Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Solving the Problem of Observers & ENTROPY | Stephen Wolfram

Starting point is 00:00:00 Everyone who's watching is an observer, and what you've published is called Observer Theory. What's your latest discovery about? About Observer Theory, what's that about? It's about the question of sort of characterizing what it means to be an observer. You know, we have, for example, when it comes to asking what does it mean to do a computation, we have kind of a way of understanding that. We kind of start from Turing machines. We know they're equivalent to lots of other kinds of computational models. We have this notion of what it's like to do a computation. So I've been interested in

Starting point is 00:00:37 what is it like to be an observer? Why do I care about that? I care about that because in our physics project, it's become an essential thing to understand what we're like as observers, because it seems to be the case that what we're like as observers determines what laws of physics we perceive there to be. So it becomes important to be able to characterize what are we like as observers, because if we were observers that are different from the way we are, we would perceive, I think if we were observers that are different from the way we are, we would perceive, I think, laws of physics that are different from the laws of physics that we perceive. So in fact, I think in the end, the picture is going to be that the laws of physics are what they are because we are observers of the kind we are. So that's a kind of a different,

Starting point is 00:01:21 it's sort of a reframing of thinking about what does it mean to have a fundamental theory of physics? It's a theory of physics that is the theory that has to be the way it is for observers like us. It couldn't be the case that you could kind of wheel in another theory that, you know, God could have invented a different theory of the universe for observers like us. It is, I think, inevitable that the laws of physics are the way that they are. So, okay, so how do we understand what is an observer like us? Right, so what is an observer like us? So first we have to kind of ask, what is an observer doing? The world's a complicated place. what is an observer doing? The world's a complicated place. We have finite minds.

Starting point is 00:02:12 The goal of us as observers is to take the complexity of the world and kind of find a way to stuff it into our finite minds. And in a sense, what that's doing is it's saying there are lots of details in the world, but they're not going to fit in our finite minds. We somehow have to compress what we're seeing in the outside world so that it fits in our finite minds. We somehow have to compress what we're seeing in the outside world so that it fits in our finite minds. Another way to think about it is we've got to make equivalences between different kinds of things. Like I'm sitting here staring at this camera, and in the retina of my eyes, there are all kinds of photons falling that are kind of making some elaborate pattern there. But all that my brain is perceiving is, oh, there's this object in front of me. So I'm doing many equivalences. And what I extract from this sort of the raw physicality of what's going on is something that

Starting point is 00:03:02 has many things, many different that, there are many different arrangements of photons that would lead me to perceive the same thing. And what you realize is that, that that's a common feature, not only of us human observers, but all the measuring devices we use and all these kinds of things. It's all about, there are lots of details in the world. We just want to measure a particular thing. So a quintessential example would be, you've got a gas, it's got a bunch of molecules bouncing around, you're trying to measure the pressure of the gas. How do you do it? Well, maybe you just have a piston on the side of the box, and you say, how hard is the piston pushed by the molecules in the box? And there are all kinds of different configurations of molecules hitting the piston, and they go this way and that way and the

Starting point is 00:03:42 other. But all that matters in measuring the pressure is what the aggregate force on the piston is. So there are all these different configurations of molecules that we equivalence together to deduce that one thing that we care about, which is the force on the piston. And so I think as we think about ourselves, the fundamental feature of an observer is we're doing lots of equivalencing. We are taking many different states of the world and saying, we don't care about the differences between these things. We're just going to extract this sort of essence of what's going on, and that's what we as an observer are thinking about. Now, it's sort of interesting to see when we imagine kind of a computational process going on, we're always generating fresh states of the

Starting point is 00:04:32 world. We're going from one state of the world, we compute the next state of the world, the next one, and so on. We're always sort of generating fresh states of the world. On the other hand, when we are being observers, we're sort of doing the opposite. Instead of generating fresh states of the world, we're trying to equivalence together lots of states of the world. We're trying to say there are lots of things which we might think of which in some sense are different, but we are going to treat them for our purposes as equivalent. Now, you might say, how could you deduce anything interesting from knowing about these kinds of equivalences? It turns out that the notion of these kinds of equivalences is critical to deducing what we can think of as physical laws. law is an attempt to explain some aspect of the universe in a way that we can understand with our minds. I mean, we could say about the universe, oh, it just does what it does, and it has all

Starting point is 00:05:30 these little things going around in it, but we don't have any narrative explanation of what's happening. The nature of physical laws is we want to take what the universe does, and we want to somehow get a description of it that sort of fits in our minds. And so, for example, when it comes to something like, I don't know, a gas with a bunch of molecules bouncing around, the thing that fits in our minds is some aggregate description that talks about pressure and temperature and things like this, not the detailed motions of those molecules. So for us, we're talking about the gas laws. For the system underneath, it's got all these molecules bouncing around. It's important that we are only able to talk about things at

Starting point is 00:06:13 the level of the gas laws, because if we could talk about things at the level of molecules, we'd come to quite different conclusions about what's happening in the world. So this is essential to, for example, the second law of thermodynamics, because what does the second law of thermodynamics say? It basically says things tend to get more random over time. What's the application of that? If you take some mechanical motion, you're sort of pushing something backwards and forwards. Well, that's a very systematic motion of atoms in the thing, but that systematic motion tends to get sort of ground down into random motion of molecules that we call heat. And once you have things as heat, it's hard to get them back into systematic motion. You don't find that all those molecules that are randomly bouncing around suddenly line themselves up and start systematically pushing the block of wood or whatever it is. So there's this tendency for things to get more

Starting point is 00:07:06 random. But from the point of view of the individual molecules, that's not what's going on. From the point of view of the individual molecules, they're just following certain laws of motion. You could even reverse those laws of motion if you wanted to. The molecules are just doing definite things. It's only from the point of view of observers like us, with our kind of bounded computational capabilities, that we say, we don't know how to follow all of those details. For us, what the molecules are doing should just be considered random, and all we should be able to deduce is something about their average properties, like their average temperature, their average pressure, whatever else. So the fact that we believe that the second law of thermodynamics is right or that the gas laws are right is a consequence of the fact that we are observers of the kind we are.

Starting point is 00:07:50 If we were observers who routinely traced every motion of every molecule, we would say, what do you mean that there's randomness in what's going on? There's no randomness. I can see what every individual molecule does. does. So in a sense, that's an example of a place where being an observer of the kind we are is the thing that causes us to perceive laws of the kind we perceive. If we were an observer who followed every molecule, could do every computation to figure out what would happen with every molecular motion, we wouldn't say, oh, it's just random. You can only look at the averages. We would be sort of concentrating on the details of what was happening at the level of molecules. So that's an example. And by the way, the same exact thing seems to happen in space-time and

Starting point is 00:08:38 in quantum mechanics. And the thing that for me is like spectacular realization is in 20th century physics, there were three big theories. General relativity, the theory of gravity, the theory of space-time, quantum mechanics, and essentially statistical mechanics whose sort of prize exhibit is the second law of thermodynamics. The theory of how systems of very large numbers of components work. the theory of how systems of very large numbers of components work. Those three basic kind of achievements of 20th century physics, I think one had thought that maybe the second law of thermodynamics was derivable from something lower level. Maybe just from the laws of mechanics and some mathematics, you could deduce the second law of thermodynamics.

Starting point is 00:09:24 People had thought that in the 1800s. By the early 1900s, they were kind of giving up on that idea, and it was just like a mystery that was left hanging out there. But there was some thought that the second law might be somehow derivable from something sort of more fundamental and already known. For general relativity and quantum mechanics, that really hadn't been the thought. The thought had been, at least the way I always thought of it, is we just happen to get those laws of physics. The universe we live in, just for reasons we don't understand, happens to have those particular laws of physics. Well, I think we can say more than that now. I think we can say, and it's really surprising that we can say this, but I think we can, that all three of those kind of achievements are consequences of the fact that we are observers

Starting point is 00:10:17 of the kind we are, that it is inevitable that we have to perceive the physical world to have those particular laws because we are observers like we are. If we were different kinds of observers, we would observe different physical laws, but we observe those laws because we're observers like we are. Now, okay, there's more to say about how this all works, but the thing that I was trying to do with my efforts in observer theory is to characterize something about what observers are. It's all about these equivalencings. It's all about taking the complexity of the world and sort of stuffing it in a finite mind by equivalencing many different states of the world to say, all we care about are these features. That's one side of it.

Starting point is 00:11:08 to say, all we care about are these features. That's one side of it. And then being able to see kind of how you flow through from what characteristics do observers like us really have? And by the way, many of those characteristics are things so obvious to us that we've never really called them out as things that we actually should say, yes, this is a feature of us. them out as things that we actually should say, yes, this is a feature of us. So an example, which turns out to be really important, is we believe we're persistent in time. We believe that we have a thread of experience that goes from the past to the future, and it's still us. Well, really, in our models of physics, for example, at every moment in time, we're made of different atoms of space. And so in some sense, it's always a different us at every successive moment. But somehow we have the perception that we have this continuous thread of experience,

Starting point is 00:12:02 something that seems very, very obvious to us, but is nevertheless an assumption. It's not obvious that we would have a consistent thread of experience. We could imagine being some kind of alien intelligence that was different at every moment. It was like we have successive generations of humans, and each one has its own separate experience, we could imagine that was somehow compressed. It's very hard to think it through what it would be like to be in that situation where we don't have any sort of memory for ourselves. I don't really know how it will work. That's kind of a science fiction type scenario that would be interesting to think through. But the fact that

Starting point is 00:12:46 we believe we have this persistent, unique thread of experience for each of us is non-trivial. It could also be the case that we could, instead of experiencing things in a single thread, there could be multiple threads. One could have, you know, one could sort of imagine what it would be like to have sort of multiple consciousnesses in the same brain, so to speak. Would you be able to imagine what that's like, or is it part and parcel of you being the kind of observer that you are that you can't even imagine it? I think it's really hard to imagine. I've been trying to imagine a bunch of these things. I mean, I think it's sort of a very interesting challenge to imagine sort of what it would be like to be an intelligence, very alien

Starting point is 00:13:32 compared to us. And, you know, I made some attempts along those lines, actually. And I would say it made a little bit of progress. But I would say that's a really difficult thing to wrap one's brain around. I mean, I think one of the things, this is sort of a side point, but I've been mostly familiar with kind of the Western tradition of thinking about things and philosophy and so on. And I've been curious because people have been telling me for years, you know, oh, the things you're doing resonate with various kinds of Eastern philosophies and so on. And I've been curious to try to understand how that works. And, you know, my initial investigation say, yes, there are things there that sound an awful lot like things that I've long been talking about, so to speak. But it's really hard for me to, even at that very small distance, it's pretty hard for

Starting point is 00:14:30 me to get sort of an internal feeling of what it's like to think about things in terms of, let's say, Eastern philosophy. And it feels like the kind of thing where it's sort of a strange thing. The way we think about things is built on this sort of tower of experience. And it's like you can just jump out into the kind of uncharted universe of possibilities. And it's quite disorienting and quite non-human. I mean, in a sense, this is something I've done for the last 40 years or something, is investigating what I would now call ruleology, the behavior of just arbitrary, simple sets of rules. So, you know, you just write down some computational rules, you start running them,

Starting point is 00:15:16 you see what happens, you get all this elaborate, complicated behavior. The question is, can you humanize that? Can you kind of give a human narrative for what's going on? And it can be really difficult. It's kind of like, well, that vaguely looks like a this or that, but it is a definite rule. It is a possible sort of law of physics for some kind of artificial physics. And do I have a kind of a human way to describe it? No, not necessarily. But in order to get to the point where you have sort of a human way to describe it, you end up having to have this sort of tower of civilizational development. Like, okay, there's this weird pattern. Do we have a word for that? If we had a word for that,

Starting point is 00:16:02 I'd be able to say, yes, remember that, the squiggle-do pattern. And I'd know what I was talking about, and you'd know what I was talking about. But without our civilization having reached that point in, as I would call it, ruleal space, without us having reached that point, we haven't colonized it. We haven't said, we're going to put down, you know, we're going to call this the city of whatever. We're going to put a word down here for this. And once we have that, and we all have kind of a common experience of that, then we can start talking about it. But without that, it's really hard to have, you know, it's really hard to both for us to talk about it and even for me to do a good job of forming thoughts about it.

Starting point is 00:16:49 Because I think, you know, when we form thoughts about things, the way that we, you know, our words and language and so on seem pretty important to us forming thoughts. I mean, they're the way that we concretize our process of thinking. I mean, they're the way that we concretize our process of thinking. I mean, the way I see it these days, and this is, again, sort of a side point to the main things we were talking about, but this whole question about sort of how do we communicate a thought? There's something going on inside our brains. It's a bunch of electrical firings or whatever else. But those electrical firings somehow add up to something abstract, a thought.

