I got this from WIkipedia "In order to study simple rules and their often complex behaviour, Wolfram believes it is necessary to systematically explore all of these computational systems and document what they do. He believes this study should become a new branch of science, like physics or chemistry. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods." This is a brilliant approach. Wolfram deserves praise for his tenacity, systematic approach and for creating a new method for studying mathematical science.
@@mbengiepeter965 p, np, they're all the same as 0 and infinite. Abstraction means logic Madness means geniality Quantum mechanics means General relativity and they're both coded in qubits of entropy
I've been doing this sort of thing since I learned to program in 1985 that's why these patterns are pretty familiar. I moved on to biology and chemistry and saw the patterns there because I had already seen them in just goofing around with the rules I set up in my programs. Later I moved on to the Human Genome data from NIH and have it on my computers. My prior goofing around with turning math into images caused me to write a program that assigns a color value to each of the 4 bases in the Human Genome files. a is red, g is blue, c is green, and t is yellow. Then I wrote several programs using a different bit simple scheme to draw a pixel of that color as it encountered that particular base letter in the file. My hypothesis being "a picture is worth a thousand words". It easier to spot patterns in millions of data points if they are displayed as an image. Then I wrote another program that allowed me to dive into the file where I saw a particularly interesting pattern and pull that sequence out. I have been doing this for about 12 or so years now and I can assure you there is an underlying structure , a framework of patterns if you will, and its pretty interesting. To me anyway. I have worked out multiple schemes such as viewing the data in sets of 4 instead of 3 which are called codons and my set of 4 I call Quadons where each position has 4 possible choices and thus a set of 4 of these produces 256 possible combinations. Which oddly enough is the same as the ASCII table. I blocked off the printing of some codes because they are basically meaningless now but have often wondered what my program would produce if run on an old machine which would try to actually perform the codes which "back in the day" would cause the computer to act weird and lock up. I wrote a sci fi story based on this idea where a guy does this and it turns out that the evolution of computer code and our own DNA have a common base code and running this program on an old machine reveals that. In short......I get exactly what this guy was doing. He and Professor James Gates should talk. If you are interested in some of the DNA images and patterns I found you can see them at thearmageddonclub.blogspot.com. Having the attention span of a gnat has caused me to study and try my hand at many things. That blog is where I display them. Great VID thanks
I found Wolframs claims in studying complexity theory and how my, I assumed novel idea, had already been introduced by him. I believe there is more to it, but I believe this is the most complete picture of the universe yet. The axioms you learn regarding complex systems as applied to our universe are epic, if we truly are the expression of an equation. As above, so below.
@@ILLUMINATED-1 Keep working at it. I've been working on this weird thing involving the emergence of mathematical patterns even in our language. (Among other things.) A quick run down is the preponderance of triangularism. Like atoms are Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. Protons and Neutrons have 3 quarks. There are 3 charge states, positive, negative, and neutral. 3 fundamental forces. I know they say 4 but recently 2 have been linked. It's like the universe presents at an atomic and sub atomic level as a Trinary Language sort of like Binary which is of course On/Off. Trinary is +/-/0. Now look at our belief systems. 3 characters. God, Satan, Jesus. Odin, Hella, Thor. Zeus, Hades, Hercules. Etc. Not all of course. Now here's something pretty weird. The number 6 which as you probably know is one of the, if not the, oldest venerated number. It is called Perfect. It's factors add up to itself. 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. Now take the ENGLISH language and assign values as such; a = 6, b = 12, c = 18, etc and put in some names. JESUS, JOSHUA, JEWISH, MESSIAH, GOSPEL, CROSS, LUCIFER, and more. I will cut to the chase. They all equal 444. Interesting coincidence. But I kept plugging away which is the point of this reply. Keep plugging away even if what you have now has been done. I kept at it off and on for years. It hinges on the ENGLISH language. All those words come from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, originally. JOSHUA is the ENGLISH translation of the Greek word for JESUS. Same character. So I kind of obsessed on that for awhile in my 20s but eventually set it aside. one time, years later, out of curiosity I wondered if there were a string of letters within the alphabet that would equal 444. I discovered QRST. On a lark I looked it up and found out it is the Eqyptian designation for JESUS. Boom mind blown. There are others but I started to focus on the number 444 and not just 6. HEXAGON is a 444 word and 6 sided. The 6th planet has a HEXAGON at the top. The 6th ELEMENT is the basis of life. The Roman Numeral for 444 is CDXLIV which is a 444 "word". The Roman Cubit is 444mm. CUBITS is a 444 word. The JEWISH numerology practice is called GEMATRIA. It is totally different from my linear progression. It gives values based on the letter's importance. It has the value of JESUS at 888. Pi and √2 are fundamental to circles and squares. Super common geometric shapes. Pi x √2 = 4.44.... The 12th prime is 37. 12 x 37 = 444. DNA is composed of 3 base sets called Codons. There are 4 bases thus 4 x 4 x 4 possible Codons. It's pretty weird. Not saying it means anything or is mystical but it's a cluster of activity. Anyway I found the QRST thing a decade after I stopped goofing around with the initial findings. Just like a discovery (purely for myself) about the Great Pyramid. Now it isnt as weird, except the Speed of Light part, because humans built it and of course threw some numbers in it but the numbers indicate it is more Sumerian in nature than Egyptian. I still find new things. I of course will never publish this stuff but I don't do it for anyone else. I just like working the numbers. Anyway. Just keep doing it. Who knows you mind find something no one else knows.
