Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics (Stephen Wolfram) | AI Podcast Clips 

Must say, I'm very impressed by humble Stephen Wolfram, much more than by Eric Weinstein who is acting out much more vanity being hurt by rejections of orthodox circles as by media and classical science. Think Wolfram is more driven by a childlike interest than speculating to get a Nobel Prize some day, and he is also not interested in trademarks and authorship of some banal wordings as Eric is, hammering them penetrantly into minds, so they keep on sticking and can be claimed as originated by a very special mind. Being interested in physics since a long time, like Eric, detecting this immense void inside the nothingness-loudspeakers in physics, actually uninspired pea counters, not having achieved much I'd say for the last 50 years, Krauss, Tyson, Carroll etc, I started to see these emperors with no cloth. Whereas ordinary people get impressed by some equations and complexity-talk putting these loudspeakers on high pedestals they don't deserve, I had my aha moments already. So we see lots of pretenders and blinders in public with their nothing's. Shallow thinkers wanting to appear as new Einsteins. I think Wolfram is different here, smart, humble, interest driven, and if someone I know has the substance to further Einsteins physics, its probably him and not the army of pea counters of orthodoxies.

Is that you Stephen Wolfram?

@@j.h252 Thank you, very well said! I had the exactly same feeling about SW. Especially after watching podcast with both (SW, EW). It is so refreshing to hear to SW. He even said somewhere, it that he worked very hard to simplify these concepts to be able to explain it even on high school. This is real trait of genius with curiosity. After watching this I will definitely order "New kind of science". SW = Von Neuman of Physics / Math / Computing

He needs to have David Deutsch on!

francescop1 yes please

Marcus Lager yeah, well... being the smartest person in the room is often interpreted as arrogance... by all the other people in the room. Cheers!

@jay it actually feels that Wolfram is onto something, unlike Weinstein's ramblings

Yeah, he's suffering from delusions of grandeur. He thinks he is the next Einstein when all he's ever done that's of any significance is sell a computer algebra program.

I bet he's mellowed - he was a physics prodigy and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way back in the day. But he seems perfectly congenial in this interview. So maybe he's matured and gotten over all that.

I'm very encouraged by this hypothesis, as I would suspect that anything that was this fundamental to be unifying would have these profound paradigm shifts as an idiosyncratic "fingerprint" rather than work within commonplace notions of spatial dimensions. So many theories propose 4, 14, 26, or 248 dimensions as the heart of their model, so it is refreshing to hear one where the enumeration of the dimensions are not yet known as the method is too low level to have encountered what it would happen to be to support the universe with the features we recognise as familiar.

Perhaps therein lies the mystery of free will.

Paradoxically Excellent - it’s not a conspiracy; same architect.

It's more that Stephen Wolfram (like everyone else) has a language for describing things, and he is applying it to this topic. There are an infinite number of analogies for any sufficiently generic idea. You if you were a pizza delivery guy I am sure you could describe exactly what he is in terms of pizza; but the underlying idea is not inherently dependent on either the pizza description, or the term-rewriting/computational analogy. They are just descriptive tools/toolsets. Which is ironically/unironically a consequence of computational equivalence.

@@homelessrobot I'd like to order a Supreme Unification Theory, with extra leptons.

Yeah I am an admirer of his work but I always thought he would be a totally unforgiving jerk in person. But apparently I was way off.

Does understanding parallax shed light on understanding relativity, special or otherwise?

@@toddmarshall7573 No, Relativity is way past parallax...It's a completely different notion. Relativity is based on how two things need to be changed in order to keep something else constant. In the case of Space-Time...Space and time change in order to keep the speed of light constant...what happens when space and time change? You get a bunch of interesting behaviour...but that's all that's special about it...is just the interesting behaviour. In Physics, you will find that relativity is not unique to just space time but can apply to literally anything that involves some kind of constant. In Wolfram's work on Rulial Space, he supposed that relationships and rules are themselves constant...and that merely our reference frame in rulial space is what changes in order for those rules in rulial space to remain constant. So what is the interesting behaviour as a consequence of that? It means that we can create different languages to describe the same thing...binary code, quantum mechanics, a pile of rocks...DNA. we can create languages to describe the same rules that exist in a constant rulial space, and therefor computation can be thought of as universal...that you can create a computer out of basically anything because the underlying rule exists as a constant in rulial space.

@@NightmareCourtPictures What if there is no space or time and only the speed of light? Well, 'speed of light' is a poor name and should probably be called 'speed of causality'. However, speed is a function of time and distance and both are fundamentally defined by regular atomic energy transitions. Since we are made of atoms and our perceptions of time and space are governed by atoms and their energetics, space and time are probably just mental constructs. Sort of how our avatars are not actually separated by space when we play Halo but the screen displays a representation of how the avatars relate to each other in a way that has utility for predicting causality.