Starting point is 00:17:30 And my electrical firings are going to be different from your electrical firings. How do we package up a thought that corresponds to some electrical firings in my brain? How do we package it up, send it to your brain, have it unpack, and have it correspond to something like the same thought? And I think that's kind of the role of concepts, which we sort of concretize in words and human languages and things. We pack it up into a concept. A concept is a robust thing. It's a cat, for example. And then I can transport that concept to your brain. You can unpack it, and you might have a similar view of what I'm talking about as the one that I internally have. And I think that the, I mean, in one very bizarre kind of way of thinking about things, this is now jumping around a bit, but when we think about space-time and we think about particles like electrons and so on, what is an electron? An electron is a lump of existence that is somehow unchanged by motion through space. There's an electron here that it moves, and it's the same

Starting point is 00:18:40 electron in some sense. It is transporting through space and time its electron-ness. Its existence is being transported in some sense unchanged through space and time. Even though in our models of physics, that electron is made of different atoms of space. As it moves through space, it's made of different atoms of space. It's kind of like the eddy in the fluid where the eddy is moving around, although it's made from different atoms at different moments in time. And so I think this notion of concepts is a concept is kind of like a particle, but not in physical space, but in what I call ruleal space. And minds are like different, exist at what I call ruleal space. And minds are like different, exist at different places in ruleal space. And so when we exchange, when we use concepts to sort of

Starting point is 00:19:31 exchange thoughts, it's like sending a particle from one place in ruleal space to another. And we have this sort of- Could you reverse that? Sorry, could you reverse that and then also say that instead of a concept being like a particle, a particle is like a concept, and the universe is talking to itself and exchanging ideas, and that's what we see as physics? to speak, which is sort of a popular Spinoza-type theological view of the universe. Yes, I think that's a, in a sense, the idea that what the universe is doing is like thinking is kind of this thing that sort of, it's all computation, so to speak. I've had this idea I've talked about for decades, the principle of computational equivalence, the idea that you can think about all processes as computations. Not only are they computations, they're also computations of somehow equivalent sophistication. So the computations that are going on in our brains

Starting point is 00:20:42 that we interpret as thinking are the same level of sophistication of computations that are going on in our brains that we interpret as thinking are the same level of sophistication of computations as are happening in the universe where we're interpreting what's going on as physics, for example. But, you know, I think the, I mean, coming back to, gosh, well, coming back to these questions about some sort of concepts and how we think about that. And you were asking, can I imagine something being a sort of a different kind of observer from the one that I am? One experiment I did a few months ago was the following thing. So you take a generative AI that's making pictures, and you could tell it, make a picture of a cat in a party hat.

Starting point is 00:21:28 And it will- Right, right. And I'll show the blog post on screen right now. I read through that. Right. So yeah, that's one of these pictures is worth lots of words type stories. But so, so, you know, so you, you say I've got, you know, what does, how does it know what a cat in a party hat is like? Well, it's because it's seen a few billion pictures on the web, and they have captions, and it can connect those things, and so on. But one of the things you realize is that when you say a cat in a party hat, that's turned into some vector of numbers in some embedding space and so on. And you can

Starting point is 00:22:08 ask questions like, well, what if I change those numbers just a little bit? I've got the cat in the party hat right here, and I've got things that are sort of less and less cat-like as I go further away. And so, for example, I think I have a picture of what I was calling Cat Island, which is the sort of island in the space of possible concepts, in a sense, that correspond to things we would identify as a cat. As you go away from that place in concept space, you get things that are less and less cat-like, and pretty quickly you get to things that we humans don't have words for. and less cat-like, and pretty quickly you get to things that we humans don't have words for. Pretty quickly you get to what I was calling interconcept space, kind of the analog of interstellar space or something, where you're just away from everything else. It's an uncolonized area of concept space. And the question you might ask is, well, what fraction of interconcept space has concepts in it? The answer is unbelievably small. So the concepts

Starting point is 00:23:08 that we humans have in even the very basic way that I had of sort of mapping out interconcept space, we have 10 to the minus 600 of the volume of interconcept space is full of concepts that we currently know. So there's an awful lot out there that we have not yet conceptualized, so to speak. And I mean, I went on in that blog post, I went on in that piece. I don't know, it's sort of blog posts, but by the time they're a couple of hundred pages, I'm not sure how bloggy they really are.

Starting point is 00:23:43 But anyway, that piece of writing. I have plenty of questions about the way that you write which will come into play later but just as a point right now about this interconcept space so it's unclear to me a question i have is how much of interconcept space is inter bs space like harry frankfurt's bullshit space and what i mean by that is like if you have 10 points on a on a 2d plane there are an infinitude of graphs that can connect them so you mentioned the word embedding the concept space depends on embedding and it's not clear to me that if you just pick another point that is something that joins these that that is also a concept so it could be meaningful by coincidence like some number that seems like noise,

Starting point is 00:24:26 but someone's like, oh, that's my social insurance number. Or, oh, that's my phone number. But that's just a coincidence and that's not the meaning that we're talking about. So how do you know that when you're in inter-concept space that it's not inter-BS space

Starting point is 00:24:39 and that it's actually representing something that's meaningful? Well, those words we have to unpack a little bit. The question is, could we make meaning out of the stuff that's meaningful? Well, those words we have to unpack a little bit. The question is, could we make meaning out of the stuff that's there? That would be, I think, a more reasonable kind of starting point. So let's give some examples. Let's say we've got mathematics. And mathematics, we imagine to be based on certain axioms. They might be axioms of set theory. They might be axioms of arithmetic. We could just look at all possible axioms of mathematics, all conceivable axioms on which we could make foundations of mathematics. And we can ask the question,

Starting point is 00:25:16 the ones that we have, are they more meaningful than other possible ones? Or could we build a completely rich mathematics, utterly alien to us, on a different set of axioms? I think, well, this is a complicated thing to say, but I think fundamentally the answer is yes. You can start from any basis, and you can wind up with a rich set of concepts, a rich kind of story. I'll give you another example. Again, we don't really know in this case, but let's say proteins. We humans have about, I don't know, 30,000 kinds of proteins that make us up. And why those ones and not other ones? Well, you say, well, evolution found those ones, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, there's no good evidence that we

Starting point is 00:26:03 couldn't have chosen completely different ones. And they would fit together in some way as well. And there would be, maybe we'd have some of the same overall attributes that we have, but with a completely different basis. make a rich story from those things. This is kind of a principle of computational equivalence type idea. It's something where, you know, pick a program. It can be any kind of program. It doesn't need to be a cellular automaton. It doesn't need to be a Turing machine. It doesn't need to be lambda calculus. It can be any of these things. Pick it. It can be even a very simple such program. Pick it, and from it, you can erect this tower that will eventually reach the same places. So I think it's most likely that the concepts we got are the ones that are... And by the way, once we have concepts, we build so much around them. We have words for them. Once we have a word for them, we can order it off a web store. If we want to buy one,

Starting point is 00:27:06 we can do all kinds of things. And so we end up in this kind of loop where as soon as we kind of imagine a concept or as soon as biology picks a protein, for example, it starts to build a lot of stuff around it. And so for us, it then seems like, well, how could it ever be different? Because look at it. We've got all these things in the world. How could we avoid having circles in the world, for example? How could we avoid having this? Well, because we've built so much around those things. So that would be my view, that we could as well build a civilization, build life, build

Starting point is 00:27:43 lots of other things from very different foundations. Once we've committed to these foundations, we built a tall tower on these particular foundations, and then everything else looks far away. But I don't think it's that it couldn't be built that way. It's just that for us, from our vantage point, from the tower that we've built, it looks like nothing or it looks far away. I see. So I was going to ask the question that many people have, is there any hope to communicate with aliens? That is contingent on a shared conceptual space. But I'm wondering if I was going to ask if that question should have been rephrased as, are aliens observers like us?

Starting point is 00:28:26 Because if an alien is an observer like us, they would have the same conceptual space, but it sounds like you're saying no. Well, I think the way to think about it is, I didn't talk much about this kind of concept of ruleal space, but, there are sort of different kind of underlying computational rules that you can be running or that you can attribute to being what the universe is running, so to speak. And in some sense, we can think about, well, we think about ourselves as being at a particular place in physical space. We can also think about ourselves as being at particular particular place in physical space. We can also think about ourselves as being at particular places in ruleal space. The way I see it is that different minds are at different places in ruleal space. And for example, this whole point about exchanging concepts and so on is like these particles propagating from one place in ruleal space

Starting point is 00:29:19 without change to another. So there's this kind of whole map of minds in real space, and minds with sort of common history and same cultural background and same education and so on, those minds are fairly close together and communication is fairly easy between them. The translation from thoughts in one mind to thoughts in another is not so hard. As you take those minds further apart, that gets more difficult. Let's say the mind is the mind of a dog, for example. Well, there are some things that you can communicate with dogs, maybe some emotional states, things like that. But lots of stuff is really pretty hard to communicate. And then we can say, well, what about something

Starting point is 00:30:01 further away? What about some other kind of computational system that with the principle of computational equivalence we can think of as being a mind-like system? My favorite example usually is the weather, which people sort of might say has a mind of its own. But the weather is pretty far away in real space from us. It does mind-like things, but the translation from its mind-like activities to our mind-like activities is hard.

Starting point is 00:30:29 It's distant. We won't think of it as having experiences like us. When we're looking, and this is always a sort of interesting problem of ethics and so on, when we have certain internal experiences, we look at other people and we say, I imagine those people are having similar experiences to mine. And as those people get further away, whether it's culturally or other things, it feels less. You're less sort of, oh, yes, I can empathize with that person. I can imagine what they're thinking, so to speak. By the time you get

Starting point is 00:31:05 to a cat or dog, it's pretty far away. What's the thing thinking? We can kind of make up a story about it, but it's pretty hard to kind of get in its mind, so to speak. And I think that's kind of the, you know, when we imagine sort of these sort of minds that are very different from ours, we just can't get in them in the same way that we can sort of get in another human mind. Now, an interesting case is AI, because if you look at people's interactions with AI, and particularly with, oh, I was just, a friend of mine just made a humanoid robot that is sort of interesting because you can watch people's interactions with that. It's the LLMAI plus the humanoid robot thing.

Starting point is 00:31:55 And it's really interesting because we all basically empathize with the thing pretty quickly in many ways. quickly in many ways. Even though we kind of know rationally it's a bag of bits, more or less, we still sort of treat it in some rather human way. And at some level, we could think about, well, every brain is just a bag of neurons with a bunch of electrical activity and so on. Why should we treat it in some special way? We treat it in a special way because we empathize with it and we sort of map it into our own internal experiences. And I think, you know, in the case of AI, we're, in an awful lot of the time, we are going to increasingly sort of anthropomorphize it to the point where it feels like it's something like us, so to speak, just as other people feel like they're

Starting point is 00:32:45 something like us, even though we don't have that inner experience of being them, so to speak. So, I mean, I think, let's see, I think you had asked about what, yeah, sort of communication with aliens and so on. I think that where I see it is, you know, you go explore the universe. We go send out spacecraft. They get a certain distance. As a spacecraft goes out, you know, to the outside the solar system or something, it has a different point of view about the universe because it's in a different place in physical space.

Starting point is 00:33:19 We could also imagine sort of sending out the analog of Rulial spacecraft, trying to understand the universe from different points of view like that. And that's in a sense, it's sort of that's the big intellectual activity, I suppose, a big intellectual journey of can we colonize Rulial space? Can we get these different points of view about how to think about things? How far out can we get? how to think about things, how far out can we get? And I think one of the points is that to even be able to discuss it, we have to have all gone together to some place in ruleal space. Otherwise, we don't have these shared words to talk about what's happening.

Starting point is 00:33:57 Right. If we send out something into ruleal space and it's sufficiently far enough, would we even be able to say that it's us that has colonized it? sufficiently far enough, would we even be able to say that it's us that has colonized it? It's a good question. I mean, I think by the time we have, you know, I think it's like translating from one language to another. You know, if you've got some sufficiently obscure language, there's probably no English to it dictionary. It goes through five steps or something. And that's the kind of thing one would see in that case. And so then the question would be, you know, are you translating to language X? Well, no, it went through this step, that step, that step, that step. So, you know, I suspect that's the way in which, that's how it

Starting point is 00:34:37 will attenuate, so to speak. What would you say is the difference between consciousness and observation? difference between consciousness and observation well i mean i think consciousness in some sense people imagine as some sort of inner feeling of existing. And that's, I mean, what I'm interested in, in kind of the operation of observers, is something that you could say is an exterior membrane to whatever you might think consciousness is. That is, it is asking the question, how do you take what's out there in the world and get it into something that is processable by a mind? The question of the inner feeling of the mind, which I suppose is what you might think of as consciousness, is one that I think is a very slippery concept. Let's start by saying that. I think it's a slippery concept, but I think we have certain feelings for what consciousness is like. For example, this continuous thread of experience is a symptom of consciousness, so to speak. Similarly, this finiteness is a symptom of consciousness. And I suppose that for

Starting point is 00:35:58 me, I've been more interested in sort of cataloging the symptoms of consciousness because they allow us to get sort of an idea of what laws of physics we will conclude there to be, so to speak. I've been more interested in that than in asking the more inward-looking question of sort of what is that thing inside that has these particular symptoms. And I think, you know, an exercise I've been doing, I need to finish it, I started it a couple of years ago, is to just sort of write the story of what it would be like to be a computer. It's like you go from, you know, from the time you're booted up to the time you crash. It's kind of like a human lifetime. You accumulate certain memory, you have certain experiences, all those kinds of things. What's that like?

Starting point is 00:36:46 What would be the inner experience of being a computer? Now, right now, we don't project much. I mean, people do and always have kind of talked to their computers and said the computer is having a hard time now. The computer feels X, Y, Z, but it's somehow still a little bit distant. I think it will become less distant with humanoid robots and with steadily better LLM-type technology and so on. like to be a computer is, and we may discover when we, you know, as we try and project ourselves into that, just as we have, you know, we have this non-trivial thing that we're all pretty decent at doing, or most people are pretty decent at doing, is sort of projecting themselves into

Starting point is 00:37:37 another human, so to speak, to imagine what that other human is thinking. And we don't as much imagine what a computer is thinking yet, but we probably perfectly well could. Once we can imagine that, all kinds of terrible things happen. Because then our ethical principles about other people and, oh, we don't want the other people to feel bad and so on, as soon as we can feel like a computer, so to speak, we have all those issues for it too. There is lots of intelligence in the universe. Every physical process, all these kinds of things are examples of mind-like activity. The issue is those minds are far away in real space. And in a sense, what we're doing in science and natural science is attempting to make bridges across, you know, we're attempting to say there's the system in nature and it does what it does.

