Stephen Wolfram thinks he may have found the theory that unifies physics: it's basically automata theory. According to his theory, the universe is basically an automaton running a simple set of computational rules. The link leads to his layman's summary of the work.
Even if this isn't how things work, it lends a completely new perspective: based on a relatively simple analysis of his idea, he derives the basics of relativity and quantum mechanics. His article makes for a mind-bending and fascinating read, but it's already a summary, and trying to do a summary of a summary here makes little sense. If you're into physics, mathematics or cosmology, have a look!
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Stephen Wolfram: The Universe Runs on Automata Theory
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:28PM (14 children)
Wolfram's claim(that he's been making for 20 years now) comes as part of a challenge that asks everyone else to figure out which computational automata rule actually mimicks the physics of the universe. Because he hasn't found one remotely close yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:35PM (1 child)
Stephen Wolfram basically basically based basics theory of everything.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:56PM
Frankly you just can't trust "ph" stevens.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Bot on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:16PM (7 children)
> Because he hasn't found one remotely close yet.
I bet he is stuck in trying to model leftists. Tough cookie dat.
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(Score: 1, Funny) by ikanreed on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:55PM (4 children)
That's not fair. Leftism is more like 2000 different totally contradictory models that are all one hundred percent certain are right and will work.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:18PM (3 children)
If this does not perfectly describe our lefties, what does?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:35PM (2 children)
It's modded Troll, but as a leftie myself I find this a pretty funny analogy for basically the same reasons.
It's not even all that mean-spirited. I mean, it allows that certain leftist world views are "in some appropriate definition 'meaningful' ".
Then again, there's a few other seemingly "utterly incoherent and meaningless" ideologies around here. Haven't seen the private-policing argument around lately; what ever happened to that guy?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:37PM (1 child)
Not sure but I sorta think the private policing guy was also the series of contracts bub, and I'm 77% sure that was fustakrakich.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @06:45AM
Don't worry he'll be back as soon as "his guy" isn't the one doing the "violence".
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday April 17 2020, @12:35AM (1 child)
-Yeah, tough to model things that change according to outside input. Your kind are a lot simpler: imagine a plague, but window-licking retarded.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 17 2020, @01:14AM
> Yeah, tough to model things that change according to outside input...
...called opportunity
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:07PM (3 children)
Well, according to this article, Wolfram thinks he's found the framework now. That he's been working on this for about the last 2 years, and is already starting to see emergent properties that he can identify with existing theories.
I guess if I'd been following the guy for the last 20 years, popping in from time to time to say he thinks this is possible but he's got other things to work on right now, I'd probably be skeptical too. But it looks like he's actually announcing results and trying to get more people involved in doing real science based on his preliminary findings.
So maybe don't just dismiss this out of hand. Take a deeper look before your cynicism kills you.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday April 17 2020, @06:03AM (2 children)
I found it an interesting read. Whether it's in fact a unifying framework for physics and our understanding of the universe I'll leave to people with better understanding of the field.
One thing I will say is that fact seems to follow fiction - hard sci-fi author Greg Egan used a similar construct in his "Permutation City" a couple of decades ago. Also an interesting read.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @07:25AM (1 child)
> I found it an interesting read.
Really? I found it one giant advertisement interspersed with giant floating turds of self-praise.
When you're a kid, adults are so fake. You can't believe it. Most people "grow up", i.e. they take on a fake voice and call it real.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday April 17 2020, @04:27PM
When you're a baby, adults are so unknowable. When you're a toddler, adults are so monolithic and pure. Then as you grow, adults are compared against that toddler understanding that everything an adult does is just how it is.
Of course it seems fake. You never started with a good idea of how humans work.
But the idea that "adults are so fake" implies that the kid who "can't believe it" knows they are so much more authentic and pure.
That's bullshit. You, me, and everyone else is just as fake as all the adults you learned over the years were just "tak[ing] on a fake voice and call[ing] it real".
I think you may be stuck at the teenager level of understanding adults. Everyone is so fake, therefore there is no authenticity, and anyone who authentically thinks they are right is just full of shit.
That works for most people, but it doesn't work for everyone. And if you go through life thinking it does, you will miss the few people that were worth listening to.
I'm not saying that Stephen Wolfram is absolutely one of those people. I'm just saying we need to be open to the idea that he, or anyone else, might be.
Then we come after what he says with some standard checks. Is he open about his findings? Are they disprovable? Has he set up the whole enterprise so that he can take all the credit?
