "slice" of that reality that arbitrarily defines space and time so that the interior of that slice follows some reasonable rules. That slice of reality can be thought of as a high-level consciousness that defines rules of our physics. Other slices of the same reality are possible, GR-like or QM-like, including those that are computational and discrete in nature. One universe, but many interpretations. Within each slice of reality, it may be possible to define smaller subsets of reality, corresponding to smaller consciousness, down to the human or even more primitive levels. So what Wolfram is describing may be true, objectively, to the observers of a computational slice of the universe, just like the MWI may be simultaneously true to the observers of the MWI slice of reality.
Almost like time is the stack and space is the heap.
Meh. Almost.
I really think that Wolfram's descent into fringe science has hurt a lot of well meaning people that don't know better and think that because he's developed useful software that he should be listened to in these domains.
Oh maybe because he has a PhD in particle physics from Caltech ?
Eric Weinstein also has a PhD in physics; it doesn't preclude you being (or becoming) a crank.
What is specifically crank about his theory? From outsiders perspective having theories that require a bunch of extra dimensions just to make the math work sound no less cranky.
It’s part of their life cycle https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
The crackpot trajectory of otherwise smart people is fairly well trodden with a number of indicators and nobel laureates who have walked it - one of which is when people start stepping well outside their field...and then also tend to start stepping into "the biggest problems" of wherever they point themselves.
I call it helicoptering, my old boss used to love to do it. Helicopter down onto a problem, act like everyone that already studied it was an idiot and hadn’t spent their life trying to solve X, stir a bunch of dust up, accomplish nothing, and helicopter away again to something else.
> If we were not computationally bounded, we could “perceive the whole of the future in one gulp” and we wouldn’t need a notion of time at all.
Maybe, if we assume we aren't axiomatically bound, despite knowing that we are (but that knowledge is rarely in context, so we can only know it sometimes...once again: time...weird).
"Thought is Time."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
You could perceive (maybe? Depends on how it's hooked up) a future (a simulation based the information you have), but there's no reason to think that's what the future is with certainty. Map/territory stuff too.
> but there's no reason
What is it that you refer to here?
> perceive the whole of the future in one gulp
"Therefore, as regards such knowledge, they know all things at once" Summa
I guess I’ll just wait for Sabine to say something about this.
I'm guessing she'll be pretty sarcastic as she's not overly fond of mathematical theories that aren't testable, to say the least.
groans in metaphysicist
Disregard anything Stephen Wolfram says about anything other than his Mathematica software. He's a pretentious, arrogant twat who thinks he's unlocked the keys to the Universe and is trying to convince the rest of the world of his brilliance.