Starting point is 00:38:31 And we are finding a way so that we can get some human connection to that system in nature. Because otherwise, we're just watching the system doing what it does. And in a sort of pre-scientific society, or for many things even today, that we don't have a way to think about in terms of science. It's just doing what it does. And it's not, we don't have this kind of, we haven't been able to make this kind of connection to it. And that's kind of how we're able to say, oh, we can, I mean, a lot of the connections we make in science today are of the kind where we say, we're going to crush this thing.

Starting point is 00:39:07 We're going to be able to say, we know exactly what it does. We can kind of imagine in our minds what it's going to do, rather than it's doing what it's doing, and we have to sort of relate to it in some way, where we're treating it as an equal mind, so to speak, to ours, and we're merely trying to understand it. I mean, it's like saying for different humans, you could say, I'm going to crush ours, and we're merely trying to understand it. I mean, it's like saying for different humans, you could say, I'm going to crush this, and I'm just going to say, I know how humans work. That person is going to do this, this, and this. You know, I don't have, you know, everything is predictable. But in fact, with humans, we're quite used to the idea

Starting point is 00:39:42 that, you know, we're doing what we're doing, another human is doing what they're doing, we can kind of communicate with them, but they're both sort of equal minds, so to speak. With nature, the conceit of a lot of science has been that we are the minds in charge, so to speak. That nature is just, we can just say, we know what's going to happen, we've got the science that tells us what's going to happen, rather than we're somehow sort of co-equal minds with what's happening in nature. I mean, there are other traditions, not the Western scientific tradition, where that's much more of a thing. And again, you know, it's challenging for somebody like me

Starting point is 00:40:20 to really, I mean, even though maybe I have a slight advantage because I've thought scientifically about these things a lot, to sort of get into that way of thinking about things. But that's what I tend to think that, you know, right around the time when people realize that AIs are not that different from us, that's around the time when people will decide there's aliens all around. There's kind of alien intelligence all around us, so to speak. It is just that we haven't been able to make these bridges necessarily to be able to communicate with it. I mean, kind of an interesting thought experiment came from a pitch some people made me a few years ago about how they're going to make a company in which they're going to send interstellar spacecraft out and they're going to you know

Starting point is 00:41:09 go out into the into the universe they're going to discover extraterrestrial technology they're going to bring it back to earth they're going to accelerate our technology by a million years okay so that's i hear far out pitches all the time that one might be the furthest out pitch i've ever heard for a startup, so to speak. But what's interesting about it is sort of the philosophically unpeeling that pitch. Because what's it really saying? It's saying, you know, when we say we go out into the universe and we discover technology, alien technology, we bring it back to Earth, we accelerate human technology by a

Starting point is 00:41:45 million years. Okay, the problem is there is alien technology all around the universe. There are pulsars doing all kinds of elaborate things with magnetic fields. There are this, there's that. There's all kinds of stuff going on in the universe. The issue is, what is technology? Technology is something where we have managed to reel it in to connect it to human purposes that we care about. I mean, you were asking before, is there meaning in interconcept space? Well, the issue is, it's like saying, is there technology to be made out of this kind of physical process? physical process. The physical process is doing what it's doing. The making technology out of it is can we reel it in to connect it to things that we care about, similar to can we build meaning on top of this thing? Can we connect it to things that we care about? What's interesting there is to realize, well, there's technology everywhere. No, there's not technology. There's the raw material for technology everywhere. But this question of, you know, it is this very human activity of saying, oh, yes, we found a, you know, piezoelectric material. Great. Now we can use that to make, you know, a piece of a clock or something. Sure. use that to make, you know, a piece of a clock or something. But, you know, the thing is the thing.

Starting point is 00:43:13 And the question is, can we connect it to human purposes? And human purposes have evolved over time. I mean, there are plenty of, it's like, you know, random elements, I don't know, lutetium or something, you know, it's just like, oh, it's a random chemical element. And then people realize, oh, no, no, we really should care about mining it. It's useful for this or that thing that shows up in a smartphone. It's kind of the thing is out there, but it's a slow process of us kind of colonizing the space of possibilities to realize that's something that we humans actually care about. When talking about observation and equivalencing, is that to be understood as the same as coarse

Starting point is 00:43:46 graining, so you don't care about the details? Coarse graining is a version of that. I mean, there are a whole collection of different ideas that sort of are all versions of equivalencing. Coarse graining, things being on attractors, compression, there's a bunch of different names for this. This is a core idea that's shown there's a bunch of different names for this i mean this is a this is a core idea that's shown up in a zillion different places um but yes uh coarse graining is kind of the the name that that uh gibbs invented in for statistical mechanics in

Starting point is 00:44:16 the in the early part of the 20th century for sort of a version of this the the challenge with talking about coarse graining and just saying oh we just do coarse graining and then we understand what's going on. The problem is, what's a valid kind of coarse graining to do? That's the real question. Just say we bucket things together, but which equivalent things can we do? Because there are some equivalent things that are very ornate to do. They would require a lot of computation to be able to figure out, oh, this is really equivalent to that. Or you can coarse-grain so finely that you become synonymous with the system.

Starting point is 00:44:52 Absolutely. So you can coarse-grain down to the level of the atoms. Right, exactly. But the question is, what is that fuzziness that you're putting on there? What's the thing that the fuzzifier is able to do and not able to do? And I think, so, you know, that's kind of the, knowing the mechanics of the coarse graining is important. So it's sort of, you have to discuss the process of equivalencing as well as just

Starting point is 00:45:20 discuss the fact that you have equivalence, so to speak. Okay, that's super interesting. So would you say that observation is the fact of equivalencing, or is the act of equivalencing? Well, I mean, the output of an observation is the result of equivalencing. The process of observation is a result of equivalencing. The process of observation is a process of equivalencing. So for example, this becomes important. Oh, I don't know, for quantum computing, this is important. We don't fully understand this, but it's important. That is, you know, in our models of physics, there's sort of these many possible histories that

Starting point is 00:46:04 correspond to a multi-way graph of possible things that could happen in the world, so to speak. And there's branchings, there's mergings. There's continually branching and merging. I think a key observation is that just as we humans are, you could say, coarse-graining, are sort of big on the scale of atoms of space, we're big on the scale of individual molecules and statistical mechanics. We're also big on the scale of different parts of history. So in branchial space, as we call it, the space of quantum branches, we are extended entities in branchial space. So we are effectively averaging or equivalencing different branches of history.

Starting point is 00:46:48 It's a weird thing. I mean, it means that we, and this is where it's really important, that we believe there's a single thread of experience that we have. Yet, that single thread of experience is actually an aggregate, I think, of many different paths of history. And that's kind of an idea that is kind of this equivalencing of different sort of paths in pieces of branchial space. It's sort of a, well, then there's a question of what's the mechanism by which that happens? You know, if we are, and this is what's important for a quantum computer, it's one thing inside the quantum computer that has these many different threads of computation going on. But then the question is, okay, humans are going to be looking at the answer. If they were quantum observers

Starting point is 00:47:42 looking at the answer, it would be done at that point. It would have these many threads of computation, and there are lots of different threads, and there to equivalence together these threads of history. You have to sort of find a way to say, and this is what happened. This is the one thing that happened. We can't have in our minds the kind of multiple branches of quantum history. That's a thing that we, in our common experience, we equivalence these things together. So sort of the output phase of a quantum computer has to be this thing where we are doing those equivalencings. Now, the fact is that in the traditional formalism of quantum mechanics, that really doesn't come up. In the traditional formalism of quantum mechanics, and it might be a mistake, the idea is there are all these quantum amplitudes,

Starting point is 00:48:46 and then, oh, there's this measurement operator, and kaboom, you just get the answer. And I think that sort of denies the fact that actually there is a process of equivalencing that has to go on to get to the point where you have an answer, to get to the point where you can sort of connect to a human mind that believes there is a definite threat of things that happened. So I have two questions here. One is, what is doing that process of equivalencing? And then number two,

Starting point is 00:49:19 you stated the word belief a few times, like we believe that we have a persistence in time and so on. So mathematically, what is meant in your model by the word belief a few times, like we believe that we have a persistence in time and so on. So mathematically, what is meant in your model by the word belief? Is the belief the same as assumption? We assume so-and-so, like what is belief? Well, okay.

Starting point is 00:49:39 So first, what's doing the equivalency? The different cases, different things. In some of these physical systems, like the piston with a bunch of molecules bouncing around, what is the equivalency there? There's more to analyze in this. There's about 10,000 kinds of measurements we know how to make. For every one of them, you can ask,

Starting point is 00:50:04 what's really going on. And they all turn out to be, they're actually a couple of different categories, but they're pretty much all something is being aggregated. Lots of individual molecules are coming in, but there's an aggregate pressure. There's one different case, which is things like weighing balances, where you're saying, you know, there are many different ways you can make a certain weight, but at some point the balance tips over. So it's kind of a discrete output, kind of like what happens in standard quantum mechanics with qubits and so on. There is a discrete output, whereas in the case of measuring pressure or something,

Starting point is 00:50:42 you just have a continuous number out. But what's happening when you measure pressure? Well, what's happening is every time a molecule hits the piston, it makes some atomic scale deformation in the shape of the piston. But that atomic scale deformation quickly sort of, you know, gets smeared out because the speed of sound is high in the solid. It's kind of that deformation is kind of, you know, the atoms are wiggling around. It quickly, that, that quickly disappears somehow. And that's, that's sort of a common thing that the, the process of equivalencing is happening on a timescale that's short compared to the, the way that you observe it. So, you know, for our brains with

Starting point is 00:51:26 our millisecond, multi-millisecond cycle times, sort of things that happen in less time than that, they are, we perceive them as being atomic things. We don't perceive those as being separated. If things are separated by a millisecond, we don't notice that. They're just the same kind of thing. But this, again, comes into, well, we have this inner experience of things happening, and that inner experience has done this aggregation. And you say, what does it mean to believe something? Well, how does that sort of work in a... I think the way to think about it is that the thing that you will do to make the decision about what to do next, making a succession of decisions, and then you go on and do the next thing. And I think the issue is, what are those atomic decisions, so to speak? What are those things that you have, you know, you've taken lots of detail about what could

Starting point is 00:52:38 be happening, and you've said, I think this happened. And then you go on and say, I think this happened, and so on. You've said, I think this happened, and then you go on and say, I think this happened, and so on. I think that's the sense in which we, I mean, in terms of kind of our attempts to build theories, this point about belief is the question of, well, what exactly can we observe? What can we talk about? I mean, it's the same thing that happened in the early 20th century when Einstein was inventing relativity and things like this. What Einstein

Starting point is 00:53:12 highlighted was what can we talk about about simultaneity? There are things that we just can't know. And so don't worry about it. Make a theory in which we don't have to know the things we can't know. And we're only talking about the things we can know. And it's the same thing that I'm talking about here. Make a theory that talks only about things we can know. And then it will be a feature of that theory that the theory has to have certain characteristics because it's only talking about the things we can know. In the case of the gas, for example, the fact that we can't know where all those individual

Starting point is 00:53:49 molecules go means that we have to concentrate on certain attributes of the gas about which we can make formulas and things like this. And it's the fact that we can't go in, if, okay, if we could go in and look at the individual molecules, we would say, wait a minute, PV doesn't equal RT, because, like, we can't really define the pressure, because actually, there could be this whole battalion of molecules that's going off in this direction, and we've got to worry about that. We can't just say, oh, it's your own model that dictates the laws of physics? Because if that was the case, this belief in the persistence of time, then someone like Heraclitus, who didn't believe that he was a continuous thread throughout time and made some arguments about that, does he then perceive physics differently? Yeah, interesting question. I mean, I think we are all so close together in royal space that observers, you know, do the cats and dogs perceive physics the same? Do the whales perceive it the same? Does the weather perceive physics the same? You know,

Starting point is 00:54:51 I'm not sure how we, as I say, us humans, I think, are so close together in the ways that we perceive things, because we all have the same sensory apparatus, give or take. We have many of the same ideas, give or take. I think that the distance between sort of ways that humans could perceive it is not very great. You know, if we say, what's the physics of the weather, the physics as perceived by the weather, I don't know. Hugely different, potentially. What's the physics of the weather, the physics as perceived by the weather? I don't know. Hugely different, potentially. What's the physics as perceived by a mosquito? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:55:39 I mean, it's, you know, it's what's important probably to the mosquito is a bunch of air currents and this and that and the other, of which we have no description, really. I mean, even if we think about, let's say, dogs, which are olfactory, where smell is a much more important sense than vision, for instance, imagining what the laws of physics, the smell laws of physics are like is, I don't know, it's a good exercise to try and think through what it would be like. I mean, the fact that we perceive the laws of physics as we do is, for example, our physical size is important to the way we perceive the laws of physics. And for example, the fact that we talk about space as being a thing is a consequence of

Starting point is 00:56:26 various kinds of aspects of our size. Let me explain that. You know, we think, we look around, we say, you know, there's an extent of space. And the room that I'm in is in this particular state at this particular time. At another time, it may be in a different state. But we see space as a unified, extended thing. So we can look around and we just say, space is out there, and we have a state of the world,

Starting point is 00:56:57 a state of space. But the reason that works is because we look around, I can see maybe 100 meters away through a window, okay? The light that's coming to me from 100 meters away arrives in microsecond, in a microsecond or something. That time that it takes the light to arrive is really short compared to the time it takes my brain to process the scene that I'm looking at.