A new kind of science got me obsessed for a good couple of years, back in 2004. I don´t know if this will ever get to form a new kind of science, but it´s definitely a new kind of seeing at things and thinking about them
I tried reading the book when it first came out, but didn't get the point. Now with this video presentation I am blown away by the depth and potential of the ideas. The way the same principles create insights in different domains of science is inspiring. For example, for me as a physicist, the view of spacetime creation as a causal network is really appealing.
Regardless of weather I think Wolfram is a genius or a crackpot, it's encouraging to see a company put this much effort into basic research that has no obvious financial payoff.
***** i bet we could program 3d printers to make tissues , bones , nerves from basic stem cells and use atomatatons outcomes to get desired patterns in turn creating structure like the snowflakes etc..
He's a very very bright lad, and a lot of his stuff is useful -- and apparently nobody at his publishers had the nerve to say "Sorry, Steve, this is old stuff, and you're making a total fool of yourself." So a nice guy who'd done a lot of good work has gone and made a fool of himself. Damn shame.
Wow. Fascinating theory. Blows my mind. It's genius really. And it only took 9 years to get to this presentation. :-) Thank you RU-vid and UCTV for making this accessible. Otherwise, I may never have ever seen it.
Wow. I thought it was strange that he introduced rule 30 and my mind went straight to a time when I mapped primes in a spiral using large sieves (leaving out points that are obviously not prime), and a little while later he showed a system that found primes and it looked just like the maps I created. Makes me want to read his book and then look at that program again.
Stephen Wolfram is bringing generative formal logic into a new era. This concept of formal logic as any induction is going to create a revolution in both the way we think about formal logic and mental sciences. This is a really big deal. This is the biggest deal. People like Sebastian Seung, Angela Belcher, Caig Venter, David Chalmers, Stephen Wolfram make me feel like sticking around a bit longer.
Velocity in which entropy grows In a chaotic p-atic fractal, but yes, time flow, arrow of time and fractal infinite curve filling surface→volume of quantum entropy in qubits, entangled to all of spacetime But yes, very much the universe flows to slower time and higher entropy.
This has changed my life, particularly in the view of physics and quantum mechanics, as I will get my degree, I want to help in revising and simplifying physics. I know that as new generations will begin to study this, our perspective of this world and science will make another paradigm shift as it did 400 years ago. In the future, people will laugh at how we thought invisibility, deep space travel to get to a star, anti-gravity, perpetual motion, even walking through walls was impossible.
The only thing bad about all this, is that Stephen Wolfram seems to be so self aware about how important this is - I wonder if he does not fear himself to maybe come across arrogant. Very fascinating (besides the deep implacations) just how visually beautiful those results are.
@bdogshredder Remember that you can find patterns everywhere, and Wolfram also never says randomness, but rather apparent randomness (it seems random to us, but it might have an overall structure that is infinite, or close to infinite, and then it repeats itself).
This video was uploaded 8 years ago, and mathematica was already able to represent all that. No wonder why Mathematica is that smart now. I like the "new" scientific approach.
as a computer scientist who is a mathematician and a physicist but through self directed knowledge. you have sold me on Mathematica. it is the programmer in me that you have inspired most, Stephen Wolfram.