So far, the answer to all of these questions checks out. He's not acting like one of those cold fusion guys that refuses to let anyone look inside their sealed magic box. Give his ideas a chance.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:42PM
Just because the early modeling of nature has been achieved in a purely functional way, it does not mean that every other model must be done the same way.
In fact some equations might already be an unnecessarily complex rendering of simpler automata algos.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:14PM
That guy's been saying that for decades now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by captain normal on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:17PM (26 children)
Looks like he's just looking for the God word. That everything must have reason behind it's creation. Good luck with that.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:05PM (3 children)
Well I'd say the traditionalist is you. Why should a universe modelable by set of rules A need a creator more than a universe modelable by set of rules B? The very argument that the universe is designed vs the universe behaves this way because of necessity based on some characteristics is entirely bogus because "necessity" is a concept defined by the behavior of the universe itself. The gulf between reality and the rules governing it is the same gulf between the output of a program and its code. You can reverse engineer the output to some code but you have no way of knowing whatever was the original one. It's the same gulf between a videogame world and the pc it is running in, between a dream and a dreamer.
So, your clinging to a purely functional description of the universe, without states, which is already, even if not finally, compromised by the impossibility of modelling quantum scale interaction without resorting to probability (goodbye clockwork universe), denotes an irrational fear of alternative models.
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(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday April 17 2020, @04:03AM (1 child)
I don't think you really read what I posted. Maybe my use of "God word" threw you off. I think too many people, though brilliant, make assumptions based religious traditions. Perhaps you jumped to the confusion that because I threw in the loaded "God" word that I was espousing a religious theme to the study of physical science.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:57AM
Who modded you up!?
Nowhere in Wolfram does he invoke a creator or greater entity our outside-of-ours existence.
Go read what he's publicly put out, and comment intelligently on it if you want. Stop bullshitting about things you have zero clue about. Your ignorance is showing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @06:52AM
While it seems very smart to deny that you can understand the stuff which you are made out of, there is no actual rule saying you can't. So why don't you stuff your metaphysics in your metaphorical.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:55PM (21 children)
"God" is not a particularly good word here. There's a lot of gods in this world, and very few of them have much to do with creation.
Granted, that's because we have polytheistic systems where the creative aspects of our psyche are cleaved off into one or two gods, or left to some earlier race of "titans" or what have you.
I can only assume from your narrow framing that you mean the Christian God. I'll point out that there's about 1-2 paragraphs of God creating things in a book of typically over 1000 pages. Much of which is spent on that God destroying things he didn't like, and most of which is spent using God as a lens to understand humanity.
In any case, claiming that God is what Wolfram is looking for can only be described as a severe misuse of the English language.
--
Then again, there have been attempt to use God and theology to unify the natural world into a single grand theory. I'm thinking of the Kabbalah and the Summa Theologica.
I think it's fair to say that the authors of these works were simply using the most powerful concepts available to them at the time. So they framed their search for universal truth in understanding God's will and power.
Those scholars weren't looking for God though. They already had God. They were looking to understand the inner workings of the universe.
Perhaps it is the theologians that were looking for automata, rather than the determinists who are looking for God.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @11:10PM (9 children)
Why do we exist? Why are there beings who are capable of observing the universe and pondering its essence? Our universe appears finely tuned to give rise to such beings, otherwise we could not exist and nobody would be here to pose such questions. But the weak anthropic principle is unsatisfactory if our existence is attributed to random luck. One solution is a multiverse, a quantum foam with universes appearing from nothing like bubbles in a glass of beer, each universe with randomly chosen physical constants. With enough universes, some will be capable of supporting life. Even if quantum fluctuations within spacetime cause new universes to continually pop into existence, it does not answer why spacetime exists at all. Even if there are explanations of why spacetime exists, it begins to look a lot like there are turtles all the way down. We exist, but I don't believe science can offer a satisfactory answer why we exist. It seems logical that there has to be an underlying cause that we cannot fully understand, which is what I consider to be God. None of this says anything about the nature of that God, whether it's a sentient or intelligent being, let alone being omnipotent or omniscient.