@@DylanMoss Honestly, I sort of agree with you in that something is up with the idea of energy... but the physics community won't really agree with you on it. I've posed the same argument and it's immediately dismissed as pseudo science. If you think about how Energy works, you realize that, Anything that is moving relative to you, will appear to you as having energy. If that object is in the same inertial reference frame, then it appears to you to have no energy. So what does this say, when all things in the universe are moving with respect to each other? Then energy is thus just a relative...perception, just like space and time, and there is something much more fundamental about space/time/gravity/energy as being all perceptions and the only real thing seems to be light. The mainstream physics community doesn't want to think about it though unfortunately.

SW discusses microscopic rewrites. Does he have any explanation for larger causal patches? Yes, 'just information' but that information becomes super-determined for those in the past. If his goal is to model cellular automata, he's failed. A super-determined causal patch is not pancomputational. It is priority cosmopsychic and deist in nature because the graph becomes a mind, computing paths "for Godel Machines" (humans).

This interview was filmed in November 2019...

A forward lying observer would cause an update superdetermining causal networks. This is not cellular automata (pancomputational). Rather it is very UWF/hypergraph being top down (priority cosmo-psychist). And that object would be Godel Machine, possibly Lobian as well.

consciousnesses could be a function of self preservation, so it tends to the infinitum, and make use of higher level functions as cognitive ones to compare, and discriminates information to feed it local system. as the field is just a dynamic sup in chaos, al the perceived systems in it are just and "illusion" from an upper view or from the super parent system point of view, 'cos occur in time and change, just continue in the system memory, but in the absolute present is just a ultra complex flux. sorry by my english here

Bloody Pommel Studios That would be fan-fuckin-fantastic!

memespace thanks! I’m going to seek that out. Have you seen the movie Dark City? It sounds like the screenplay may have been inspired by your recommendation. It involves a population of humans living in a simulation, but it’s another force that manipulates the sim, with one exception: the protagonist. He acquires the ability to “tune” the simulation and thus poses a threat to the Archons who are programming this “world.”

Why? They're both egomaniacs. It would be like trying to force two protons to come together. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!

@@JohnVKaravitis I think you just made a pretty compelling case for why.

I would like to see Penrose in that room as well.

@@JohnVKaravitis I think you're the only one with the ego here xD

Pass me a pipe if they give it a go.

Yeah people like him have an alien IQ

Gravitational effects propagate at the speed of light.

Exactly; it's all just ideas; but very clever ideas; and perhaps some of it might be useful; very unlikely any of it is true in any ultimate sense.

Really interesting insight here and I agree, that the relationships on a graph are always more important then the elements themselves and that with Space-time propagation, perhaps current day physics has always been looking at the wrong thing (the nodes) when we should have been focusing on the relationships (the edges). I think Global Dynamics is a good way to express this...because we really can't know everything, we just know what is fundamentally moving the system forward (basic computation)

An easy response to would be that in an unbounded search space, simple rules that generate/support complexity are more common than complex rules that do the same thing. Iterated across some abitrary collection, the anthropic principle describes how observers are more likely than not embedded in a universe with simple rules. Sadly, this offers no explanation for the mechanism of a structure that would generate such a collection of universes, so I'm not sure how satisfying it is. It probably aligns better with our deepest concious intuitions to say that is was a design intention. The motivation might be authored by something orthogonal to determinism and randomness! Perhaps an entity of free will generated a rule set that could a) itself support entities of free will and b) be appreciated by entities embedded within it. Perhaps that is only achievable with this type of rule set (simple -> complex).

I've majored in computer science and never heard about computational irreducibility... I'm not saying it doesn't exist...

It's not really different. It's totally hierarchical. In fact a lot of it is based on fully established complexity theory stuff... based on how macro scale networks are built from smaller subscale networks, and those subscale networks themselves are macroscale networks of even smaller subscale networks and so on into infinity. Hypergraph's is essentially just the tool used in order to get the most complex behavior. But the hypergraphs react the same as normal graphs, with just a bit more capability. These hypergraphs create complex structures from very simple and I mean SIMPLE fundamental constituents, and they follow the same hierarchical and invariant scaling you'd typically see in networks. From this he develops that quantum mechanics and spacetime are emergent properties of these simple relationships.

@@NightmareCourtPictures Ok, thanks, isn't it kind of obvious that the universe can be modeled by a hypergraph then? Certainly, that's not news (given that the brain is a network therefore everything must be able to be modeled as a network that we can conceive), Is Wolfram bringing a new language to the table, or just applying an existing way to describe hypergraphs to quantum physics?

@@JordanMiller333 Wolfram's work is not exactly new, as it's based mostly on already known aspects of complexity theory. Complexity Theory however had no rigours mathematical formalism or unified understanding until recent times, because for the most part, nobody really thought to see how important the distinction was between linear systems and chaotic systems, and that it was only until recently that it might be the critical component behind why linear systems don't truly describe the physical world. Most physics is based on upon the fact that we can linearize and idealize the systems we study. Wolfram's contribution is that he's applied a rigorous mathematical structure to the complexity mechanism in it's fundamentality, which for a long time was very vague and very unknown quantity. So ya i think what Wolfram has really done as a contribution is create a kind of language for us to even talk about the subject which is great. Leonard Susskind has been dabbling in the area of complexity science and has a series of interesting lectures on the subject called "Complexity and Gravity" I highly suggest watching this too as it gives insight into a real world applicability to how complexity arises in Black Hole physics.

