Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that the fundamental thing that Wolfram is saying is that reality is non-local. Locality itself is an emergent phenomenon. This is his clever way of getting around Bell's Theorem. His networks don't require space to exist, they are space. When we think of spacetime, we think of a manifold, and he's saying that what looks like a manifold at a macro level is really just a discrete network at a micro leve…
But a theory is supposed to model something that actually exists, yes? So for instance when philosophers made the conjecture for the existence of the atom, their theory was either correct or not, on the basis of whether the atom actually existed in nature. So if Wolfram is correct, then there exists at the lowest level of nature a network, upon which everything else follows. Wolfram is trying to describe reality, som…
The existence of the atom, however, is not what is being predicted. A theory should predict the sensor readings of particular instruments during particular experiments. Those sensor readings are what is real; "The Atom" is the abstraction.
The very idea that "things exist" is an abstraction. A thing exists if we can model it, and that model corresponds with reality.