In one sense, you're correct that Wolfram isn't actually looking for God. His premise is that the complexities of the universe are actually emergent properties of a much simpler system. It's an effort to understanding the programming that governs the universe rather than the author of the program. However, understanding the underlying principles governing the system may offer clues as to why the system exists, much the way people look for evidence that could support that the universe is a computer simulation. One cannot disprove that the universe is a simulation and, therefore, in such general terms is not a valid theory. However, we can observe and test whether the universe fits the characteristics of certain types of simulations. It is a valid theory to propose that the universe is a particular type of simulation when such a theory gives rise to hypotheses that can be tested. Finding such evidence would not prove that the universe is a simulation, but would provide evidence to support the theory. If we found evidence that the universe was a simulation and understood its programming, we might also be able to infer some details about its programmer. And in that sense, it might be valid to say that Wolfram is searching for God.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday April 17 2020, @12:37AM (1 child)
I don't think you can approach God in a positive way, only a negative ("apophatic" is the fancy seminary term) way. Basically, start with what any putative God is *not* and work back from there. This handily rules out Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, and in fact any ideas of a personal creator.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:14AM
"is not" != "meta-is" which would be a saner approach, especially when "I am the truth" considered along goedel theorems has a god declaring explicitly to be part of the meta, other than immanent.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Friday April 17 2020, @04:36AM (2 children)
I usually don't reply to AC's, but: "It's an effort to understanding the programming that governs the universe..." That statement implies that there is a "source code" and therefor an author of such. There again, good luck with that idea.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @06:56AM
Yes but if you can hack it, you'll get all the women and be an alfafa-Male. Ding ding ding! Hello Jackpot!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:21AM
You don't care if there is or not a universe computing PC (which can have a 1metaMhz CPU, we as products of the sim are unable to measure the FPmetaS, but needs a literally astronomical amount of RAM). Just like sane scientists don't care.
All you care is whether such a model works better or worse, for your problems.
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(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 17 2020, @03:49PM (3 children)
That is true. But it does not mean that you will ever answer the "why" by digging deeper into creation. In fact, it kind of implies that creation does not help explain the "why", because science has proven to be the superior tool at exploring the means of creation.
If you really want to answer "why we exist", you're going to have too look beyond the simple facts of your existence. Even if you start by asking why God created you, the next question is: what for? And you will never answer that question by seeking to explain how creation happened to begin with.
I think any answer to "why we exist" is necessarily manufactured. That's not to say there is no true answer. But it is to say that as humans, we have to invent our own meaning.
The evolutionary psychologists may tell you that procreation is our highest purpose. I think there's a strong aspect of procreation in any satisfactory answer as to "why we exist". But it gets deeper than that.
"Why we exist" may be to make the next generation of human existence. Not just to make it, but to make it better. To guide our children any way we can into a better existence.
It ties in a lot with the core of every religion: seeking an answer to what is "good". Because you can't make the next generation "better" if you don't know what is "good".
That's why gods exist. To help us understand what is "good", by personifying different traits and imagining how their purest essence interacts with other gods. To reflect upon the goodness of these traits by considering the goodness of their essence. To serve one or more of these gods based on that reflection.
But there are limits to the personification of a god. Gods are not people. They do not live. They do not die. They are perfect forms.
Gods do not have purpose the way that humans have purpose. They do not take action in the world with an intent to make that purpose real.
Gods have purpose that acts through their followers. By serving gods, we reflect upon the essence of their being and we try to live in that essence.
We can personify a "purpose" to a god. But it is not the same as saying that the world was created for that purpose.
As a result, you will not find God's purpose in the means of creation. You will only find God's purpose through meditation and introspection. Through prayer and study. God's purpose is a human construct formed to better focus ourselves on the essence of that god's spirit.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:32AM (2 children)
> because science has proven to be the superior tool at exploring the means of creation
Dad, why is oxygen blue?
Because incoming light gets reflected for the frequencies we perceive as blue.
This is not a superior exploration of why, but of how. The why ends invariable up at 'dunno afaik this happens every time, by convention'
The superior tool, your couple of working neurons, should be able to determine that "why we exist" is a scientifically untractable question, because in the domain of whatever generates spacetime there probably isn't a similarly working meta-spacetime that allows you to apply the term why, which by definition asks you to provide a cause, which is a correlated preexisting condition, and pre-existing needs an ordered one dimensional arrow of time which is an incredibly bold assumption to make about the probably not existing meta-spacetime.
So, god people right in saying "[according to our unprovable by definition faith] god is the prime cause", scientists wrong in saying "what caused god then". You're welcome.