@@NightmareCourtPictures cool thanks!

These aren't theories of everthing in the same way putting chess pieces and checkers pieces on the same board does unify the games, but it's a start.

@@sadface7457 cheers. I'll watch in full. I'm just beginning to understand the basics over the past few months, and really interested in more.

They're completely different approaches and moreover it's impossible to say because neither theory has been articulated (to be fair at least Wolfram has *something* to show). I am getting kind of tired of these "outsider" physicists. There's a serious lack of communication here. So far Wolfram has some technical materials (www.wolframphysics.org/technical-documents/) a lot of which seems to reference his "New Kind of Science" book-- it all looks very impressive, but FFS, it's STILL not at all clear nor widely understood AFAIK how to apply hypergraphs to even simple physics. One should expect that a theory of everything should be applicable to, you know, everything. I'd like to see how this stuff applies to basic, well understood physics. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop Wolfram from going at 100 mph talking about connections to quantum field theory, black holes, general relativity and unifying everything.The reluctance to FIRST address SIMPLE STUFF is disturbing and makes me not trust his pedagogical approach. I am still trying to use the smaller papers to see how to apply hypergraphs but they're very difficult (I admit that could be my own limitations). Weinstein has NOTHING so far other than his word and some "front-matter" in the form of a very confusing lecture and podcasts that he has been delivering to the general public inappropriately using very heavy jargon while going off on bizzare tangents. Weinstein has some very legit friends, maybe he's on to something, but one of the characteristics of the physics community (which Weinstein complains about for having "sharp elbows") is that YOU HAVE TO "SHOW YOUR WORK". It's super distasteful to go off to the general public to market a theory without first getting at least some buy in from the community. If you want to see how a physicist should communicate to the general public, watch Lex's interview with Jim Gates. He's a super-symmetry theorist that carefully explains the nature of his work to the general public in a way that is understandable by almost any one who is interested enough to listen. There's some really strange results too, but Gates is careful to not overstate nor speculate too much about the meaning of the strange results (I'm talking about the discovery of ECC codes within the mathematics of the theory). These other guys don't seem to have that discipline.

It definitely seems analogous to it doesnt it? This interview is just great.

@@jingalls9142 I've heard criticism that Wolfram is just throwing ideas out hoping to catch publicity, but IMO he's expanding meaningfully on the ideas from John Conway's game of life

It is not proven that causality is time-symmetric. Large aggregates of matter (eg. cream and coffee) make the opposite apparent, in fact.

Yo estoy igual jaja

No, merely unbounded.

@@DylanMoss Difference...?

Well said.

What is the utility in supposing that density is inverse to the traditional convention? Aren't you just making a symantic alteration instead of an actual conceptual distinction?

@@DylanMoss Yes I do realize my thought is vague and counter to common-sense. I am reaching for something for which there is presently no context or language; and which may not have any objective reality. I'm fully aware of all that.

@@david8157 They were good faith questions and I'm curious how you'd answer.

@@DylanMoss Your questions were reasonable. When I first had this thought some years ago the metaphor which came to mind was a photographic negative.

Eh, I think you're wrong on that. Everyone is looking into Complexity theory right now, Including Susskind...Wolfram's thing is so exotic that there might not even be a way to test it yet...so rather then hiding it for 30 years until it gets a test (For which he might be dead by then), he'd rather just release the information publicly right now to get the science community at least queued into the idea of complexity theory being an option for the TOE, which i actually agree with. Right now people are stuck in the standard model...which is perfectly okay but there are HUGE problems with the standard model and everyone knows it. I think it was always his plan to self-publish this information so that people just know that complexity theory exists and that it could be a TOE. Now, Wolfram's idea isn't as exotic as I pointed out...it's just exotic with respect to the standard model. Wolfram's Hypergraph is just a rigorous mathematical extrapolation of current day, well established Complexity Theory. I read his 500 page document. It mathematically shows the emergence of today's physics...it's no joke and it's real math. This guy Wolfram is also the guy who publishes all our high school math text books. He's not some average shmoe with an Ether theory.

String has amounted to nothing. It's a metatheory with no working theory to produce the standard model and no physical evidence for supersymmetry.

Wolfram has published papers on this.

Intelligent neurons :-)

The simplest particle that makes up all the other fundamental forces of causality in our known universe, is a symmetric minimal abstract, pair of points. They orbit each other, probably spin, in wierd ways. The simplest point might even be the big bang who knows. It assumes that transformations into the observable universe depend on the the variations in differences between the two points, their total measurement, determines how it creates the starting point for universe evolving. Its a brand new way of thinking sooo its catching on.

A Dyson lithium ion battery

I think he is Russian and Ukrainian

in layman's english?

Keylanos Lokj - we try and use our hammers on everything as if they are all nails.

Meh, these are non issues. Why do you use words you don't seem to understand? Obscurantism isn't a cool thing since the medieval times my dude

This is nonsense.

That are toughts..

the WHY is the creativeness capabilities of the conscious creatures (isn't a why--> just possibilities)