Starting point is 00:57:24 thought compared to the time it takes my brain to process the scene that I'm looking at. So for me, it is a good way of thinking about things to say that the world consists of a series of frames in time where it's the state of space at this moment in time, then the state of space at that moment in time, and so on. So it makes sense for me to kind of aggregate up my view of the universe in there's space out there and things progress through time. Now, for example, if my brain worked a million times faster than it does, replace human neural circuitry by digital electronics, it'll be a million times faster. What will the world seem like if we thought a million times faster? Well, then the light that's coming to me from there, I will have already, I will have been able to process by the time the light arrives, I can already make, you know, think something different,

Starting point is 00:58:17 so to speak. So it no longer will seem the case that I, it will no longer be obvious that I should aggregate space as a thing that is at this moment in time. Similarly, if I was much bigger than I am, even with the same processing speed as we have right now, if we were the size of planets, for example, if one person was the size of a planet, let's say, then we would always be thinking about, oh, the speed of light. We can't think about, oh, the whole solar system is just one blob of space, because the different parts of it, we'd always be thinking, oh, that part of the light signal from Neptune hasn't arrived yet type thing. And we'd be able to think about things while we were waiting for that light signal to arrive.

Starting point is 00:59:04 And we'd be able to think about things while we were waiting for that light signal to arrive. And again, it wouldn't make sense for us to aggregate sort of space as this blob that exists, that has a state at a particular moment in time. I mean, we see that very concretely when we start thinking about reference frames for talking about the time for interplanetary spacecraft and things like that, we can see you just can't do it. By the time you're talking about things on that scale, with our human scale processing speeds, this idea that we sort of aggregate space at moments in time no longer works. So that's an example of where, because we are the way we are, we choose to talk, talk about the universe, the way we choose to talk about the universe. And by the way, I think there are a

Starting point is 00:59:50 whole bunch of other aspects of us that we take for granted, like that feature of us about our size and the fact that space makes sense to talk about. We completely take that for granted. And, you know, here's another example of something we take for granted. We take for granted that we have a certain degree of free will. We imagine that we have free will. For example, we imagine that if there's a science experiment, we could just do any science experiment we choose to do. We imagine that we can take that polarizer in some quantum experiment and we can turn

Starting point is 01:00:22 it to 30 degrees or 60 degrees, and whatever angle we think we can turn it to, we can turn it to 30 degrees or 60 degrees and whatever angle we think we can turn it to, we can turn it to that angle. We don't imagine that actually the act of turning it to that angle changes the world in such a way that next we'd have to turn it to some other angle. We have the belief that we have free will and that's important for a bunch of things about our perception of the world. And there's a whole chain of these kinds of things that seem obvious to us. Another good example is motion. The possibility of pure motion is non-trivial. That is, the fact that we can take a step forward and still be the same us as when we were in a different place is not obvious. be the same us as when we were in a different place is not obvious. If we were made up from little eddies in a fluid, we might be able to do the same thing, but it might not be surprising to

Starting point is 01:01:14 us that, well, actually, we can't just be moved around. this this idea that pure motion is possible is another kind of assumption about the world another thing about sort of the way that we because we are the way we are we sort of choose to describe the world uh in in in a certain way i mean the the discussion about space because we are the way we are with the scales that we're at, we can choose to describe the world in terms of space and separately time, for example. So, explain. You know, I think that the more we understand about the way we are as observers, with all the arbitrariness of the way biological evolution has taken us to where we are, technology has given us measuring devices of the kind we have, and so on, with all that

Starting point is 01:02:11 arbitrariness, as we think through what that means, we probably will learn more about how physics has to be the way it is as perceived by us. and so I think that's, you know, I had always assumed that we'd be on sort of a search for what is the rule that gives us the universe as the universe is. And what I've come to realize is, and this is kind of this idea of the Rulliad, that the universe is running all possible rules. It is merely that we are sampling a slice of all those possible rules. There's a slice determined by the way we are. An analogous thing. We are at a particular place in the universe, physically, in physical space. We don't have a theory for why we're here rather than somewhere else. I'm not sure a theory

Starting point is 01:03:04 like that would make sense. We just happen to be in this galaxy, on this planet, etc., etc., etc. And that is, and so our view of the universe is based on the point of view of critters that are on this planet looking up at the sky or whatever else. And if we were somewhere else, if we lived, you know, near the center of our galaxy, or we lived somewhere completely different, or we lived at a different time in the history of the universe, whatever, we would have a different point of view about the universe. And it's the same story with kind of ruleal space that we have a different point of view about the universe. The non-trivial fact, the real sort of scientific bite you know, bite here is that once

Starting point is 01:03:47 we are observers with certain general characteristics, we can make certain general conclusions about the laws of physics that we will perceive. And so it's kind of what goes in, what comes out. What goes in is some characterization of us as observers. What comes out is the laws of physics we have to observe. And it's sort of interesting because it's like, where do the laws of physics come from? Well, they in a sense come from the fact that we are the way we are. And for me, that was always a very confusing thing. In the end, why did we get this universe and not another? And the answer, I think, is we got this perceived universe because we are the way we are. And why are we the way we are? Well, you can say,

Starting point is 01:04:32 well, how did we evolve this way, blah, blah, blah. But in the end, it's like asking why are we on this particular planet and not another one? It's a sort of contingent fact about the world that we are here and not somewhere else. And so similarly, that we are the way we are as observers, so to speak, is something that sort of happens to be that way, but it's not something for which we will expect to have, we wouldn't expect to have a theory for that. Stephen, if what you're saying is that the question of why these laws and not some other set of laws is tantamount to why this planet, Earth, and not some other planet like some from the Andromeda galaxy, I don't see what's non-trivial about that. Well, yeah, but the thing that's really non-trivial is that you say, well, why is general relativity correct? non-trivial is that you say, well, why is general relativity correct? Well, for any observer that has these very general characteristics, inevitably you have those precise laws. That's the non-trivial

Starting point is 01:05:33 part. If it was just saying, well, because of the details of the way we are, there's really a non-trivial sort of heavy lifting piece of science between this impression that we have about, you know, these very coarse statements about the observers that we are and the precise statements about what laws of physics we perceive. So, Stephen, you've had a variety of breakthroughs recently, especially since COVID, remarkably. of breakthroughs recently especially since covid remarkably if you had to pin a majority of the recent breakthroughs of yours to one key insight what would it be so for instance it could be the introduction of hypergraphs or the coining of computational irreducibility or the hiring of jonathan gerrard jonathan's been very helpful, for sure. No, I mean, you know, I think, look, the first statement is sort of, it's computation all the way down.

Starting point is 01:06:35 That you can really, that computation is the way of thinking about the world. You know, if you look at how have we formalized the world, it's kind of, you know, if you look at how have we formalized the world, it's, um, uh, um, it's kind of, you know, the invention of human language is a formalization of the world. Logic is a formalization of the world. Uh, you know, mathematics is a formalization of the world. Computation is a formalization of the world. And, you know, in terms of what has allowed me to get where I've gotten to, a large part of that is taking seriously that idea of computation as a way of formalizing the world and building tools, building our whole Wolfram language technology stack and so on around that idea of computation as a way to formalize the world. way to formalize the world. Now, once you've had that idea, you start thinking about, well, what about physics? How do I formalize that? So the next big fact is principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility. Those are very closely related. That's a key

Starting point is 01:07:39 intuitional idea that I originally had in the early 1980s that is a driver for a lot of other things. In more recent times, I would say that this whole business about multi-computation, understanding the Rulliad, understanding the role of observers, it's kind of this idea of the relationship of underlying computation and the Rulliad, the entangled limit of all possible computational processes, understanding the interplay between that and what we're like as observers. The fact that you can derive science from that is really pretty interesting and i did not see that coming i mean that you know if you'd asked me even four years ago or something you know did i think we will be able to derive general relativity and well i knew we could derive generativity from underlying hypergraph evolution. I've known that since the 1990s. I thought it was graphs back then,

Starting point is 01:08:50 but hypergraphs are easier. But the concept that there is some kind of, that there's an inevitability to these kinds of laws of physics for observers like us. I really didn't see that coming. And I think I'm sure that it has echoes and resonances in lots of things that people have imagined, particularly a couple thousand years ago or more, in sort of early thinkings about philosophy and how it relates to our descriptions of the world um you know the main thing that we've achieved in the last couple of thousand years is you know we can run computer simulations and actually you know see how this works with some concreteness so to speak rather than having just some some sort of vaguer idea

Starting point is 01:09:40 about what's going on but i would say that that for me, the role of the observer, the idea of multi-computation, the Rulliad, the inevitability of science the way it is, those are important ideas. I suspect that a lot of the technical detail of hypergraph rewriting, all this kind of thing, is a very useful way to get there. But in the end, it will be possible to state a lot of these things in terms of… It's one of these things where you can think about computation theory. And if you don't have Turing machines or something like that, you can't concretely talk about it. You're just sort of still just vaguely saying things. You need a concrete basis on which to discuss things. But in the end, the core ideas are independent of

Starting point is 01:10:38 that basis. And so it is, I think, with the whole observer theory, Rulliad, sort of, you know, inevitability of laws of physics and so on story. Yeah, many of these ideas are like fountains where other ideas cascade out of them. So you mentioned the power of computation or thinking about computation as fundamental, equivalencing, computational irreducibility, observers, multi-computation, Rulliad. So let's call those ideas fountain ideas for the sake of this conversation what recipe would you give your former self to have some of these fountain ideas more often there's a whole bunch of computational irreducibility and what has what ends up happening is one tries to come up with these things.

Starting point is 01:11:27 You know, I don't think I'm batting too horribly in terms of having these ideas with decent frequency. I mean, because frankly, some of these ideas, if you have them too quickly, there's not a lot you can do with them. They need a certain degree of of development before they're before they're very meaningful i mean so i think that the you know there's a there's a maximum rate in fact one of the things that has been a frustration to me recently is that there are so many of these things coming that you know i'm i'm writing about all these different things and i think some of the things i'm writing are quite important and seeds for a lot of other things. But I'm going so quickly that they don't have as much chance to develop as they probably need.

Starting point is 01:12:15 So I think there's a maximum rate of generating these potentially big ideas. And if you exceed that rate rate it's kind of just totally confusing and you can't achieve anything so it's not that when you saturate it some just fall to the wayside it's that somehow it's like spinning plates and all of them fall no i mean if you do it too fast then it's just like well i have this, but each of these ideas needs a certain development. I mean, you know, when one first, I mean, one of the things that I personally spend a lot of effort on is sort of cleaning ideas. That is when I have some vague sense of an idea, it's like, what is the essence of that idea? What is the really simple, I could say it in a sentence or two, version of that idea?

Starting point is 01:13:07 And that takes a while. I mean, maybe a smarter me would be able to do that more quickly. But it's taking, figuring out what's the essence, what's important, what's not. I mean, I've had the good fortune, I suppose, in my life to do that a whole bunch of times. I've had the good fortune, I suppose, in my life to do that a whole bunch of times. In fact, the thing I do for a living, designing and building our computational language, critically relies on that skill because that's all about taking all these things that one might think about computationally and kind of crisping them down to these kind of primitives that we implement in our language and so on. So that's a, you know, I get to do this pretty much every day

Starting point is 01:13:50 and I've been doing it kind of every day for 40 years. And that's a useful experience to have if your goal is sort of the crisping of ideas for kind of basic intellectual development, so to speak. I think that's one thing. I mean, another thing for me is tools. And when I can do an experiment with Wolfram Language, I've built this whole technology stack. Well, conveniently, millions of other people use it too. But first and foremost, I kind of built it so I could do stuff myself, kind of my sort of personal superpower, so to speak. And that works really well.

Starting point is 01:14:28 And it's really necessary for, you know, I could not, many, many things I've discovered, I would never have had the built-in intuition to figure out that the way they work is the way they actually work. I discovered the way they work by doing experiments, computational experiments. And I wouldn't have had the confidence, actually, even if I'd imagined that was the way things might work. I wouldn't have had the confidence to say that really is the way things work without having seen them as the result of an experiment. And I think it's kind of the, I might have imagined, although I didn't, back in the beginning of the 1980s, that really simple computational rules

Starting point is 01:15:11 could lead to complicated behavior. I didn't imagine that. I actually imagined the opposite. And had it not been for the fact that I had explicit computer experiments where I could just plainly see that's what's going on, I wouldn't have believed it. So that's a necessary piece. You know, if it was purely, I'm going to sit and think about this stuff just in my own mind, I would never have got there. And it's the same with tons of things I've been doing. So I would say that the, you know, probably the two things that have been important to me are the tools, having built the sort of tall tower of tools that allow me to do experiments, get intuition, and so on. That's one thing. And even the very act of putting my thoughts into computational language is a way of crystallizing what I'm talking about. It's like,

Starting point is 01:15:58 well, I vaguely imagine this and that and the other. Let me write a function that does that. It's kind of like when people say, I'm going to write down a mathematical proof. Yeah, Ah, interesting. People are doing, I don't know, math exercises or something, and they get the setup totally wrong. That's a different story than if, oh, they did a calculation slightly wrong and they got this minus sign in the wrong place. It's for kind of crystallizing thoughts, human thoughts, into something that has a lot more power. And not only because, but both because it's a way of sort of formalizing what we're talking about, and because then we can have a computer help us to zoom forward with what we're thinking about. But so, you know, for me, it's kind of the tools, the sort of crystallization of ideas from representing them

Starting point is 01:17:09 in basically a morphic language, then the actual running of it to see what happens and to get intuition that I wouldn't otherwise have had. And I suppose the other thing is the effort to sort of get to the essence of things, say, what is the, what is the, what is the core point that, that, um, that this all comes from, so to speak. And I suppose that for me, that is somewhat related to exposition. And, you know, I spend quite a lot of effort writing things, trying to explain things, you know, doing live streams, all those kinds of things. you know doing live streams all those kinds of things and for me that's a you know that's a that's a part of the process of kind of grinding things down to their essence like even in this conversation

Starting point is 01:17:52 we've had i've i've said a few things that i haven't thought to say before so to speak that um i think are are useful ways to kind of crystallize some some thoughts that i've that i've had in the past and that's you And that is my typical experience, is that sort of the act of exposition is an important driver for sort of getting to the essence of things. But that's, for me, the other big thing is what's the essential point? Now, you know, this question of, you know, I've been, I sort of carry around with me lots of things where I mean to figure this out someday. And I'm sort of gradually accumulating knowledge about those things. Part of what I need to do is in any new field that you work in, there is some kind of sort of local intuition in that field.