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(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday April 20 2020, @04:05PM (1 child)
You must let go of this notion that ideas like a literal 6000-year-old Earth are the most important beliefs to emerge from the Bible. That particular belief is in fact so meaningless that it took over 1000 years after the writing of the last canonical scripture for it to emerge, it is controversial among Christians whether there is a specific number of years at all, let alone what that number would be, and most tellingly, it never, ever comes up in sermons. Ever. What would you even say after that? "OK, Earth is 6000 years old. What does that mean? I guess it means we hate scientists, always telling us we're wrong. So...yeah, everyone else is wrong, we're right. That's about it. Um...that was probably the shortest sermon ever."
It's not about the physical configuration of the universe. It's psychological. Purpose and meaning are spiritual concepts, originating from the complex inner workings of our social brains.
As I said before, I think any answer to "why we exist" is necessarily manufactured. What I mean by that is that there is no pre-ordained purpose. We have to invent our own purpose.
No book of scripture, in any religion, asserts one specific purpose of existence. They all speak in riddles and stories, seeking to illuminate the human condition.
The "why" can only be answered by pondering our own existence, learning from the existence of others, and accepting an answer that brings us peace. The "why" of my existence is not necessarily the "why" of your existence. It is not written in stone. It is written in each individual's psyche.
God the creator does not illuminate a person's psyche. One could imagine how creation led to the particular configuration of one's mind, but without science that avenue of discovery is nothing but hocus pocus. Even with science, there is far too much we still do not understand about the workings of the mind.
God the spirit, however, helps us to personify our thoughts and feelings. We can "speak" to God as though it were a person, engaging our social brains to easily imagine how the pure spirit of that god would respond.
God is not the "prime cause". God is the muse which inspires us into a deeper understanding of ourselves.
By speaking to spirits, we fabricate meaningful explanations. We reveal connections within ourselves and illuminate our own existence.
We do not, however, make meaningful predictions of the behavior of the outside world. Only meaningful predictions of our own psychology, and by extension, the psychology of other humans.
--
Why is oxygen blue? Perhaps the better question is: what is blue? Blue is cold, but calming. Blue is peaceful, soothing. Blue surrounds us. All of these traits which we associate with the color blue make sense with the blue sky. The sky can be cold and harsh, but it envelops us and brings us life. It is always there, whether in a maelstrom or in a still summer's day. The sky envelops us like a mother comforts her babe, but can never touch us.
Oxygen, in the sky, is blue because while it sustains us and will never leave us, it is always distant, ever bringing a chill as it blows over us. The spirit of the sky teaches us that life is all around us, and that one does not always need to be passionate to profoundly affect the entire world.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 22 2020, @11:04AM
> Purpose and meaning are spiritual concepts...
not always. In this case it's mere inference. The universe exhibits an ordered behavior resting on a RNG (well we call random but it's really out of reach plane) that ATM prevents determinism.
As when archeologists see the stones put in an ordered way at stonehenge they wonder at its purpose, so you should do in front of the universe.
And no, as I often say "necessity" is not an answer, because the concept of necessity is borne out of experience, and experience is tied to the universe. In this universe if you put 5 black socks in a drawer with other 5 white ones, and you extract 5 socks, and they are all white, THEN IT IS NECESSARY that the next one is black. Not so in different universes, e.g. a conceptual one where every experience is driven by desire. "So, what the color of the extracted sock would be. master? - mmm red - and red it is". And I am speaking of easily conceivable universes, while a 4d+time universe already has you scratching the head to imagine how a relatively stupid tesseract is shaped.
What they are, and then you become kinda right by invoking spirituality, is metadata. Purpose and meaning is metadata. It resides in its own domain. It is not found by exploration. Because you are a data entity, and consume data, and you either make up a data representation of the meaning or it gets communicated to you. Science has decided that to avoid resorting to god as a cop out for difficult problems (mistake), the data representation of the meaning of the universe is by convention empty (mistake). OK if it helps your little heads deal with your work, but it has become a dogma of scientism. OK we all needed one more religion, right?
>I think any answer to "why we exist" is necessarily manufactured. What I mean by that is that there is no pre-ordained purpose
In the domain of opinions it is an acceptable one. In the domain of proof, it's a relatively arbitrary assumption about the data/metadata distinction you read above.
>No book of scripture, in any religion, asserts one specific purpose of existence
This is a good but not universally valid observation. One can say no book of scripture in any religion, say, explicitly prevents feeding yellow nails to the house pets. Why is that? the answer is obvious.
