The Wolfram Physics Project

Yeah, I am not seeing the mirroring claimed. Salesman projects a reality distortion field. Potential buyers end up complaining about the RDF during the latest product advertisement. It is clearly a reaction, and in that sense a "mirror", but they aren't copying the behavior by projecting a reality distortion field themselves.

Oy, I've been dreading having to answer this question since I pressed "post" :)

I've decided that I do not have the time or interest in writing the Related Work section for a paper-length blog post touching on an enormous number of fields, some of which I know well and some of which I haven't thought about in a decade. (As an aside, one real and substantive problem with trying to build a research program without taking the time to share a survey and comparison with related work is that you'll have difficulty communicating with others. It will then take extra effort on others' part to build up a knowledge base. Surveying and comparing to related work is hard and thankless but important work. It's not about credit, it's about building up a shared knowledge base.)

However, I can spare an hour or two and take the time to flesh out one or two in order to demonstrate what I mean.

So, I'll make the following offer: is there any particular excerpt from Stephen's blog post to which you would like the CS/PL/info theory analogue? Or, would you prefer me to pick a particular sentence and identify the body of work that explores that question and the major results of that body of work? (I will take this opportunity to emphasize the "about the non-physics side of things" portion of my original post.)

I'm going to link to this thread in other places where people have asked this question instead of monitoring 3 or 4 different threads going forward. I'll do my best to occasionally monitor this thread for requests and do my best to reply. FYI, I probably won't get around to answering more than one reply until the weekend.

I'm talking about a collective phenomenon that accrues out of many individual contributions. Sometimes this is metaphorically called the hivemind.

What builds up in these threads is an obsession with Wolfram that is even more Wolfram-obsessed than the Wolfram-obsession Wolfram is charged with. This is unmistakeable, and always happens the same way. Out of the material of these comments, a Golem arises that is a variation of the same monster. Arguably even more monstrous: at least Wolfram writes about things other than Wolfram, and very interestingly—just in a way that would take a chemist to separate from its packaging.

I wouldn't get too misled by the polarity being opposite (yay Wolfram-me, boo Wolfram-him). That's only one bit of difference, similar to the negative of a photo. The interesting thing is, what does this arch-enemy that springs out of the internet aether want to talk about? Wolfram wolfram wolfram. And what does it hate the most? How fixated on Wolfram he is.

What makes this fascinating is that in its trivial, internet-in-a-teapot way, it is an example of how we collectively create our own demons. Nietzsche famously said about monsters: be careful when fighting them, lest you become one. Other writers have said: whatever you fight, you create; and so on. That is a profound question. The fact that this is a small and somewhat embarrassing case makes the dynamic easier to see. It's as if it had been isolated in a laboratory for the purposes of studying it—a simple example for early in the textbook.

I know it feels like being obsessed with another is the exact opposite of being obsessed with yourself, but that is how self-deception works: we dress something up as its opposite, so we can have it without seeing it. The gateway into seeing it is to look at how it stirs up your emotions. Why do we create such an intense, and intensely personal, picture of someone whom we don't (as you point out) personally know? Where is that activation coming from? From inside us. $monster just furnishes material.

To avoid redundant threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871806

"Perhaps the single most[0] significant idea conveyed within Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and the initial intellectual seedling from which the contents of the book subsequently grow, is the abstract empirical discovery that the “computational universe” - that is, the space of all possible programs - is far richer, more diverse and more vibrant than one might reasonably expect. The fact that such intricate and complex behavior can be exhibited by computational rules as apparently elementary as the Rule 30 and Rule 110 cellular automata, which are so straightforward to represent that they can easily be discovered by systematic enumeration, is profoundly counterintuitive to many people.[1]"

"However, once one has truly absorbed and internalized this realization, it leads to an exceedingly tantalizing possibility: that perhaps, lying somewhere out there in the computational universe, is the rule for our physical universe[2]. If an entity as remarkable as Rule 30 could be found just by an exhaustive search,then perhaps so too can a theory of fundamental physics.[3] The idea that there could exist some elementary computational rule[4] that successfully reproduces the entirety of the physical universe at first seems somewhat absurd, although there does not appear to be any fundamental reason (neither in physics, nor mathematics,nor philosophy) to presume that such a rule could not exist. Moreover, if there is even a remote possibility that such a rule could exist, then it’s slightly embarrassing for us not to be looking for it. The objective of the Wolfram Physics Project is to enact this search.[5]"

[0] There is in fact only one idea in that book, and this is that idea. But is this an original idea? When computer scientists and mathematicians come up with novel results in programming language theory or type theory (or whatever) what is to stop them claiming that they are empirically exploring a "computational universe"?

[1] Probably, but not to programmers, or the computationally literate.

[2] An extraordinary leap within the context of the introduction. Though note, neither is this an original idea, that the universe may be "digital" is not an idea original to Wolfram and it redates his magnum opus by I don't know how many years. Note there are actual physics projects that seek to kick the tyres this hypothesis.

Have you got that so far? A recasting in lofty terms of an unoriginal idea followed by a a giant leap to another unoriginal idea which serves only to motivate the project.

[3] So you say, but this is a giant non-sequitur.

[4] Why just one rule? And the rule hardly runs itself. What does it run on? Great you have a generalised term-rewriting system (how completely un-novel). "What rewrites the terms?* How is this not the first question you ask yourself?

[5] Hey, why not just say: “You know that "it from bit" idea? We have a hunch that term rewriting hypergraphs is the way to go. These are our explorations. We've encountered stuff that echoes contemporary physics.” Why not write the intro like that? Not grandiose enough for you?

===

Any sufficiently worthy "it from bit" project must answer the following questions.

(1) Given that we know that any sufficiently powerful computing system can emulate any another what motivates your choosing this particular computational system and model?

(2) Demonstrate convincing physics (not toy models)

(3) Make testable predictions – this is not something for "down the line", this is what theories of anything must do. No predictions, no dice, no matter how nice.

(4) Is it software all the way down? If so, how? If not, what is the hardware and what does that imply?

(5) I would direct this last point at all TOE-heads like Wolfram and Weinstein and whoever. Why does it have to be simple? Why does it have to be elegant? Why is it always encoded in the formal systems you happen to play around with (geometry for Weinstein, term-rewriting systems / cellular automata for Wolfram).

===

I think the wider scientific community needs to call time on savants like Weinstein and Wolfram.