Starting point is 01:18:44 Right. kind of, uh, sort of local intuition in that field. And unless you've kind of marinated in the thing for a while, it's hard to have that local intuition. I mean, you know, I've been interested in the foundations of biology, foundations of economics, uh, things about, uh, neuroscience and so on in each of these areas, sort of slowly over the years, I've been trying to get sort of general knowledge and intuition about these areas, because otherwise, you really, it's very hard to, you know, when you say, I'm now going to go and figure out the essence of economics, for example, unless you have some sort of big intuitional understanding of what economics is about, it's very hard, at least for me, it's very hard to go and do that. If you're just like, well, you know,

Starting point is 01:19:32 somebody says the definition of economics is this. Okay, that's nice, but they might be wrong. And unless you've got some sort of more broader view of what's in that field, it's really hard to dig down and not sort of be channeled into the things that people already said were going on. So that's a slow process for me. I mean, there are many fields where I've been following them for, I don't know, some of them nearly 50 years now, and slowly trying to get intuition i mean physics for example is a good example i mean the fact that you know i can make you know decent you know i can can do the things we've done in fundamental physics is i think completely dependent on the fact that you know, I, you know, learnt research physics when I was, as it happens, pretty young. And, you know, you can talk to me about quantum field theory or general relativity or something

Starting point is 01:20:33 like that, and I know all the technical stuff. And that, while that's not something that we use every day in moving forward with the physics project, for instance, the fact that one has that background knowledge of roughly the physics project, for instance, the fact that one has that background knowledge of roughly how things work. I mean, like Jonathan and I were just talking about some really nice stuff he's been doing with using our models to do simulations of space-time. And we're talking about why do these things happen this way? He sees these things in these simulations. Why does it happen that way? It's very important in those conversations that, you know, I, for example, and he also, but, you know, kind of knows the whole sort of shtick of how typical general relativity

Starting point is 01:21:19 works, how typical quantum field theory works, and so on. how typical quantum field theory works, and so on. Without that, it's really hard to, I think, to reason rationally in this area. If you have to invent everything for yourself, you'll never get there. But once one is sort of living in this environment of, well, there's a certain amount of ambient knowledge that's been developed, then you have the chance, if you understand that ambient knowledge well, and that's one of the issues, if you just know kind of the, oh, I read this textbook and I got this one point of view about things, that's not enough. If you want to make foundational progress in a field, you really have to understand it in some quite deep level that's typically your own internalized understanding that isn't the thing that you just learned from a textbook type thing. And for a lot of these fields, it takes a while to get there.

Starting point is 01:22:30 Doing practical projects in these fields where you're kind of like, for example, in economics, working on things related to blockchain and distributed blockchain and so on, helped me. I don't think I'm there yet, but it helped me to kind of get an understanding of, I don't know, the role of liquidity and what that means and the notion of single prices for things and so on. notion of single prices for things and so on. To have that sort of practical in-the-weeds experience in this area and to see sort of how things work out in practice, really important in being able to get a sort of bigger foundational theoretical idea about what's going on. Is there a difference in how you do research now and even your philosophy of research compared to when you were in your 30s or 40s other than the technology? And, um, the, uh, uh, the thing, I think by the time I was a little bit over 20 years old, I had cottoned on to this point about the most important thing is the essence of what's going on, so to speak, drilling down, so to speak, as opposed to sort of building the technical tower. I mean, when I was first doing things like particle physics, you know, I was mostly, you know, if you look at sort of the output, I was mostly taking a tower that had already been built and adding an extra floor to it in one someplace or another. And I sort of, and understanding the foundations of the tower was something that I, you know, took me a few years to get to the point where I realized that was worth doing. That was a thing I could do.

Starting point is 01:24:14 And, you know, at the beginning, it seemed like that was a waste of time. It's like, let's take the tower people have built and let's build on top of that. Who cares about what's underneath because people have already established that. And I then realized that the greatest leverage comes from operating at the bottom of the tower, so to speak. In this analogy, at least, it comes from, you know,

Starting point is 01:24:38 if you change the foundations just a tiny bit, so much changes. Whereas if you're operating kind of at the level of of you know technical detail your your maximum sort of reach is much smaller in terms of of um no i mean i'd been a uh gosh i think um um my mode of of doing things that there are a few differences i mean for example in my 30s i spent my 30s basically writing this big book a new kind of science um it's kind of terrible to say one spent one's whole x decade of one's life doing something but yes i spent that decade of my life why is that terrible because it's a

Starting point is 01:25:26 long time we don't have a lot of decades in lives and um it's kind of a big commitment to to say you know i this is the thing i did in this decade i mean i i'm i'm i that project had a number of features one was well there was sort of a delivery medium issue. In today's world, I might have done that project differently. As it was in the world of the 1990s, the only way I could see to put out a substantial body of intellectual ideas was you write a big book. That was the only thing, you know, it's kind of like, that's the way you get sort of, uh, you know, if, if you, if you write, you know, paper, a hundred papers, it's kind of all little micro steps and it's completely unrealistic to expect

Starting point is 01:26:21 that people will piece together a hundred micro steps and say, oh yeah, I get it. I understand. So, so, but at the time, sort of the only medium I could come up with for, for getting out big ideas was you write a big book. And I also had this, I, I really, I sort of put, you know, I wanted to achieve a certain level of perfection in what I was putting out because it was like I'm I'm spending a decade on this this is I didn't know it was a decade at the beginning I probably wouldn't have done it but but it became a decade of course and it's like this has to be you know this is my magnum opus thing it's got to be perfect it's got to and you know every page it's like you know if i'm lucky it was a page a day and you know every picture was you know every detail was kind of

Starting point is 01:27:13 done very carefully you know i used what i produced every single day pretty much you know i'm using the online version of of nks the new kind of science book, all the time. It's like I'm talking to people. I say, I need an example of this. Okay, I've got a page in NKS that has that example. It's remarkable how often I end up using it. So that was not a bad investment from my point of view. In modern times, I've had a different optimization.

Starting point is 01:27:40 My optimization is I write as quickly and as much as possible. My optimization is I write as quickly and as much as possible. It's more a question of, you know, let me get the stuff out there because the choice is I could go and I could noodle on it for another five years. And then it's not clear it will be better. It might actually be worse. It might be harder for people to absorb. I think that the, you know, the sort of style of writing that I've developed with just, you know, write it out in a somewhat conversational way, people seem to have a good time absorbing that. And that's, you know, had I done the NKS book that way, I would probably have a better time in that decade. And it would have been longer.

Starting point is 01:28:27 But it would be, you know, and maybe I wouldn't find it as sort of concentratedly useful as I do now. But you know, that's one style that's changed is that I'm, I'm churning out some, oh, I don't know how much it is, I'm probably, I don't know, I should work it out, but I bet I'm writing at least 1,000 pages a year. And that's so I'm writing the equivalent of the NKS book, which is 1,200 pages every year and possibly much more than that. And that's a difference in those things. I mean, I would say in terms of tools, one of the things that is probably an underappreciated power is what we call click to copy.

Starting point is 01:29:10 That is, you know, you look at one of these things I write, it has a bunch of pictures. You can click any one of those pictures. You'll get a piece of orphan language code. You can run that code. And unless something went horribly wrong, it will make the same picture as the one that I had. So it's all perfectly reproducible and perfectly buildable on. And, you know, when we do our summer schools and winter schools and so on, people all the time and people in the world at large all the time are like, I'm just going to take this piece of code from here and I'm going

Starting point is 01:29:42 to build on that. And that's a kind of a new opportunity in research, because normally people, when they do research, you know, somebody writes a paper, other people read the paper. It's kind of like concepts as, you know, the particle concepts or something that transmitted from one mind to another, but then they have to be unpacked at the other end. What we have the opportunity to do with kind of things like click-to-copy code and computational language in general is you're just like, here's the thought. You can just use it immediately. You don't have to unpack it. You don't have to do your own, make your own version of it. And so I think that's been a powerful thing in terms of being able to move things forward. Having said that,

Starting point is 01:30:25 you know, there are a decent number of people now who are, you know, have absorbed a lot of stuff with our physics project pretty well, and the things that have come from the physics project, mathematics stuff, and so on. The stuff is difficult. You know, to make real progress is technically complicated and is technically and conceptually complicated. And I think one of the things that I've noticed that's been rather a curious observation is that, you know, I've talked to lots of people about what we're doing and things. You talk to scientists, physicists, let's say, or other kinds of scientists. You have one experience. You talk to people who've thought about professionally or sometimes otherwise about philosophy and things like that. You have a different experience. The thing that I found interesting is the scientists are used to technical complexity

Starting point is 01:31:20 and technical progress. They're not used to conceptual progress and conceptual complexity. It's kind of like, well, just tell us, you know, we got another formula. We can write down another, you know, equation more or less. We can write down another whatever. That stuff can get very complicated, but it's very tracked in a certain way. Whereas what's, what's ended up happening with, with what we've done is, you know, it ends up being conceptually a bit different from what's gone before. And that's something which I've noticed. There's this strange inequality in kind of that is more easily understood by people with sort of a more philosophical bent than it is by people with a technical scientific bent. Which is sort of an interesting phenomenon. I don't know where that ends because it's in a sense you know the science we have today was born out of philosophy

Starting point is 01:32:09 back you know 400 years ago 300 years ago or whatever and and that was you know there was a certain set of concepts that sort of condensed onto science as we know it today we have a somewhat different set of concepts that are condensing into sort of a new direction in science. And there are many technical things to be done that are traditional scientific kinds of things. I mean, the things that, you know, like Jonathan and I are talking about right now have to do with kind of observational consequences of physics models for, you know, what can you actually observe with a telescope? What can you do, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a lot of technical physics that has to be done there. But, you know, these questions about sort of the inevitability of

Starting point is 01:32:59 the laws of physics, the nature of observers and so on, that's a different kind of thinking mostly, although, again, it has lots of sort of technical tentacles about how does this particular kind of measuring device work and what consequences does this have and so on the question that many people are wondering now that you've mentioned it is where is the evidence for the wolfram's physics project how would you respond to that? Well, gosh, I mean, it's not a very common thing that you get to look at the big achievements of 20th century physics and know why they're true. Never happened before. Nothing is even close to that. It's remarkable how much you get from a rather small, you know, from a sort of a small essential set of ideas.

Starting point is 01:33:50 There's just huge reach in all these different directions. Now, you know, if you say, do we know it's our model and not model XYZ? One of the things that's interesting is an awful lot of things that have been developed in mathematical physics seem to plug into our models. They seem to be limits of our models. They seem to be specific cases of our models, things like that. So the idea it's us versus them is not really the thing. I suspect that essentially all of the popular mathematical physics directions, whether it's, you know, whether it's, I don't know, loop quantum gravity or whether it's spin networks or whether it's string theory or whether it's, you know, ADS-CFT correspondence, these kinds of things, they all seem to plug into our models. Our models provide, like, this is why ADS-CFT is true.

Starting point is 01:34:43 This is, you know, string theory lives in this particular corner, a particular sort of case of our models, maybe. We don't know that for sure yet. But that's what I think is going to happen. So it's kind of, it's not us versus them. But there are fundamental things about our models that are very different from what's gone before. For example, the idea that space is discrete. And that's a thing that it's kind of amusing if you look at the history, which I have only come to know much more recently, which is, you know, back in antiquity, people were arguing all the time, you know, is the universe discrete or continuous? They would have said, you know, democrators would have said space is discrete. You know, other people would have said it's continuous, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 01:35:26 They were arguing about it. Okay, then we get people were arguing about the same kind of thing for light. Then we get to the end of the 19th century and sort of the big fight was on about molecules and, you know, was matter discrete or continuous? And it really looked like the continuous stuff was going to win right up until when molecules and Brownian motion and things like that were discovered.

Starting point is 01:35:50 And at that point, it's like, OK, you know, matter is discrete. And then, OK, light is discrete. I mean, Einstein, when he's presenting, you know, the photoelectric effect and idea of photons, just comes right out and says, we discovered that matter is discrete. Let's check out the electromagnetic field. Maybe it's discrete too. Gosh, it actually is. At the time, and this is something I didn't know until very recently, at the time, most people believed space was discrete. Even Einstein, apparently. Absolutely. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, the whole crowd, they all believed space was discrete.

Starting point is 01:36:26 And I keep on finding out more and more of this history. But what happened is they couldn't make it compatible with relativity. And that was a technical problem. I mean, that's a problem we solve with hypergraphs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so they gave up. And so for 100 years, people said, oh, space must be continuous. And when you said, well, wait a minute, space might not be continuous, people are like, that's just nuts. Now, they wouldn't have said that. 100 years ago,

Starting point is 01:36:57 people wouldn't have said that. And it happens in science and other fields that people develop, oh, yeah, for very technical reasons, oh, it has to work this way. And then after a few sort of academic generations go through, it's like, well, of course it works that way. So, okay, is space discrete or not? You know, with molecules, people kind of lucked out that Brownian motion was visible. The question is, is Brownian motion, is the analog of Brownian motion for space detectable? Is it detectable in our times? And that's a really interesting question, and we're working on it. And maybe there are some things to do with black holes

Starting point is 01:37:39 that are detailed effects, and maybe there are some things that I have the slight guess that dark matter will end up being a feature of the microscopic structure of space, and that it will be that after we know what it is, everybody will say, how could we have been so stupid? We missed that for 50 years or whatever. But I think, but we're not there yet. So I can't say that.