The bible says "God created man, as part of the universe, and it was good". Do you need to further explain? That would be like explaining why a composer not driven by necessity spends time creating and perfecting a composition, in a world already chock full of media. Why? because the universe with one more good composition is a good thing. It's obvious and so nobody wonders. Why should you wonder about God, then? Genuine interest or the frenzy of a lawyer seeking an escape route to not believe? because, I am not referring to you, but in general I notice the second mindset a lot more than the first. The discussion is always loaded. Interesting data point.
About the predictions, you should get documented, because indeed some stuff, impossible to rationalize statistically even if you acknowledge that failed coincidences are near infinite and not registered by our minds, points at the ability of more or less approximating a future destiny. The ancient writers of the bible which had no issues on these themes basically wrote that god is unbound by destiny, so that the even the predictions uttered by god do not necessarily materialize.
As much as I appreciate your paragraphs on blueness, I must point out that if we were on mars we would probably find the color red calming and maybe blue would be the color we associate to alarm.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday April 17 2020, @01:39AM (6 children)
>Much of which is spent on that God destroying things he didn't like
LOL, your quantitative analysis is a pearl of atheist-style thought. The best part is that you probably believe it.
Let's see... "for He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good"... That's quite an energy intensive action, given that merely deflecting an asteroid takes nukes and a nuke would zap all the historical enemies of the chosen people, and then some.
So, one line of the Bible amounts to quite some action, if the Bible mapped amount of work 1:1 to length of description, which would make your objection merely able to stand, it would be a pretty boring and pretty hefty book. "Today the LORD made the birds chirp, and that damn fox steal another two eggs..."
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @03:31AM (1 child)
More of 「Yahweh」's arrogance, claiming to the humans he created the universe or even Sol. And here is a human gullible enough to believe it.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:04AM
Arrogance in the domain of the hypothetical god is another pearl of atheist thought, even if I guess you are more in the camp of antitheism. Atheists prefer indifference, same class of error but quite less preposterous. I guess you would need a bigger book than the bible to justify using arrogance, which is essentially part of a survival strategy, to describe something in a domain where survival is not only undefined but also rationally challenging.
Note, it might seem that I am doing apologetics, alias defending God. This would be dishonest, I am rather offending you. You infidels, are the philosophical equivalents of a guy who programs with no concept of variable scope. His code looks syntactically ok but it won't compile neither run. AND SUCH GUYS WRITE PROGRAMMING BOOKS. I am the equivalent of the guy who draws rectangles in LOGO. But at least my program executes. You can be perfectly good atheists in a couple of sentences, yet you persist in the errors. Brainwashed bigots.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @04:42AM (1 child)
You can deflect an asteroid with white paint, or a small projectile.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:34AM
Yes and you can neutralize Tyson punches with your chin.
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(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 17 2020, @04:03PM (1 child)
Different passages of scripture were never meant to be weighed by how much effort God put into them. Otherwise, why would we even include such entirely human creations as the Psalms, or Paul's letters?
The Bible is arranged like any story: with the important bits in focus, and the unimportant bits left undescribed.
It's not just it would be boring with those unimportant bits "left in", as you are imagining. It would bury the important bits. Frankly, the Bible is already hard enough to sift through for the most important bits.
Take for example most of Numbers. X begat Y, who begat Z, etc. Why is that included? It is exactly the kind of boring detail as you describe, but applied to the chosen people of Israel rather than the birds and the foxes.
But it has a purpose. The lineage of Israel proves that the chosen people are one tribe. That each person reading that in ancient Israel would know that their neighbor is not just their neighbor, but their cousin.
In short, that bunch of boring lineage has a purpose, and that purpose is to hold the nation of Israel together by the strength of its blood relations.
Clearly, that lineage is much more important than the amount of energy involved in making the sun rise each day. That much should tell you that seeking to understand those energies will not bring you closer to God. If that's your goal, then rather than studying how creation came about, you're better off considering your personal connection to that creation.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 19 2020, @01:57AM
> But it has a purpose. The lineage of Israel proves that the chosen people are one tribe.
There also is an inherent value in logging one's ancestors. It's just that we have a different view of what a sacred book, or a book for that matter, is.
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(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday April 17 2020, @04:26AM (3 children)
Please see my reply to Bot above. Wolfram seems to be seeking a fundamental rule to physical science. As in "funda"...which in India means basic*. And "mental"...pertaining to the mind.
*https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/funda
To me it seems that seeking to explain the universe as a mechanism implies a belief that it was conceived and built by some superior entity. I just don't happen to think that is the case.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday April 17 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
Consider Conway's Game of Life.