And here we thought idea of making meth with your crystallography skills blew your mind ... No problems. We get it, you're retired now. So this is what you're doing?
This seems quite the program to sort out what McKenna refered as "Novelty". Is not about what things are made of, but what things that are already made could become. As a non mathematician per se, to me the Mandelbort series seems to capture the same phenomena from a different angle, the expantion of theoretical sequences resembling what time does to matter from a central point, which could be related as the present we're living in as the Universe is. I can barely fathom what kind of things might be archivable by getting down one single and cohesive understanding of matter behavior in a constant state of presumable chaos.
his mind is a good example that something supposedly simple can bring about something very complex, lol. But seriously, he's great explaining complexity. Am getting much out of this. It'll be interesting to see how the "time-constraint" of natural calculation will be explained. Thanks, Stephen
Why can't people keep comments relevant to the video? Regardless of the theory's implications for humans, or each others' ego, his theory does an excellent job at describing HOW the universe happens, as opposed to WHAT is happening. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I'm disappointed there aren't more NKS videos on youtube.
15 minutes in and I'm thinking, "this guy has been seeking for 10 minutes just to tell me the same thing in like, 7 different ways." I get it. simple computations have complex results. honestly I feel like this isn't so spectacular like he builds it up to be.
except that he's developed systems based on 8 simple rules that show remarkable similarity to the way subatomic particles interact and how space time is shaped.
They don't teach this stuff (cellular automata) in computer science courses. The fact that it's capable of universal computation is really significant.
Better find a better computer science curriculum. Wolfram wrote "Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata" in 1984. At U. Stonybrook, functional languages, Prolog, and lambda calculus were introduced year one as an undergrad. If I remember correctly, I had automata as a sophomore, or maybe a junior.
Did you not learn about finite automata and regular languages? Studied physics but I kinda assumed that's the theoretical aspect of a Cs degree would cover it.
Don't think I've ever seen one video that's left me re-considering so many aspects of the universe. Human thought may be no more intrinsically complex than the patterns that form in rock. Woah. And, from what I gathered, there are many computations that we can never predict the outcome of, we just have to run the program and see what happens. Reminds me of planet Earth in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
the real person to which the as yet to happen but arguably inevitable "singularity" should be attributed. Primarily though, here is a great mind put to great action with a remarkable legacy already
I'm not a math person but wasn't similar complex behaviour from a simple set of rules already known a long time ago (Lorentz attractors, the Mandelbrot set, etc.)?
Kind of, Mandelbrot said "oh look at this cool pattern". Wolfram said" Here is how this pattern applies to natural systems". The difference is night and day.
***** True, but he's not talking behaviors of chaotic systems, per se. It touches on compute universality of cellular automata and axiomatic systems, how they related and can be seen in nature and how physical systems be reduced to specific, relatively simple rules of deterministic automata. Completely different idea.
NKS was only published ~8 years ago. The seminal implications of Wolfram's thought have only begun to influence younger members of the CS community. Just a slight shift in technological focus will reveal the real - and surprisingly dramatic - impact of these concepts.
You can set a program to perform functions in a precise manner when having the correct mathematical computation. As said in this video, discovered a pattern by performing a function not discovered....and then eureka.... same is with computer programming. There is no spooky action about performing precise function input to get the desired results
@ToddAndelin It actually is used in studying the brain. What one does in cognitive science is to look for patterns in the brain, and say that this particular pattern yields this particular behavior. The problem is that one does not find the underlying rules for why those patterns arise. The models of Wolfram can possibly provide patterns to compare with brain-scans and thus be able to find the underlying rules.
All those information described by Sir Wolfram....what a wonderful world ! I wonder how far those ideas can be explored and twisted into the computer and what will emerge from all this complexity ... I suggest you people to read John D. Barrow's book The Grand Theory in which he discussed the computational irreducibility concept. Another point of view... My question : how do arise physical constants through complexity emergence ?
This man is a wonderful human being, my favorite kind of person, a free thinker, and an innovator. I would love to be able to talk with him. Very interested to see if he's met and spoken with John Nash, or if he also appreciates the ideas of F. A. Hayek. I would like to see him design a robot with a brain that has a functional replica of every portion of the human brain, only optimized. The power is there RIGHT now. I would love to speak with him about the indicators, parallel projects.