Starting point is 01:38:09 Yeah, yeah. But I think. I heard a quote from you about dark matter's space-time heat or the caloric substance of our time. Well, we don't know that yet. But that's. Let's imagine you knew it. Let's imagine you were able to derive that. Then could you also say, because there's an abundance of evidence that dark matter behaves like matter,

Starting point is 01:38:30 so because of that, then could you also say that some of the matter or the matter that we see is also a form of space-time heat? Like, if space-time heat can behave like matter, what is the limit to that? Right. Okay. Heat is a form of energy. Kinetic energy, you know, large Okay. Heat is a form of energy. Kinetic energy, you know, large-scale motion is a form of energy. It's the same sense, I think, here that particles, ordinary particles, are like large-scale motion. And whereas my guess would be there's a different thing, which is microscopic features of space-time.

Starting point is 01:39:03 So, for example, if we look at matter, we are used to macroscopic things happening with matter. Throw a ball from here to there, that kind of thing. There's a big chunk of matter that's moving from here to there. Then we're used to the idea of heat. Heat is a microscopic feature of matter. Heat is not macroscopic. Heat is something about individual molecules. So my guess is that particles are the macroscopic, not macroscopic on our scale, but macroscopic relative to the atoms of space, macroscopic effects in the structure of space, whereas maybe spacetime heat is microscopic effects in the structure of space. Maybe spacetime heat is microscopic effects in the structure of space.

Starting point is 01:39:55 And my guess, that's my guess so far, is that that will lead to a change in the things we say about the structure of space. And you say, well, OK, one thing to understand. It's a fundamental feature of, well, OK, so Einstein's equations, for example, and the principle of equivalence and so on. In Einstein's equations, you can trade off sort of energy momentum for gravitational field. You can kind of move things around. You can say, okay, I've got a gravitational wave.

Starting point is 01:40:19 Is the gravitational wave something which is a source of gravity, a source of spacetime curvature, or is it just space-time curvature? You can kind of trade off those two things. In our models, that tradeoff is more extreme because in our models, everything is just a feature of the structure of space. So these particles are just sort of lumps in space. In traditional general relativity, one distinguishes things which are features of space from things which are sort of matter that exists in space. Now, for example, let's say we made a bunch of stuff out of black holes.

Starting point is 01:40:54 Then we would be in the same situation because black holes are, as they're usually formulated, just a feature of the structure of space. So if we were making our sort of, I don't know, our, you know, planet or something out of lots of little black holes or whatever, if we could hold them apart and so on, then we have a thing which seems like it's, you know, something that's like matter, but it's really just made of structure of space. By the way, I suspect that there is a close analogy between particles like electrons and things like black holes.

Starting point is 01:41:27 They're both kind of persistent structures in space-time, except that black holes, we have normally imagined in relativity that they're these very big things, whereas we think the particles are very small and subject to quantum mechanics and so on. In our models, there really isn't such a distinction. and subject to quantum mechanics and so on, in our models, there really isn't such a distinction. You can have kind of features of space that are on any scale. And in any case, my tendency would be to think that the concept that dark matter is like matter, I mean, this is always what happens in science and so many other things. The fact that it's called dark matter might be a big mistake, just like people called it caloric fluid. Calling heat caloric fluid, the fluid part of that name,

Starting point is 01:42:14 was a big mistake, which probably made it. People just thought of it as a material fluid substance, just as we now, by the name dark matter, we're thinking of it as matter, and that may not be the right picture. And I don't think that the experimental features, what's known is that it has certain gravitational effects. It's not known that you can pick it up and make particles out of it and so on. known that you can pick it up and make particles out of it and so on well many people are trying to find other models that aren't matter like how do you modify gravity to reproduce the experimental result yeah yeah right so i mean that one one thing about that is that the you know the attempts to just sort of go and hack einstein equations and, you know, figure out how that works has not been terribly successful. I think one new degree of freedom that we have that's pretty important is dimension change. And because we don't have the idea that space has to be fixed three plus one dimensional thing, that provides kind of a reformulation of general relativity in terms of dimension change rather than spacetime curvature. And I think that, although I don't know how it

Starting point is 01:43:31 works yet, my intuition is that when one looks at those attempts to parametrize changes to gravity, that it's just like, whoops, we missed that change because it didn't seem natural to us. But as soon as you think about dimension change, a change of a certain kind will be natural, even though, let's say, for example, if you were doing a series expansion, you would never get x to the one half is not something you get through a series expansion. It just isn't, you know, x plus x squared plus x cubed and so on will never make x to the one half. And so that's a, you know, it's kind of a, like you kind of miss that by thinking about things in a particular way. And so I'm sort of guessing that dimension change may be the key to seeing how you get an effective modified gravity,

Starting point is 01:44:20 because that's what we're going to end up with. I mean, whatever happens, you may, you know, it's just like we can talk about, you just like when we talk about heat. It's a form of energy. It has certain characteristics that are like energy, and in the end, we'll describe it in terms of the dynamics of energy. Similarly here, this will eventually be described in terms of the dynamics of gravity. It will be a modified gravity, but gravity modified in a particular way that comes out of the structure of our models. Do you think that the Rulliad itself can be an observer? I know we're going back to observation, but I'm curious. Oh, boy. Not really.

Starting point is 01:44:59 Not an observer like us. See, here's the thing. observer like us see here's the thing the one feature of us and it's another implicit assumption is we're kind of small and integrated that is our minds you know by the by the very idea that we have a single thread of experience our minds are not too extended if our minds were sort of sort of vastly extended we wouldn't have the same sort of sense of coherent identity so you know one picture is about the rulliad is we say let's go explore the rulliad let's go uh look at sort of you know let's go colonize rullial space let's go yeah right go explore further and further out and you know, let's go colonize rural space. Let's go explore further and further out. And you say, maybe that's the point of civilization. Maybe that's what we're,

Starting point is 01:45:50 you know, maybe that's our, maybe that should be our goal, just like we explore physical space, we explore rural space, et cetera. Well, the problem is that when you are sort of holding in your mind all of these different possible views of what's going on, in some sense, by the time you have all those different views all stuffed together in your mind, there's no coherence to what you think. And so, probably in no meaningful sense can you say that you still coherently exist. You are everything, but you're also nothing, so to speak. In other words, the concept of coherent existence, I think, depends on the choice that it is there are things that are you, and there's lots of stuff that isn't you. If you say you are everything, then in some sense, there's no you in that picture, so

Starting point is 01:46:39 to speak. Interesting. So I think that what is necessary is that in order to have kind of coherent existence, we have to be limited. A way of thinking about this, a much more formal way of thinking about this in mathematics would be, well, you want to prove theorems in mathematics. What you care about is having a limited set of axioms, then building a tower of theorems on top of those axioms. Well, you could say, well, what if you just allowed all possible axioms? Then you could prove everything. And why isn't that a good thing

Starting point is 01:47:17 in mathematics, so to speak? You can just prove everything. Well, what does that correspond to? In mathematics, it's kind of an old result in logic that as soon as you have something that you consider false, you can deduce anything from false. Implication, the logical rules of implication, given that you start from a false premise, everything becomes true. true. And at that point, it's like, then you've sort of blown up everything. You can no longer make a coherent statement in mathematics. By the time you throw into the things that you believe something which is false, then you can derive everything. Then everything is, in a sense, everything is true. As soon as you take as a premise something which is false, you sort of have to conclude that everything could be derived as true. And at that point, you can no longer sort of build a coherent mathematics. And so I think it's the same kind of thing that as you, by the time, you know, if the,

Starting point is 01:48:18 if by the time sort of you as an observer span the Rullliad you do not in any coherent sense exist and so that that that's kind of a uh for observers like us that's kind of a downer there are different logical systems like there's classical logic and then there's paraconsistent where you can have a and not a, but not explosion. So in your really at approach, is there something that's like the canonical logical system? So it's, I don't know, intuition is logic. It's a good question. I mean, I think that in a sense, everything we've done is sort of a constructivist approach. The idea of logic with true and false

Starting point is 01:49:05 and so on, I've never thought was that great. I mean, there's an awful lot of things in the world that are neither true nor false. You know, it will rain tomorrow. That statement is neither true nor false. It's a, as stated now. Yet to be determined. Yeah, right. But I mean, as a practical matter, you know, you can try and shoehorn everything into, it's got to be true or false. But that's not the reality of most of what we talk about. You know, if I say, in Wolfen language, for example, I say x is greater than three, but I've said nothing about what x is, there's nothing I can do with that statement. It's just, well, it's a statement x is greater than 3. Maybe there's some other statement I can derive from that, but that statement does not have a truth value. That statement does not in any useful form have

Starting point is 01:49:54 a truth value. It's just x is greater than 3. We don't know. And I think that the things we're doing in Physics Project and the metamath mathematics that comes from that and so on, it's all constructive. We're saying you can build a thing this and that way. We're not asking the question. We're not formulating it as what is true. We're formulating it as what can you build. And so you don't really get into the same kind of binds. You don't have to force yourself into this kind of question of what's the logic, so to speak, because there isn't a logic. It's just what can you build? In other words, if I say, what is true in the world? Well, in mathematics, you could say, what's true? Okay. I don't know whether

Starting point is 01:50:47 mathematics can answer that question. Because in mathematics, if you think about it in typical foundations of mathematics, it's like, well, there are these axioms. And given those axioms, you can derive things. And you say, well, is this actually true? Well, if you change the axioms, you might be able to derive it,, you might be able to derive it. You might not be able to derive it. What we're concentrating on is purely what can you derive. And I think that's similar to what can exist in the world, what can be produced by physics in the world.

Starting point is 01:51:19 That's a similar kind of question. You don't say, is the Earth true? You say more, does the Earth exist? Has the Earth been produced by physics? And so similarly in mathematics or in other kinds of ways we talk about things, we say, can this be produced? Not, is it, quotes, true? can this be produced not is it quotes true earlier when you were talking about okay so there's one view that you can go into a field and make progress because you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and you're not you don't have the dogma of the whole history of the field indoctrinated upon you but

Starting point is 01:51:59 then there's the other view that no what you need to do is familiarize yourself with the tools gain the intuition you need to understand where the field is before you can make some progress. So it was my understanding that you were advocating at least for the latter. Do you feel what, okay, what is the largest myth, quote unquote, of modern science that is preventing, in your opinion, some major breakthrough major breakthrough like where do you feel we're being held back most other than hey we should be thinking more computationally so other than that yeah yeah right no i think i mean by the way your your sort of dichotomy between know the field deeply and don't get too dyed in the wool in the dogma of the field that's an interesting dichotomy um and i think the main way you get out of that

Starting point is 01:52:46 is i suppose unkindly you could say by being arrogant or confident or something because explain well because i mean if there's a dogma in a field and you're not really confident, you say, well, I guess that's probably true. Even if you have to have a certain, look, I know that's the dogma of the field. I understand that dogma. And by the way, I think it's nonsense. That's a non-trivial, almost emotional thing to say, right? You have to be very, you know, it's not, most people who come along and say, well, most people will come along and say, I'm just looking at this field. I don't really know much about it. Its dogma must be wrong. That's probably a lose. Most people, by the time they've learned the dogma, it's right most people by the time they've learned the dogma it's like that's what they're living in and they can't see anything outside of that and so i think you know in my own case i've been lucky

Starting point is 01:53:54 and that i've worked in a lot of different fields and so i i can kind of see a little bit from the outside some of you know i've learned the dogma of a bunch of fields but i can kind of see that from the outside and i've had the experience of seeing these dogmas just turn out to be wrong over and over again. And, you know, I think that that is a, and I've had the experience, the kind of, you know, personal arrogance experience or something of realizing, yes, I figured it out correctly, even though the dogma said something different and the dogma was wrong. I mean, that was, you know, I, in my early life, I, you know, was able to figure out a few little things in particle physics where that kind of thing happened,

Starting point is 01:54:36 but they were small, but gradually they got bigger because after you see, well, you know, I mean, I remember there was one thing when I was like 17 years old or something where, where, um, you know, I'd calculated a bunch of things in particle physics and there was some experiment that said what I, you know, calculated had to be wrong. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is how it has to work. Either QCD is wrong, or this is how it has to work. And, you know, I kind of, and turned out I was right. And I felt kind of stupid for not having checked more about how the experiment was done and so on, because I probably could have realized that, you know, there was some fishiness there, so to speak. But it was, you know, that was a fairly small thing. But after

Starting point is 01:55:24 you've done a few of those things you build up a certain amount of confidence that hey you know just because everybody says x doesn't mean that x is necessarily true and that's a that's a super useful thing from a personal point of view to realize and and you know one could say well i think something different from what people usually think and And, you know, one may be just completely wrong. One may think that a bunch of times and one may be wrong every single time. You know, my personal experience, for whatever reason, you know, I happened to, perhaps because I started smaller, I happened to have had the experience of being right a bunch of

Starting point is 01:55:59 times. And that really helps one to have the confidence to think differently, so to speak, about the things that are, you know, some accepted dogma. In terms of right now, I don't know, things that people widely think that, I think there are different kinds of issues. There are places where people think that problem is too hard, it will never be solved. And we'll never know how physics fundamentally works or whatever. We'll never know how this or that works. It's hopeless. Just give up. That's one category of mistake. The other, there'll never be a theory of economics that makes any sense. There'll never be a fundamental theory of biology. There'll never be, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, this first thing is that. The second thing, I suppose, is often when there has been technical

Starting point is 01:56:58 success in a field, things get quite locked down. I mean, you know, the belief in continuous space, for instance, is a thing which has been technically successful. And, you know, it's a good approximation. It works some, you can figure out a bunch of things from it. You know, a huge amount of mathematics has been built on the idea of the continuity of space. And it, I mean, that mathematics will still survive perfectly well, even if space is not in in fact, continuous. But to build that tower based on that, that's something people have ended up assuming. I think there are a whole bunch of other more technical things that people assume about how quantum mechanics works, etc., etc., etc. They're more technical. They're less kind of big picture.