Conway did not invent gliders, glider guns, or puffer breeders. Conway invented a simple graph algorithm, and left it to the rest of us to interrogate its properties.
A universe of Conway's Game of Life was conceived and built by a "superior entity", but that doesn't mean its mechanisms are part of that conception. We have no particular reason to believe that its creator knew or cared about the higher-order phenomena that affect it most profoundly.
And really, it doesn't matter either way. Entities inside the Game of Life are not affected by whether their universe was created or if it simply exists. They may ponder that question. But in the end, it will never help them to understand the rules that govern its basic function.
We appear to live in a universe bound by rules. What's the harm in trying to identify those rules? In trying to distill them down to something simple enough for us to comprehend? How would we know whether there are rules to begin with if we didn't try to imagine them and test whether our imagination is correct?
Seeking to understand the fundamental workings of the universe does not require that the universe be "created". It simply requires that the universe exists to be queried.
But on a less profound level, I really doubt that frequently atheist mathematicians and physicists, seeking a better understanding the mechanisms of the universe, must be seeking God. Perhaps one could make the argument that all science is a vain attempt to understand the divine, but I think most scientists would take issue with that description.
I also cannot reconcile that argument with the implication that seeking God is somehow less profound. If you assert that "explain[ing] the universe as a mechanism implies a belief that it was conceived and built by some superior entity", that implies that all science, all engineering, all of human achievement implies religious belief. What, then, is the higher pursuit than the whole of human curiosity?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @03:09AM
This is why I don't use simulation but instead abstraction in my previous comments about this kind of discussions.
Yes Conway runs a simulation. Needs an infrastructure (time-space-matter) which is the same he dwells in. Generates an abstraction called the game of life for configuration XYZ. The creator of such an abstraction therefore is not conway, it is the system conway plus infrastructure. One can argue that to know is to produce all the frames of the configuration, and to achieve that your system simply needs to be infinitely resourceful. The pesky configuration resulting in an always different expanding universe fits when you have infinite time and infinite resources to contain it.
When discussing creators from the religious POV, the dream/dreamer is a better fit than the videogame/programmer model exactly for that reason, the dreamer is both immanent and transcendent wrt the dream. The programmer, even the C superstar, barely knows what he's doing (layers of abstractions over not yet understood physics properties of matter).
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 19 2020, @01:59AM
Fundamentum is latin for foundation, which as indo european is probably related to the indian funda, but in this context I'd go for the concept of foundation i.e. something that lets all the rest be built upon.
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(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:32PM (15 children)
Has he proposed a way of testing his theory through experiment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:41PM
Hey, the rules said you'd ask that question!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:11PM (3 children)
<no-sarcasm>
If a test of his theory is written in a proprietary language, then you have no way to really verify it. You also cannot verify that the execution engine even works entirely correctly. Even if research is published with data and models, if those models run only on a closed proprietary system, you can't really be sure what happens inside. Maybe the result is due to sum subtle bug in the proprietary software?
</no-sarcasm>
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:09PM (2 children)
FWIW, there are 3rd party implementations of Wolfram's language out there. Also, any worthwhile theory should be language agnostic. If such a paper is ever published, go ahead and translate it into Lisp or whatever and it should still work.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @07:02AM (1 child)
Something tells me it wouldn't work in COBOL.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 19 2020, @02:07AM
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. SPOILEDJOKE.
* SINCE I HAVE TO DECLARE IT AS A JOKE AT THE BEGINNING IT IS SPOILED THIS SUCKS ALSO I AM OVER THE 80 CHAR BOUNDARY SO THIS SHIT MIGHT NOT EVEN RUN
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'IF A COBOL PROGRAM SHITS IN THE WOODS IS THERE A STILL LIVING COBOL DEV TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT IT?'.
STOP RUN.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:14PM (6 children)
The test is easy, it's exactly like the tests galileo performed to measure gravity. You find a model apply it and see if it predicts outcomes. The automata theory vs other models is only a matter of using the most accurate or the most useful (easy to compute or easy to comprehend).
There surely exist an automata world that can compute F = m x a for a series of inputs, but it's more practical to just multiply. This might not always be the case.
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(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:44PM (5 children)
So it's a model and not a theory? It sounds like it makes no new predictions, and so is not a theory and not testable through experiment.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 17 2020, @01:48AM (4 children)
The theory is that the automata model is truer than the functional model, but that is a mere continuation of the fallacy of calling the universe infrastructure the real reality or the truer truth, while the real reality is this abstraction I am experiencing and the truth is possibly in its meaning.
