[HN Gopher] The Concept of the Ruliad
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The Concept of the Ruliad
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-11-14 07:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| 7373737373 wrote:
| The recent 3Blue1Brown video on "How a Mandelbrot set arises from
| Newton's work" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqbZpur38nw) made
| me think how, similarly to how different areas of the Mandelbrot
| set represent some halting property of the given complex number
| and the iteration z_n+1 = z_n2+c, programming languages could be
| visualized.
|
| Chris Barker's Zot
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200414141014/http://www.nyu.edu...
| is a turing complete system in which every binary string is a
| valid program. Input data is just appended as binary string to
| it. So the two dimensional "program+input => number of steps
| before halting" space can be visualized similarly without having
| blanks for syntax errors: https://i.imgur.com/ZGeZBBa.png
|
| So not just mathematical computable spaces can be visualized this
| way, but also programming ones - another part of the Ruliad.
| m4r35n357 wrote:
| Perpetuating the fiction that nature works like our mathematical
| algorithms, or computational machines. Waffling vanity.
| ironSkillet wrote:
| I'll wait for this to be formalized with precise technical
| language before really giving it weight. Until then, to me it
| sounds a lot like the kind of "profound" philosophical stuff I
| would come up with while high in grad school ha. And once I was
| out of the hazy stupor, there was nothing concrete and precise I
| could build out of the ideas.
| _game_of_life wrote:
| Probably wise. Also relatable, I have tons of old notes of
| ideas at some point I thought were potentially profound, only
| to realize they were half-baked and/or already explored.
|
| I'm still waiting on my "new kind of science." Wolfram makes
| all sorts of interesting claims, maybe he should focus more on
| interesting results.
| User23 wrote:
| > In many ways, the ruliad is a strange and profoundly abstract
| thing. But it's something very universal--a kind of ultimate
| limit of all abstraction and generalization. And it encapsulates
| not only all formal possibilities but also everything about our
| physical universe--and everything we experience can be thought of
| as sampling that part of the ruliad that corresponds to our
| particular way of perceiving and interpreting the universe.
|
| Bear in mind this is merely a postulate, it isn't at all proven.
| It's our ability to make concrete predictions that's limited by
| what's computational, not necessarily the behavior of the
| universe itself. On a more pragmatic level however we don't
| really have any good ways to theorize about behaviors of creation
| that are uncomputable. Nonetheless, we know uncomputable
| functions exist so it's absurd to axiomatically rule out the
| possibility that there might be physical behaviors described by
| them. Perhaps all physical behaviors are and we're forever stuck
| with more or less congruent computable approximations?
| lupire wrote:
| If a physical behavior exists, why would its movement be
| unconmputable? we could use that proceas as the basis of
| computation.
|
| Uncomputable function only "exist" in our imagination as an
| implicaton of imagined axioms. There is no physical evidence
| for them.
| evanb wrote:
| Always mysterious when something like this happens; submitted
| this yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212384
| tinco wrote:
| There is an excellent interview by Lex Fridman with Wolfram on
| this topic. It's just them talking about this concept and the
| related concepts and their relationships to both the universe as
| a whole and to various scientific fields.
|
| It's all very theoretical, but at the same time very stimulating,
| I found myself working out machine learning topics I had been
| thinking about while listening to them talk.
|
| Just turn your critical mind off and let Wolfram's genius and
| wonderful mind expand your own, it's really quite a trip.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >Just turn your critical mind off and let Wolfram's genius and
| wonderful mind expand your own, it's really quite a trip.
|
| The issue being that Wolfram is presenting himself as some sort
| of serious scientist, not as the lyricist of a 70s prog band
| plutonorm wrote:
| Even if he isn't a serious scientist, he employs plenty of
| serious scientists to help him develop this theory.
| tinco wrote:
| Why is that an issue?
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| tl;dr:the universe is just a somewhat more complicated No Man's
| Sky
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| A really interesting topic, especially from a philosophical point
| of view.
|
| A good discussion that touches on these ideas in a fairly
| accessible way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-SGpEInX_c (Lex
| Friedman interviews Wolfram for the 3rd time)
|
| I enjoyed Sabine Hossenfelder's thoughts on this and other
| 'Theory of everything' projects (Do we need a Theory of
| Everything? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdu9KvLxHFg). A
| little bit of a reality-check for those who get really invested
| in these ideas, but I, like her, think it's really cool that
| there are people like Wolfram et al thinking these interesting
| thoughts and trying to push Physics in new directions.
| lhorie wrote:
| Specifically in relation to this theory of ruliads and
| Hossenfelder's take, one "pop" mathematical concept that comes
| to mind is Godel's incompleteness theorem. It may indeed be
| mathematically feasible that some holy grail equation exists
| within the ruliad given that Godel et al have shown that it is
| possible to just keep recursively describing internally
| consistent algebraic systems and meta algebraic systems ad
| infinitum, and that in an infinitely arbitrary meta
| mathematical system you could describe anything that is "true".
|
| It does not, however, follow that such an all-encompassing
| system _physically_ exists, or that it is finite in some
| observably interesting way. I.e. the universe could just be
| infinite in every one of infinite aspects, in a monkeys-and-
| typewriters sort of way, and that would mean our existence
| would just necessarily be real, which is just not a very
| interesting conclusion. Or it could be that the universe is
| finite /limited in some way that the meta mathematical
| framework does not predict.
|
| And that's where Hossenfelder's take comes in: we _don 't know_
| that physics is as infinitely big as mathematics, and for the
| purposes of advancing the field of physics, one needs to work
| on increasing the confidence of what we do know, rather than
| saying that what we might eventually know happens to exist
| within some theoretically infinite set.
| indymike wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. I wish more people, particularly
| journalists and funders or research would listen to
| Hossenfelder's advice.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Simple rules can lead to complex results. Given almost infinitely
| powerful computing and a lifetime of hacking, you might figure
| out the secrets of the universe, or not.
|
| It's a _very interesting_ rabbit hole that Stephen has dug. I 'm
| not sure I want to get stuck down there. ;-)
| TuringTest wrote:
| What makes you think that the idea of _" the collection of all
| possible computations can be seen as a single object, instead
| of multiple processes"_ can be used as a tool to figure out the
| secrets of the universe? ;-)
|
| It's a mere change of perspective, but everything that you
| needed to find out about possible computations, you will need
| to find out about an infinite object containing them, in the
| same exact way.
| cjameskeller wrote:
| Reminds me of the various versions of a paper published by
| Alexandre Harvey-Tremblay, including the most recent:
| https://www.academia.edu/33079029/The_Design_of_a_Formal_Sys... -
| A previous version even had the public praise of Gregory Chaitin,
| himself, though it appears to have been removed/superseded.
| cmor wrote:
| While reading this, the anthropic principle came to my mind as a
| kind of subset of the ideas described in the article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
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