Starting point is 01:57:44 works, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They're more technical. They're less kind of big picture. I think another meta-observation, which I wouldn't have said until recent years, is how important is the observer in deducing how science works? I would have expected that everything I could have said about science would be, you know, clearly objective, so to speak. In no way- Observer independent, yeah. And I don't think that anymore. I'll tell you another thing about a fundamental thing, which is how far is science going to get? In other words, what kind of thing can we expect from science? There is this idea that, look, you know, we just write down equations, we crank out the answers, we can predict everything. You know, you give us an epidemiological situation, we can

Starting point is 01:58:32 predict for you, you know, how the epidemiology will play out. We can predict for you how this is going to happen, that's going to happen. We can predict all these things, sometimes they get very political and so on of, you know, we can predict what's going to happen in the climate or this aspect of society or that thing or whatever. We can, you know, there's this idea that science provides kind of this, science is the kind of the freeway that lets one get to the end, you know, without going through all the detail type thing. Computational irreducibility is the story of that not being the case. But yet, the absolutely uniform belief about this is the kind of scientism type belief about the world is science can explain everything.

Starting point is 01:59:23 Science can figure out everything. We can predict. We can see what we have to do based on science. I mean, that was a thing that led to, well, all kinds of beliefs in the world. I think that's a thing where one will have to realize, no, there's a certain set, if you pick the right slice of computational reducibility, yes, you can figure out what's going to happen. If you can live in that slice, then you can predict what's going to happen. Life is not so interesting if you're purely living in that slice. If you know everything about what's going to happen, it's kind of like, what does the

Starting point is 01:59:57 passage of time really do for you? You know, another version of this that's going to come up, I think, very big time is the sort of the computational irreducibility kind of fulcrum of AI. I mean, in other words, you've got an AI. It's doing computationally irreducible things. That means you can't predict what it will do. That means it might surprise you.

Starting point is 02:00:20 That's door number one. Door number two, let's force the AI to only behave in computationally reducible ways. Let's make sure we know what the AI is going to do. In door number two, you don't get to let the AI do the things it can do. You're constraining it. You're forcing it on this track where it can only do certain kinds of things. You're making it, you're forcing it to be dumb, so to speak. So there's this big choice to be made. Does one sort of go with what the AI does, let it be computationally reducible,

Starting point is 02:00:53 let it surprise us from time to time? Or does one say, no, we don't want that. We want to constrain the AI to only work this way. This is an important, you know, this is a sort of societal decision, I suppose, that, you know, I think will be a pretty important one in the years to come. And I think it will be, you know, it's, look, it's not totally, you know know disconnected from decisions about do you try and control the world or do you just sort of let you might say in economic terms you know market forces or something else some other

Starting point is 02:01:33 dynamics kind of just play play out as they play out so to speak do you do you do you go for constraint or do you go for just let the dynamics play out? And what do you go for with respect to AI? Well, I'm not, it's not going to work to just say, let's constrain it completely, because then we don't really have AI. We just have sort of, we just have things that behave in predictable ways. We have kind of industrial revolution style machines, so to speak. We have machines where you get to see, you know, where does every cog and style machines, so to speak. We have machines where you get to see, you know, where does every cog and lever go, so to speak. I think that's a,

Starting point is 02:02:10 I mean, that's a, you know, you might say, gosh, the world would be better off if all people behaved in completely predictable ways. I don't think that would be a terribly fun world, so to speak. And I think that's, you know, we have the same issue really with the AIs. I mean, there are a lot of detailed questions about sort of how I tend to think that a society of AIs is a much more robust, less fragile thing than, you know, the one giant AI in the world doesn't seem like a very good idea. Just like the one, you know, the one giant AI in the world doesn't seem like a very good idea. Just like the one, you know, the one government in the world probably doesn't seem like a very good idea. It's more robust if you have multiple different, you know, if you've got this essentially ecosystem or something of different things interacting. I mean, it's a thing we see in endless examples in in sort of physics and other

Starting point is 02:03:07 places that the the behavior of the of the aggregate is more robust and less likely to to sort of go crazy go extinct whatever than the one so to speak you know it's kind of um so i i would tend to think that that's um but you know these these questions about what's better about those kinds of things this is a question of you know i have my own particular way of leading my life and you know the things i like the things i don't like whatever other people have different ones i don't think there's a right answer to any of these things. I think one of the things that's tricky to me, at least in thinking about ethics, another thing where I'm sort of slowly trying to understand enough that I think I might have something sensible to say.

Starting point is 02:04:06 But one of the things about ethics that's very confusing to me is I'm used to science where you can do controlled experiments, where you can say, I'm going to look at this one subsystem of the world and I'm going to ignore everything else. I'm going to just study this particular little, you know, quantum system or whatever it is. And the fact that all these other things are happening in the world is irrelevant. I think ethics doesn't work that way. I think when you decide, you know, you're going to have the trolley run into the giraffes rather than the llamas or something, that decision is never a, despite sort of the apparent setup, that decision is never a local decision. That decision is in the end a decision that sort of relates to everything about humanity, so to speak, that it can't be localized in the same kind of way. So in a sense, it is sort of a thing for which, and that's another kind of assumption we make as observers related to kind of free will about doing experiments, is the notion that we can do something here that won't affect everything else in the world. And I'm not sure that's true,

Starting point is 02:05:07 affect everything else in the world. And I'm not sure that's true, that ethics can be done in this kind of factored, modular, separated way, which makes it confusing when you try to think about it in terms of sort of from a science point of view. Is the notion of observer also a local phenomenon, or can you have a non-local observer? Can a collection of observers be considered an observer? An ant colony, for example. Yeah, I mean, you know, yes, we have examples where, look, I mean, we humans are already extended. We're not observing things at the level of one atom of space. We are aggregating quite large chunks of elements of

Starting point is 02:05:49 space and so on. Now, what would it be like to be an ant in an ant colony where you have a collective mind about things? I'm not sure. Perhaps the true organism of the earth is all of human society, the true organism of the earth is all of human society. And then we're all just ants relative to that. And you can say, what is the experience of the whole of human society? Human society makes decisions as we individuals make decisions. It makes decisions. We watch those decisions happen. Sometimes those decisions are pretty confusing for us individuals, so to speak. You know, society goes in this direction. They decide that, you know, top hats are fashionable or something, and it happens as some sort of collective dynamic. And it's, you know, and we as an individual don't really know what happened there. And so I think this notion of, you know, can society as a whole,

Starting point is 02:06:48 for example, be thought of as an observer with respect to some kinds of questions? Probably yes. And in a sense, society, you know, for example, this whole equivalency question, you could ask that for society as a whole as opposed to individuals. You could say, we as individuals, we believe all kinds of different things, but society as a whole concludes that top hats are fashionable, for example. And that's just like it could very well be the case that in our brains, you know, one part of our brain is saying, you know, I hate that color. Another part of our brain is saying, I really like that color. And in the end, we come to a conclusion that is some kind of aggregate of those things where we say, hey, I kind of like that or whatever. And I think society does the same kind of thing. And we are in this, with

Starting point is 02:07:37 respect to society, we are like the individual neurons in our brains. It's like, if we could know what that individual clump of neurons was thinking, then we would say, oh my gosh, the whole brain made that crazy decision. You know, this clump of neurons really had it right, but the whole brain did something completely crazy. And, you know, so it is, I think, with us individual humans relative to all of society so humor me for a bit suppose the observer theory that you have would be able to give you a quantity like iit has phi for this you will have 1000 units of consciousness an ant has one okay suppose we could do that suppose we could then say that a cell inside your body has five units of it, in observer theory units, and that the aggregate of you has a thousand,

Starting point is 02:08:30 and society actually has ten thousand. Okay, suppose it was that, but then at the same time, earlier in the conversation we have that the Rulliad is a bit too incoherent to give a consciousness number two, so maybe it's either zero or undefined that would mean to me that would seem to me like there's a maximum amount of of consciousness at some point in some scale because as you scale outward you can get more but if you scale too much you get zero or ill-defined so what do you make of that what would it be what the heck would that be, the maximum, most conscious being? I think it's one of these things where

Starting point is 02:09:12 you've sort of got a couple of parameters. You've got coherence, and you've got kind of the coherence of the being and what the being contains. And these things are directly related. The being sort of has a broader set of experiences, paradigms, whatever else. The being is also less coherent. As it can have these two different points of view let's say which have certain incompatibilities it is both by extending to be able to encompass those different points of view it is encompassing more but it is also becoming less coherent in what it encompasses so i mean my own guess would be that that I think it depends. Let's see. Usually the answer to a question like this is

Starting point is 02:10:12 it depends what you want it for. That is, if you say, which thing can make the maximum number of decisions per unit time let's say which thing can have the uh i understand you know it's it's you could have these different criteria and i think you'd end up with a different answer which would end up being a reflection more of your criterion than of the thing itself but i i do think that think that it is an interesting question. So, for example, the thought experiment. What if we gradually replace our neural circuitry with digital electronics

Starting point is 02:10:54 so we think a million times faster? What would that feel like? Our experience of the physical world will be different in that case. We'll notice the individual photons coming in. We'll, you know, not aggregate space in the same way. We'll have all kinds of other funky relationships, different relationships to physics. But, you know, what would it be like to talk to an entity that was thinking a million times faster than you were? I don't know.

Starting point is 02:11:25 I think it's a, it, I suspect that the main point is that it can be spinning around and thinking really, really fast. But what matters to us is the way in which we connect to what's going on. And so actually the perception of what's happening wouldn't be so different, because what we're seeing is only those things that we can be an observer of, so to speak. All the detail about what it's thinking, it's thinking a million times faster, it's coming up with this and that and the other. It's maybe what we would perceive of it, it's like perceiving something in physics, for example,

Starting point is 02:12:06 where lots of things are happening, but all we're perceiving is what we're capable of perceiving. So in other words, that the inner experience of the million times faster thinking thing would be invisible to us. And that when we talk to it, it would just seem like, you know, all we're noticing is the things that we can notice, so to speak. Now, you know, it's an interesting question. If you, you know, if you take, I don't know, things I figured out in my life, and you imagine the million times faster version of me, then, you know, again, it's like this connection to physics.

Starting point is 02:12:44 then, again, it's like this connection to physics. Then, yes, you could say the things that would take me a year to work out, the million times faster me would work out in 30 seconds. But I think that interface to that is like an interface to sort of physics if viewed you know the speed of light is the speed of light we can we experience different things if we are experiencing at a different uh with kind of a different speed of thought but i don't know i mean i you know i think these are these kind of these thought experiments of, of what is it like to be an alien mind? I find them very interesting. I have a very hard time with them. I, you know, and I look to kind of almost, it's like, could you write a science fiction story, which had as the protagonist,

Starting point is 02:13:41 you know, something that thinks a million times faster. How would it think about things? How would other people feel about it? You know, these are things which, in a sense, by writing a science fiction story, you're trying to make that humanized bridge to our everyday experience. I, you know, I wish more people were doing this. I think it's a really interesting thing to do. I think it's really hard hard speaking about this bridge to human experience as you dabble with ethics what if it turns out you're correct about observer theory about the discreteness of space-time about computation underlying the fundament what if someone's like okay so what how what should i now i'm watching i'm listening to this podcast. As a result of this, what should I do? How should my behavior change?

Starting point is 02:14:33 Yeah, I mean, I think that's a, you could have asked the same thing when Copernicanism came in. I mean, it's kind of like, okay, so we know that the math is different because we think about the Earth going around the Sun rather than the Sun going around the Earth. So what? Indeed, that mathematics was a deep so what for people. What was not the so what was our common experience is we're sitting on the Earth, the Earth is standing still. But actually, we learn from this piece of science that our common experience isn't the way things really are. So that's important. If you say, well, everything we know about the world, we can derive from common experience, that blows up that idea. So in our time, interestingly enough, there's sort of a flip side of that, which is

Starting point is 02:15:29 computational irreducibility kind of blows up the idea that just trust the science, it will tell you what's going to happen. So in other words, this notion that, I mean, I would say, you know, put in the Copernican time, it was just trust the scientists. Because it's kind of like, just because you think the Earth is standing still, it isn't really right. The scientists can tell you it isn't. Well, now we've so internalized that, that it's kind of like, well, science can tell you all these things. You know, you can put this scientific gloss onto everything, and we understand how we feel psychologically, and we understand how we do this and that and the other, and it's very science-ified. And this notion that science can answer all the problems,

Starting point is 02:16:19 science can tell you what's going to happen, Science has solved it. I think that notion is kind of blown up by computational irreducibility. That's kind of the realization that, in a sense, don't expect science to solve everything. It's not going to work that way. It's not something where you can just say, well, I'm just going to feed it to science and it's going to tell me the answer. So I think that's one kind of everyday takeaway. I think another one is the story of the Rulliad, the story of Rullial space, the story of different essential Rullial reference frames. The concept that, again, sort of the takeaway from that is there really are different ways to think

Starting point is 02:17:05 about the world. There really are different sort of reference frames with which to view reality. And so people, you know, have long had that intuition. But again, it's been kind of this, well, there's this one, and it's based on mathematical science or whatever else. That really isn't right, that there are others. They will have different power, different ability to figure out particular things. But this notion that, oh, this other kind of reference frame, this other way of thinking about the world, it's just wrong, is probably not the correct way to think about it. It is a different way of thinking about the world. It can come to different kinds of conclusions, but it isn't the case that there's sort of a hierarchy and we got the right one and it's the mathematical sciences or something.