Is is the primes thing? I discovered calculus at 17 through binomial expansions of infinite series, and I honestly think ideas like these connect abstract Ally the logic that binds science together. Madness/geniality is the glue binding knowledge and creativity together to form ideas
I can't help wondering that the universe has re-written the rules after the big bang, and the initial conditions aren't part of our known universe. It's a pity that the video quality so poor. Those diagrams really are beautiful in print. (but I guess that's why they did it - to sell his book)
from wiki on 'A New Kind of Science' #criticisms: "In a 2002 review of NKS, the Nobel laureate and elementary particle physicist Steven Weinberg wrote, "Wolfram himself is a lapsed elementary particle physicist, and I suppose he can't resist trying to apply his experience with digital computer programs to the laws of nature. This has led him to the view (also considered in a 1981 paper by Richard Feynman) that nature is discrete rather than continuous. He suggests that space consists of a set of isolated points, like cells in a cellular automaton, and that even time flows in discrete steps. Following an idea of Edward Fredkin, he concludes that the universe itself would then be an automaton, like a giant computer. It's possible, but I can't see any motivation for these speculations, except that this is the sort of system that Wolfram and others have become used to in their work on computers. So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood." Note: Weinberg is an atheist, criticizing another atheist for thinking everything is discrete. The Universe, and life itself, is not a Cellular Automaton, and I agree...though I much admire his Mathematica.
+Arthur Sulit I agree but I don't think it matters. If you grow up a carpenter, you see things as a carpenter. This surely doesn't automatically invalidate the claim that moon is made from wood. It might not make it particularly likely. But if look at plumbers, carpenters and all other tradesman, one of them is bound to be closest to a working theory. And Wolfram very well might be. So investigating, validating or refuting, his ideas, instead of his persona or heritage, is surely more worthwhile.
lnternet RB I'm glad we might Agree on many points, but I think historically, most Ideas are inseparable, in fact incomprehensible, without an understanding of the Person(s) and historical context behind them. So why "limit" intellectual inquiry to just "ideas", as if the context and persons were not relevant? Wouldn't that be guilty of a certain level of anti-intellectualism or narrowness which fails to enrich and enliven the discussions? So shall we have a colorless "detached" debate, watered down to political correctness, and therefore, achieve no deeper understanding of other potentially hidden variables involved? I am highly interested in Epistemology, and the interactions / environment / history of the persons involved. I am not one to naively rule out the possibility that he or she might have been influenced by positive or negative forces directly relevant to the idea (weather it be an abusive vs. a loving father, or internal "demons" like Freud's coming out in his so-called "scientific" ideas, etc.). Without story, drama and context, most people won't find it interesting, and therefore won't "get it". So in the end, it's all about people, inseparable from their ideas, which has the most potential to enlighten and reach the most people, yes? In a Utopian world, one might "wish" that all people can remain "detached" from people and their ideas. But that is not reality. The reality is that people, mysteriously, like to read the Tabloids, or 'People' Magazine. They don't buy into purely "academic" dry discussions. They want drama. So if drama serves the interests of getting more people interested in Science, then that in itself, is a useful service, yes? In addition, it is scientific to do so, because it is an Affirmation, not a Utopian rejection, of human (and potentially spiritual) nature, which in the opinion of a few psychiatrists (like Dr. M. Scott Peck, 'People of the Lie')...deserve more scientific inquiry. If we start with a Premise, such as that the Ideas cannot be separable from the Soul (or Consciousness) which expressed them, then that Premise itself, fully deserves more rigorous and lively investigation. So rather than declare personalities "irrelevant", merely because it is now "Taboo" or "politically incorrect", I prefer to lift the implicit bans on free inquiry, from those who mistakenly try to suppress it. That to me is less narrow-minded approach, which enables richer more open-minded and rewarding, more memorable, and hence, more educational discussions...kind of like the William F. Buckley vs. Gore Vidal debates. Sound reasonable? So when I say Wienberg was an "atheist criticizing another atheist", perhaps that is what made you feel uncomfortable. Yet that point is highly relevant, because Darwin himself became an atheist, due to loss of his Daughter, now angry at God. Yet his theories were later invalidated in many cases, by his own fellow atheists (like Wolfram) later on. So theologians who are also scientists, do not need to resort to theological moral arguments to expose the (oft monstrous) scientific flaws of so many big name Atheists (such as how Darwinism led to the Holocaust, and to Eugenics). All they need to do, is study more carefully the population of other big-name Atheists, who will do their work for them, lol! i.e. Atheistic Science itself, is exposing the fallacies of its own most-revered Atheists like Darwinism, which is leading everyone to Question Atheism itself. Particularly their claim there are no souls, nor I.D. involved in anything. Well, that Question, deserves rigorous investigation, yes? It is not resolved, yes? Therefore it is highly relevant and enlightening, enriching, to discuss the Persons themselves, so we can train ourselves to think deeper, rather than just be satisfied with the superficial surface of things.