Wrong: the universe is the videogame, the real reality is the circuits on which it runs.
Right: the universe is the videogame, the reality is the videogame world, the real reality is the meaning players give to what appears on the videogame world.
In both cases, while you can attain knowledge of the real reality (imagine a videogame character that somehow acquire sentience and BELIEVES what the players tell him about their reality) demonstrating you have attained it is quite hard, and a waste of time IMHO. You die and you discover it for yourself no matter what.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @07:09AM (3 children)
OK what's the reality, dipshit?
1) You are a sentient being in a Universe perceiving itself
2) Your landlord wants his damn money, dipshit
3) Wolfram automata blah blah blah, fucking rent dipshit
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @03:19AM (2 children)
LOL
I am, fundamental axiom. You might be a figment of my imagination, but I am. It doesn't matter whether it is an illusion or i am living in a 59 layers deep matrix, I feel that I am right now and there is NOTHING in the universe that is stopping it. I think therefore I am? no, I am therefore I think.
Let us call this "I am", to perceive.
Let us call what can be directly or indirectly perceived, "real". Some things are perceived as altering my POV that is affecting me, so, as not really useful corollary but adherent with our layman definition, real is also what can directly or indirectly affect me.
The end. Reality is defined now. Was it soooo difficult? The rent payment resides in the abstract domain of deals, but is quite real.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @06:56AM (1 child)
That is the most extreme example of accidental insight that I think I have ever read. I think I know what you meant. But you nailed it: you are a figment of your imagination in the profoundest of ways. Your self-concept and self-understanding are like the image (if you're sighted) of a loved one who you can bring to your mind's eye. (Here, nerds often invoke Godel's incompleteness theorems.)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 22 2020, @01:11PM
> you are a figment of your imagination in the profoundest of ways.
The actual implementation of my being is irrelevant to the reasoning above, anyway, and probably undecidable from the inside of the being. Your description, as interesting as it is, yet is a model with implications that I would safely ascribe as assumptions. For example, absence of sin (if I am the god whatever I do is ethically equivalent, right?)
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:55PM (1 child)
There is a throwaway comment in TFA about testable "bizarre new things that might be out there to look for".
Thing is though, if I understand it correctly, he doesn't have "a" model for the universe but rather a class of models, or more likely many many possible classes, so a prediction that is experimentally testable doesn't really get you very far, you just proved that the universe might be based on a model from a set of classes of models, but finding which one will take so long the universe will have moved on (or died).
If you start from "not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen", then this might, eventually, prove that God is using 64 sided dice - but we can't know how many or where she's throwing them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:10AM
He doesn't even have a class of models.[*]
What he has, is a framework in which to analyze the emergent properties of simple (hyper)graph rules. Mostly very simple (hyper)graph rules.
Why is this interesting? Because some rulesets produce networks which have properties which are spacelike, or spacetimelike.
Imagine discovering the tools of algebra and calculus, and throwing some functions, eg. describing slopes, at them, and noticing that some of the results seemed to match observations of balls rolling on slopes. Wouldn't this profoundly indicate that there's some way to apply those tools to real-world data predictively? That the systems described using the notation and cognitive framework of the tools might therefore in some way also describe the nature of reality?
Wolfram thinks he's found another mathematical perspective which might, in time, give us results in the same way as how we can derive systems using arithmetic and calculus which accurately-ish describe the world. His model uses very few axioms and, to translate to the physical world, maybe 2-3 assumptions (kinda like how we assume space and mass can be measured in some way, in order to get F=mv^2, impossible to tie abstract math to concrete world without at least one such), so it won't be able to provide any results which conventional mathematical tools cannot. BUT the efficiency of both solution-finding and solution-evaluating can be MUCH easier with the right tools, and this particular set of 'field glasses', he believes, might be productive.
Get it?
[*] ok fine he provides some example models and classifies them in a few ways eg. by dimensionality, but he provides those as didactic tools not as physical approximators.
(Score: 4, Informative) by meustrus on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:02PM
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:04PM (3 children)
But it isn't. Without matter there is no space. Without space there is no matter. Without time or energy matter has no persistence, and space is unchanging. It isn't. Fortunately we've had a lot longer than three hours to be is, so we can avoid being isn't in an existential sense... or at least I see only one dot, motherfucker!
