How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything

It's pretty wild to have gone from watching a lecture from Neil Turok (who is currently my favorite theoretical physicist with a "here's my idea for what physics currently has wrong with its model") and looking at Wolfram's rambling.

Between this and the recent "techno-optimist" rant, I get the sense that maybe we shouldn'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.

Michael Jordon didn't have a stellar baseball record and likely wouldn't have made the cut for a team if he wasn'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.

You don't think it's implausible? Reading this line didn't set off any red flags?

"And that the structure of space and everything in it is just defined by the network of relations between these elements—that we might call atoms of space. It’s very elegant—but deeply abstract."

How about this one, shortly after describing "in the history of science there's four models":

"But now there’s something even more: in our Physics Project things become multicomputational, with many threads of time, that can only be knitted together by an observer." Wow, one of the four models in the history of science is the thing you just came up with?

Or this one: "But how is that rule picked? Well, actually, it isn’t. Because all possible rules are used. And we’re building up what I call the ruliad: the deeply abstract but unique object that is the entangled limit of all possible computational processes."

Dude overfitted basic physics with a model and thinks he discovered a theory of everything.

"OK, so the ruliad is everything." Pythagoras move over, there's a new mathematician's Monad in town.

"And there are two crucial facts about us. First, we’re computationally bounded—our minds are limited. And second, we believe we’re persistent in time—even though we’re made of different atoms of space at every moment.

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."

How convenient.

"We can think of this as a place in the ruliad described using the concept of a cat in a party hat:" Wait, what now?

"Maybe we need a promptocracy where people write prompts instead of just voting." This is still on the rails for you?

"Before our Physics Project we didn’t know if our universe really was computational. But now it’s pretty clear that it is. And from that we’re inexorably led to the ruliad—with all its vastness, so hugely greater than all the physical space in our universe." Oh great, it's pretty clear.

I can't imagine that he hasn't convinced respected physicists of his claims.

Did he show them the video of the cat in the party hat becoming a "cat island" and then turning into abstract concept spaces mirroring the development of actual spacetime from the big bang? He should definitely lead with that next time.

That is a better answer than the article.

That doesn’t provide any guarantees that he’s not evolved into, a crank with money.

Looking at Physics historically there are multiple examples of scientists who did productive and fully credible work in their prime and later ended up stuck on crank theories.

> the theory is not able to make any new predictions (yet)

AFAIK, the theory is not able to make _any_ predictions yet.

It purports to be one of those "theories of everything" in the form of a kind of "universe building kit".

But all it produces are a bunch of pretty "hypergraphs" that have some loose analogies with some physical theories.

If, at the end of the day, one's "theory of everything" can't replicate classical mechanics, the spectra of Hydrogen atoms, and the laws of thermodynamics, then it probably doesn't warrant bloviating on the big bang, black holes and information theory as Mr Wolfram is apt to do.