+Arthur Sulit I am glad that both Weinberg & Wolfram are atheists, but why did you bring that irrelevant fact up? Why not mention whether they are American or German or vegan or socialist or communist or capitalist?
Yes, true, I accept your point which concedes that atheists are a divided bunch who do not agree with one another on science, economics, psychiatry, education, law, diet, et al. The only thing they "agree" on apparently is "no God". Beyond that, they (to our advantage) angrily assassinate one another, basically neutralizing each other's flawed world-view. It is highly relevant I bring this up, because their very premise "no God" leads to internal inconsistencies with reality, which in observable testable reality, end up nullifying one another as untrustworthy. I apologize for the blanket statement here, but it would take volumes. One place to start might be your online ID "The Ultimate Reductionist". Surely, that name betrays a person of at least some level of higher education, who is fully aware that the philosophy of Scientism / Reductionism / radical Empiricism is self contradictory, since it demands "proof" of everything else, yet fails to prove itself. Are you aware of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which basically proves that not everything is formally provable, yet we still know large regions are true? (Starting with, "This statement is unprovable"). In short, the typical atheist prides himself or herself of being "free" of circular arguments, then has the nerve to accuse theists of being circular. Sorry, friend, all Language (spoken, mathematical, etc.) is self-referential (circular), and you / we cannot avoid it. We can only "choose", not "prove". So "Ultimate Reductionist" is a self-contradiction, for you cannot reduce your nature, as if you can describe yourself, without self-referring to many traits about yourself, which are themselves describable only by referencing themselves. For instance, "Pleasure is that which is pleasurable". You can kick and scream all you want that you aren't just as faith-based and ciruclar as theists, but the scientific and Linguistic evidence proves, all our arguments end up being circular upon Axioms we choose, not prove. The difference, then, between an atheist and a theist (pun intended), is in precisely which Circular premise they choose: "I am that am" or "I ain't nothing but myself". Either way is Circular. Pick pill: red or blue? Thanks, buddy (or bud-gal?), for the entertainment! Take care :-)
No and yes. The universe is based on 3 states of being. Positive, negative, and neutral. Its like a computer language (see videos on Professor James Gates) except instead of binary its 1, 0, -1. Everything we can think of either comes together or moves apart because of this. All of chemistry and therefore life is about the bonding of atoms and the "need" to balance forces. Where fractalization comes in is on both the macro and micro realms. They have imaged and plotted a lot of galaxies and when viewed from a great distance they form patterns just like electrical discharges. See (Thunderbolts Project). You may also be interested in videos on Cymatics.
This video has impacted me greatly. I am pondering how this could be used in studying brain development/ mental illness etc. This is very enlightening, thanks!
i consider it an absolute that this is the basis of the eventual view our decendants will hold of the physical universe we find ourselves contained within ..as it is certain to be the view of other beings who have preceded our evolution throughout the stars and galaxies.. galaxies that themselves, may someday be 'explorable' by extension of these very models aplied to the physical phenomenon currently refered to as reality
This is not particularly original. The over-arching term is 'Emergent phenomena' pioneered by such folks as: Linda Werner, Jill Denner, Shannon, and Weaver, Titsche, Campe, Damon Chizuru and others. This is a little naughty on Stephen Wolfram's part. I think you can still download Shannon and Weavers small computer programs that let you run this stuff yourself.
Adam Mangler Oh, you might also be interested to know that the computability of a system really started with Alan Turin in a paper he wrote during WWII.:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
8:47 that's not random, that's predictable, You set a limit for the resolution and when the resolution goes higher than the limit it will bunch up just as if you stretched a .jpg image larger than was. There is no truly randomness in computers unless you can get background noise from external sources and even then its based on your programing.
