The Wolfram Physics Project

Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft also has a cellular automaton theory and one of his conclusions is: "If engineers ever succeed in making such quantum computers, it seems to me that the CAT is falsified; no classical theory can explain quantum mechanics." By "such quantum computers" he means computers that can run Shor's algorithm. "...but factoring a number with millions of digits into its prime factors will not be possible – unless fundamentally improved classical algorithms turn out to exist."

https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548

[warning: uninformed tangent]

A more optimistic interpretation could be that quantum & non-quantum machines will be similar because we have huge leaps to make in non-quantum computer architecture.

This is strictly a theoretical thought-experiment for me, but it has always intrigued me that quantum computers sort-of model the problem itself in the hardware circuit & shove a bunch of qubits through it.

In digital computers, we mostly model Boolean logical structures & then, in software, translate our problem into that Boolean logic. This translation into discrete steps places a limit on the theoretical efficiency.

However, perhaps there is room in analog computing hardware to more closely model specific types of optimization problems & then shove a bunch of electrons through it (shouldn’t the electrons follow the path of least resistance?).

Just a few years laters, people quickly translated this to graphs - a network. The spacial interpretation aside, the idea surely should hold for higher dimensional social relations.

And that's where we reach and interesting point that Wolfram writes about: These system are useful, as long as we can calculate or derive a state. If all we can do is simulate it, then it's much less useful. And indeed, creating such models is the true "art".

So while the "idea" of using relations and hypergraphs lays a foundation that I am sympathetic to, I also feel like the things "on the to do list" are, indeed, the meat of the issue.

What is the "monster" in this case? Obsession? That's just a feeling; in a vacuum, there's nothing wrong with it. No philosopher, Nietzsche included, would say "obsession" is always bad. If stuff like that could be dealt with in absolutes, then people like Nietzsche wouldn't have spent their lives writing books about the nuance of it. Clearly, for any feeling or action, "obsession" included, the actor and the object both matter. There is a qualitative difference between self-obsession and obsession with someone else.

I fail to see how this is an example of how we "collectively create our own demons." That's a cute turn of phrase, sure, but in its original usage, "demons" refers to one's own insecurities and internal emotional challenges, not every bad thing that exists. Clearly, if you think about it with some nuance, some "demons" exist outside of oneself. Nobody believes that people trapped in poverty have "collectively created" the demon of inequality. Nobody believes that victims of violence "collectively created" the trauma they experienced. In reality, some demons simply exist, at no fault of one's own; the people complaining about Wolfram didn't collectively invent him. He exists, he's writing and funding these huge research projects, and that's a material fact external to the people complaining about him.

As for your last point-yes, technically, everything we think and feel comes from inside us. But that doesn't make everything we think and feel the same.

Just btw, I think that it's generally cringey to vaguely quote Nietzsche (or any philosopher) to defend a point, unless you are a philosopher writing to other philosophers, or you're citing some unique idea of his. And I hate this whole style of writing, to be honest, where one papers over any nuanced interrogation of their beliefs with shoddy references to pop-philosophy.