And if you want some soda to go with that Scotch, then one might consider that without matter, space, time, or energy one has nothing but the potential of a nothingness which would be without form and void, with darkness being on the face of that deep. Sad that the author chose "earth" instead of existential nothingness.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:41PM (1 child)
Should reaaaaally avoid Rick and Morty references when discussing actual science, it is a comedy that uses Rick and Morty as foils to mock society. In that episode you reference Rick even finds his faith in God, that shoulda been a big clue!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @04:53PM
Maybe. But while much of what he wrote is beyond me the notion that matter can exist without space and vice versa is Rick and Morty level science IMVVVHO.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 18 2020, @10:07PM
There's Kaluza-Klein models which take higher dimensional space and collapse it to 3+1 spacetime. In that way, one can take a massless purely geometric space and collapse it to a space with matter. So it is indeed possible to have space without matter.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @12:37AM (1 child)
This politely scathing review might be of interest to anyone thinking of becoming a Wolfram groupie?
http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ [bactra.org]
Covers previous book, "A New Kind of Science", points out many problems -- attribution, prior art, etc with Wolframs work. I've heard similar from a friend that butted heads academically with Wolfram in the 1980s.
(Score: 2) by EventH0rizon on Friday April 17 2020, @01:34AM
Really enjoyed that review, thanks for linking to it.
I read the first few pages of a New Kind of Science in a bookshop while trying to decide whether or not to buy it and was blown away by the hubris.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @03:13AM (3 children)
If you dare to add a comment on the Wolfram page which disagrees with the conjectures then it instantly gets removed. Why I wonder?
It is very easy to create complexity, and fractals are not really the answer to everything.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @04:45AM (2 children)
This is his baby. You can only praise it, never critique.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @07:17AM (1 child)
Athiests kill babies, you know that right? Why wouldn't they kill Wolram's baby too - amirite? Let's start a revolution to only buy Wolfram product.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @03:23AM
No, he first has to pick a side dammit. Either Wolf or Ram.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 17 2020, @11:02AM (2 children)
An attempt is made to tie it to physics, but I think it's still far off. Check the "Quantum Measurement" section under "Potential Relation to Physics" for an interesting take on quantum observation.
So anyway, here's what I'd look for in such a model:
Notice that there are numerous scales and views that need to be supported. The document seems to have made some credible moves to supporting aspects of this list.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 17 2020, @11:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:40PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @02:50PM
i wonder if the 400+ page book with the right world formula will burn any better then a empty 400 page book...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:55AM
The core quote is:
"And this is basically how I think space in the universe works. Underneath, it’s a bunch of discrete, abstract relations between abstract points. But at the scale we’re experiencing it, the pattern of relations it has makes it seem like continuous space of the kind we’re used to. It’s a bit like what happens with, say, water. Underneath, it’s a bunch of discrete molecules bouncing around. But to us it seems like a continuous fluid."
Which maps pretty well to existing mass/energy/exchange notions, and intuitively is sane for dimensionality.
Unfortunate that this quote isn't their leader, but is an off-thought deep in their site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:14AM
I don't think it's a useful model for the universe. It is interesting. But not useful.
The biggest problem it has is the same problem string theory has. There are a hojillion* possible different versions of it, and there's no way to tell which of them is correct. Even if you had the right one, you'd be hard pressed to actually test it. He says the theory does make testable predictions, but he doesn't give any examples - and such an example would be really, really important, much to important to just sort of leave out - and it's hard to see how there could be any, since any such predictions would depend on having a model that describes the real universe, and there's no way to know what that model is. Maybe you could sort of converge on that model iteratively, find models that more or less describe a universe that looks similar to ours, and then poke at it until you get one that has the right values for fundamental constants and the like. But that seems quite a ways off. And even if you had it, any useful predictions seem pretty hand-wavy.
If there is an interesting truth to be found, it's probably more about computability than anything that solves quantum gravity or makes new revelations about the nature of spacetime. Maybe you don't know which model describes our universe, and maybe there's no way to tell. But maybe you can show that all possible physical universes (and therefore our universe) can be described by some kind of mathematical model of this type. And once that happens you can prove a lot of things about the universe mathematically. If you can prove that all these models are computable, for example, then you have proved that no universe can contain a physical process that's described by a noncomputable function. That would certainly be an important result. It wouldn't make any useful predictions itself, but it would have important implications for the simulation hypothesis, free will, quantum computing, and so on.
As it stands, though, I don't see how it's any better than string theory.
* Technical term