@Uaz31 "Oh I know very well what the terms mean." If you think that information theory makes any sort of trouble for evolutionary biology, or if you think that a cow (for example) is a "closed system", or that evolution means "one animal into another" we're already very much off track. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, these ideas can be challenging.) Maybe we should start from the beginning, can you give us a brief explanation what you think biological evolution is?
seems to me the whole mathematica principle is more to break down the seeming exponential growth of our existence into recognizable patterns in an effort to see the underlying principles of the universe but how can you quantify and qualify the mathematical formula used in a way that removes the "randomness" and allows us to see the patterns in the "chaos".... I say exponential growth because of the seemingly increasing complexity of life that we are able to recognize and categorize
at time 1:11:13 mathematica is currently on version 9....so much of this is history, interesting listening to Wolfram predicting quantum computers 2-3 years before they were even envisioned...(about the time D-wave was forming up)
dx dt Mr. Wolfram attributes to himself lots of things which belong to other people. If someone is misinformed, someone simply "buy" that... better yet: buy his book! and buy his software!
The game of life is very simple and would produce a pretty simple pattern (immediate isappearence) if, like in Wolframs examples, you woul start out with just one cell. If you choose different starting states employing Wolframs CA, you can get event more complexity. But the very point of this presentation is to show that with minimal complexity in the initial conditions and the rules you get a lot of complex output, so making the initial conditions more complex would miss the point.
Penrose quasi-crystal tile patterns that "almost" repeat using only a few tile shapes are similar to many of these cellular automata results. Pi-like unending and non-repeating fractional numbers that are in-between the countable infinite numbers (not 1, 2, 3, 5/33, etc.) also should be able to be handled by these systems if they are to be universal in their application.
@Uaz31 The axiom of your conclusion, is that the genome is what you call a closed system. This is new to me, and I hope you can link me to some creditable source. If not, then this discussion will reach an early end, as we might as well wish new laws of nature into existence. Why do we asume the genome to be plastic? Because we have observed relatively large changes within species, over short periods of time. We can also follow trails of evolution back through history. Examples?
I'm so glad the Toobeyoo has put their little blue box under the video telling us what the bureaucrats at the UN and our talking head politicians think is true. They are so much smarter than Stephen Wolfram and I am so grateful for their input.
@@brendawilliams8062 My comment was in regard to the blue box RU-vid put below the video, but as now has removed, telling us what the UN and the governing class wants us to think about very complicated systems such as Stephen Wolfram describes. I agree with you, he is a hero and a turning point in science.
can anyone explane please, can we solve CFD, electromagnetics or heat problems with cellular automata? what is the benefits or disadvantages of CA according to FDTD, FEM etc.
I was wondering if there is any evidence that the sequence of DNA for humans plants or animals bacteria fungus etc follows any sort of top down computational algorithms or rule similar to these "cellular autometers" or rather is there evidence that it has been custom designed or written by a superior intelligence? This would be the greatest question of all to ask Stephen Wolfram.
I'm pretty sure his answer to that is clear in what he says here. The whole point of his thesis is emergence of complex forms from simple rules, so the form of DNA would be the result of those sorts of developments in the chemical world. Most biologists, even without accepting Wolfram's views, agree that life started from non-living chemical reactions happening to develop the principal functions of life, through chemical evolution. Where Wolfram answers the first questioner, he talks about life's ability to evade the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, i.e. to build complex and lasting structures, when the Law says that everything eventually increases in 'entropy' (randomness or formlessness), and he shows that this is evident also in his cellular automaton examples. When you describe these as 'top down', you're using an unusual vertical metaphor - most people would call all of this theory 'bottom up'. 'Top down' is normally used where an outcome is sought and described in broad terms (as when an alien decides to create human DNA, for instance ;) and the problem is then broken into smaller units. Here, the structures that appear come from simple rules being repeated, which show no indication of expressing those outcomes in any inherent sense - and indeed it seems that he's shown that often there is no way of knowing what the outcome will be - no 'shortcut' to predict something, only waiting for it to run.
QM IS GR, Leonard Susskind and Maldacena are working on complexity too. Intuition and abstraction lead to psychedelic mathematics, the wildest way to think about maths and at the same time the most trivial and intuitive. Topology, geometry and abstraction instead of numbers and paper logical machinery
There is a philosophical meta-physical duality that's mystical when perceived humanly but only trivial and obvious logically, nevertheless it is marvelous. The intraverse is the mirror image of the outerverse for it is a fractal
interesting that quantum randomness appears to be similar to the deterministic randomness generated by the Wolfgang automaton and that Bell violating correlations appear with long distance connections (non-locality?)
@Uaz31 You point out lingual restrictions, not flaws in evolutionary theory. We cathegorize in order to "stack" information, allowing our short term memory to be more effective, and to enable ourselves to communicate more in less time. However, our cathegories will always remain inaccurate, rather than clearly defined by nature. What exactly are you arguing? That the theory of evolution is false? Do you deny that certain traits are heritable, and that evolution is a necessary result of this?
@Uaz31 You're misunderstanding a lot of terms here, namely "system", "closed", and "information". What you've said literally makes no sense by the definition of the terms you've used. Would you like some help on what these constructs mean, and don't?
Wow, this blew my mind! I've read a few bits on his website, but this is very clear and he's packed a lot in. There is some stretching of correspondences into conjecture, but this shouldn't detract from the rigorous exploration of the subject that is evident, writing a programming language for years in order to apply it to the study of the computational space, discovering (if it's true) the computational irreducibility of some automata, and applying these principles to analysis of different possible mathematical or logical axioms. The possibility that something like cellular automata might be significant in sub-atomic particles or spacetime (a sort of fundamental computation of reality) seems to have attracted a fair amount of resistance and criticism from traditional (formula-educated) theorists, and I don't know enough myself to judge, but it seems intuitively very promising. Against that, it's not really taken off, AFAIK, in the decade since the book's launch, which isn't encouraging. It's nice that the book is available free on the website, although it's a bit awkward to keep track of where you are sometimes. I think he's completely wrong about free will, however. Developing 'randomness' in a system doesn't confer freedom to choose in the sense usually meant by the term. The first reason is that (hopefully) he's using the word 'random' in the sense of unpredictable (and he gives this as the reason for his suggestion), when these are clearly deterministic processes, so the randomness implied is in no way 'acausal'. If all the processes of our lives are like these computations and deterministic, it doesn't matter if our will is unpredictable. In actual fact, neither true acausality nor this pseudo-randomness would take us any closer to having will, only make our actions 'freer' in the sense of more random and unpredictable. If our decisions are either based on earlier causes or a cosmic die-throw, or any combination of these, we're not agents with free will. We're deterministic processes perhaps disturbed by causal noise. His model, I think, is a very good fit with a completely deterministic universe that looks convincingly like it has independent agents. One additional piece would be our evolved cognitive errors, projections and approximations: we invent the self and its agency, just as we rationalise our decisions after we've (deterministically) made them.
For those of who don't plan on watching the whole thing.. What he is saying is basically explaining and further stressing the butterfly effect and chaos theory, and that to understand nature we need a new branch of science(aka researchers) to record and observe the simple rules of nature, much like how physics and biology began.
It looks like randomness is generated by one way functions. These one way functions are like rule 30 or rule 110. This is exactly the technique that is used in cryptographic harsh functions. But what is it in a one way function that makes it irreversible? Just look at the multiplication algorithm (rule) and the factoring algorithm (rule). Its easier to encrypt than decrypt.
Can anyone tell if there's something new here? chaos/Complexity from simplicity is not new, so perhaps it is his perspective on math thats new? I couldnt follow everything..
"one node at a time" is convenient for serial simulation, but it creates causal chains that depend upon the order in which nodes are updated; causal invariance is a theoretical myth only applicable to pathologically simple systems. however, if one posits that every node is updated simultaneously, then his model makes intuitive sense, except that how then, does one explain the observable phenomenon of relativity?
@Uaz31 Your first mistake (and again it's a common one) is thinking of evolution in terms of individuals rather than populations. A cow will not adaptively become a whale, nor will a bacteria become a man. The genetics within a population however will via selective pressures be varied to adapt populations to their environments. Raw information is fed into our genes via mutation, and any variation resulting in improved fitness (the ability to reproduce) will be propagated. Anything confusing?