Starting point is 02:17:52 So I think those are two kind of everyday takeaways from these kinds of things. the uh to come to those conclusions it is to know that the universe is computational all the way down is to give one no choice about those conclusions if you're still it's just like if we think about brains and we say and we think about free will and things like that, and we think about, and we say, there's going to be something in our brains that isn't going to be just mechanical, just rule-based. We're going to find something. It's going to be quantum mechanics. It's going to be mysticism. It's going to be something else. You know, we keep on searching for that.

Starting point is 02:18:42 Well, if we really know that the universe is computational all the way down, we can stop searching for that well if we really know that the universe is computational all the way down we can stop searching for that we know there isn't there isn't a you know it's it's and it's already enough to say that it's computational it already has those aspects of irreducibility and free will and so on we don't need any more than that what's something that's more than that what's something that's that's stuck in your craw for a while something that nettles at you not mathematical not physical what's some problem that you're dealing with say for the past decade oh gosh i mean the the uh you know there are things that one figures out where it's like, the world should absorb this, but it doesn't. It absorbs it at a painfully slow rate. And sometimes it even rejects it.

Starting point is 02:19:39 You know, a lot of sort of this science-informed technology that I've built is, I don't know. I don't know how far ahead of the world it is. I know some things that we figured out 35 years ago, people just cottoned on about 10 years ago. That was a 25-year gap. Those were, I thought, rather trivial things. It's a little bit like it's fun to make artifacts from the future. It has more leverage if they are more quickly absorbed, both because then, you know, that very act of absorption, you kind of see the reflection of how that works in the world,

Starting point is 02:20:21 and you can see how to go further with it and also from a purely kind of i don't know personal point of view it's uh it's like gosh if more people understood computational language for example then lots of progress would get made in the world lots of things that are confused now wouldn't be confused lots of what would be an example of let's say in biology something that would get overturned because they're just thinking too non-computationally? What's the fundamental theory of biology? I mean, in other words, biology has not even believed that there is a fundamental theory. Biology at best has natural selection as sort of a fundamental theory. It's not really a predictive

Starting point is 02:21:05 theory. And it has the idea that biology is somehow fundamentally digital and is encoded in genomics and so on. But there isn't. Whereas in physics, we have sort of big theories, biology does not have big theories. Biology fills endless books and journals and so on with lots and lots and lots and lots of detail. And the idea that there might be a big theory is pretty absent in biology. I mean, at times in the past, I would say in the 1980s, there was a period of time when people were sort of like a little bit thinking of those time in the 1950s, when 40s and 50s, when people were thinking about theoretical biology that I wasn't around in those days. The 1980s, I was around, so I was, you know, was participating in that. And there was sort of some degree of enthusiasm for that. But the idea that there

Starting point is 02:21:58 might be big theories in biology is really not there. And that would be an example of something which, if you really internalize kind of the computational way of thinking about things, that is a thing where there could be a big theory. And, you know, what would the consequence of that be? You know, we might be like, well, this is how aging works. This is really what's going on. This is really what's going on in, you know, sort of foundationally what's going on in, I don't know, cancer or something like this. It's foundationally what's going on in neuroscience. You know, we don't know those things.

Starting point is 02:22:31 We don't have big theories in those areas. And, you know, you asked what's a place where people go off track. You know, I think the assumption that there cannot be a big theory is an example of something that might be off track. I mean, you might have said about, well, lots of things in physics, for example. There couldn't be a big theory of this, but then turned out there was. And I think that's a place. So I think that—and when I say a big theory of things, it's sort of interesting because on the one hand, we've got computational irreducibility, which says there isn't a theory of a certain kind of certain kinds of things.

Starting point is 02:23:09 But then we're saying, but could there be a big theory? And the way that that's sort of not in conflict is the big theory is a slice of computational reducibility. And the issue is, what slices of computational reducibility can you find? And the ones that, you know, our laws of physics represent a particular slice of computational reducibility that observers like us can see with respect to the whole Rulliad. And, you know, I think that when we look for a theory in biology, that theory might not be a theory of the same character as theories that we, you know, it might not be a theory that says the Stegosaurus will have, you know, four spikes on its tail. It's very unlikely to be a theory that says something like that. But, you know, what kind of a thing it might say, we're not sure. Natural selection is a theory that says different kinds of things than we might have imagined the theory would say earlier. I mean, even today, it's like,

Starting point is 02:24:17 what are the predictions of natural selection? Well, it doesn't really have the same kinds of predictions that a theory where you compute from axioms something has. So, you know, I think that's the challenge in some cases is the challenge is more to define the right question. Once one has the right question, for example, in biology, what kind of a thing would the fundamental theory of biology talk about? And what would it, you know, for example, one could be unlucky. It could be the case that there is a fundamental theory of economics, and it's about something we just don't care about. There's a fundamental theory of economics, and it tells us about something to do with the correlation between transactions here and there. And it just is something we humans say,

Starting point is 02:25:05 okay, that's fun. You know, we can measure it. It's like, cool, it works, but we don't care. And now, actually, it will not stay that way. If such a thing is found, just like we in engineering kind of find ways to make use of things that we can say about the world, I'm sure that anything we can say will be made use of. And just like, you know, whether it's the hedge funds arbitraging

Starting point is 02:25:32 based on it, or whether it's some other kind of use that some of us might consider more productive, but that's a different matter. Stephen, thank you for spending so much time with me. This was a good conversation this was you you asked a lot of very interesting questions and i i i said a bunch of things here that i haven't said anywhere else because i only figured them out as we were talking about them so well that's super fun man it was super fun the and um is this this is video as well as audio right so so it's not... That's correct, yeah. Keep up the good work

Starting point is 02:26:06 and I'm sure you probably... The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people.

Starting point is 02:26:21 You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for Theories of Everything, where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes,

Starting point is 02:26:55 it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms. Just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts, and I read that in the comments, hey, Toe listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash kurtjaimungle and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to

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Starting point is 02:27:59 can you hold up some of the books that are behind you so that I can include them in the description? Let me see whether I can, like the real question question is can i turn around and not confuse everything and let's see what do i have here i have to go find them okay if it's too difficult that's all right no i think i think let me see whether i've got some uh you know what i actually don't have the current versions of some of them on that bookshelf thank you for for pointing that out. I've got some…

Starting point is 02:28:25 Actually, if you… Yeah, hold on. I'm going to solve that problem, but you have to… Just a second. Let me… Let me… Hold on. Let me just set this.

Starting point is 02:28:40 All right. That was a fun ask of, can I hold up some books? I have this big pile. This is like shopping channel, you know? All right, let's do it. So let me see. I've written a whole bunch of books. Actually, my, oh gosh, I forgot the biggest one, New Kind of Science. Well, that's a big one that's fine don't worry the viewers are familiar with that right so then in more recent times you know i had this whole run of books that started in 2016 that started had this book called idea makers which is about um it's kind of a uh a book of biographical um uh sort of biographies of a variety of people, which I think is pretty fun.

Starting point is 02:29:33 Then, let's see. Then we have just before 2019 when I started the physics project, I put together a collection of things, which was Adventures of a Computational Explorer, which kind of might have been the, that's the end, folks, kind of story. But then came the physics project, and then we have the book of the physics project, which was kind of my initial writings on that subject. Then I had a book that was kind of a book about a subject

Starting point is 02:30:15 that has been obscure for 100 years. And I thought I kind of put together this book because I wanted to, because it was the 100th anniversary of the invention of combinators, which was sort of a first idea about how computation might work. And I found this much more useful than I expected. This is a great kind of laboratory for understanding a lot of foundational ideas about computation. So that was interesting. Then there's my book about metamathematics, Foundations and Physicalization, which is about applying ideas from the physics project and the Rulliad and so on to mathematics, the foundations of mathematics, to understanding that Plato was right in the sense that mathematics, there's a real thing which is mathematics. If you believe in physical reality,

Starting point is 02:31:13 you should also believe in mathematical reality. And then, what do we have next? Then we have, this was a sort of a fun book to put together, 20 Years of a New Kind of Science, this was a sort of a fun book to put together 20 years of new kind of science um partly explaining how the nks book came to be written and so on and some of the uh the history of that that um i uh was actually as is so often the case in history it was much harder to piece together and to write than i expected but it makes an interesting tale if you're interested in kind of how big projects actually happen. Then we have my book on the second law. And that was the, I kind of started on this book when I was 12 years old, 1972. on this book when i was 12 years old 1972 um i got interested in the second world of thermodynamics and the kind of the um uh the thing that was my kind of stimulus for that was a book cover

Starting point is 02:32:16 that um uh let me see um there we go um there's it uh let's see if i hold it up now if you can see that book cover so you will notice a certain resonance between that book cover and this cover, this book cover. And, um, so that, that book cover was, um, uh, book that I got when I was, was 12 years old. And, um, 50 years later, I made this book, which I hope finally explains what, uh, the phenomenon that was, uh, that was illustrated on that, illustrated on that that very old book cover and then then i have two small books this is unusual for me i have this book that um about

Starting point is 02:33:12 chat gbt and um kind of how llm yeah you announced that where we met yes possibly yeah possibly the book was been ready right around then. Yeah, this was a, you know, I wrote it because everybody kept on asking me, how does ChatGBT work? What's it doing? Why does it work? And so I thought I better write this down. I wrote it down rather quickly. And then millions of people read that blog post and so on. And then people said, you should turn it into a book. And so now there's versions of this in about 15 languages. said you should turn it into a book. And so now there's, there's versions of this in about 15 languages. Um, and, uh, and it remains, I think the only kind of high level description of, of kind of what's going on and why it works. I was sort of surprising. Um, but as I, as I thought about it after the fact, I kind of realized that the set of things that you kind of need to know about and pull together is more unusual than, than I thought. Well, I just did another book that just came out a few days ago, which is a very utilitarian book, but it came from in 2017. There was an eclipse visible from the US, and I decided to write something about the

Starting point is 02:34:20 history of how one could predict eclipses. And also, we built a website that could predict when, when the eclipse would occur at any given place on the, on the earth at, um, uh, to within one second. And so, okay. So at the time of the 2017 eclipse, um, you know, I just produced this sort of history of, of eclipse prediction two days to spare from the time of the eclipse. But this time we knew the eclipse was coming because after all we can predict them and um so this time my my team said let's put out the uh the description of this and and about predicting eclipses as a book in time for the april 8th um 2024 eclipse that's visible in the u.s so this is um So this is a sort of a fun story about that,

Starting point is 02:35:10 that I have to say, if I was able to write sort of the history of eclipse prediction in 2017, because I wasn't working on the physics project at that time. But now that i've got this this whole pile of other things that i'm doing um a book like that wouldn't exist um but for the fact that it was already written you know the core parts of it was already written in 2017 but um that's that's all for that's that's all the books i it's it's a reasonably i mean i i don't know i feel i feel like you feel like you're more productive now in your 60s than you were when you were younger? In terms of writing, yes. Actually, I should mention one more book. That's another book.

Starting point is 02:35:51 That's the third edition of a book about Wolfen language, which is kind of intended as a sort of an introduction to how to use our computational language to think in computational ways. And actually, I have just embarked on another book project, which is a book called Introduction to Computational Thinking. That's a rather ambitious project, and I'm sort of doing it as a background project, and I will probably start posting pieces of it on the web.

Starting point is 02:36:24 You're asking, am I more productive now than I was in the past? You know, it really helps that I've found new mechanisms to sort of make use of my productivity. I mean, the fact that I can write things and post them and so on is there are lots of things which I had energetically done in the past, but I didn't really have a venue to do anything with them. So it's, it's been, um, uh, it's been nice. I think, um, um, uh, you know, I, it, uh, I feel reasonably productive. So that's, I, I've certainly, you know, if you, if you, if you just count sort of, um, uh, you know, if you just count sort of, you know, I don't know, if you count volume of paper over the last four years, that's pretty decent.

Starting point is 02:37:14 And are you typing the majority of that, like physically typing? Are you writing or are you dictating? I'm typing. Someone typing. typing someone typing in fact i i have a really crazy habit which is that i record these video work logs of actually you know as i write these things and figure things out and i even post them i don't think anybody nobody should watch them probably yeah yeah the working sessions the live working no no no this is much worse than that those are those are interactive with other people these are video work logs, silent,

Starting point is 02:37:45 me working on my own. And the only thing that's interesting about those to me and useful to people sometimes is if there is some random thing that I said somewhere and somebody wonders, why did he say that? Did he know what he was talking about or not? You can, in principle, talking about or not, you know, you can, in principle, go and find the video work log where that very sentence was typed. And you can see, you know, the six versions of that sentence before the final version. And you can see the, you know, what the actual experiment that I was looking at that made me conclude the thing that I wrote in that sentence. So meaning that it's a screen recording? It's a screen recording. Yeah. It's a screen recording it's a screen recording yeah it's a screen recording of of um uh the only it's silent screen recording so i i had considered recording it including sound with with me whistling to myself but i decided that was that was too silly

Starting point is 02:38:35 and too distracting so they're just silent screen recordings but it's it's it's i mean I don't know, I haven't, I feel like it's, I'm kind of interested in this kind of open science idea. You know, it's an idea that, this idea that you can really expose the process of doing science. And I've, you know, I'm really, I like that. I'm really, I like that. I think it's a, both for me, it's kind of, it makes it feel more meaningful doing it if one is kind of exposing the process. And I think for the world at large, I think it's an interesting thing to be able to sort of see inside that process. And I, you know, I've been surprised that, I mean, I've been doing live streaming now of like our software design stuff for five years, six years now, maybe more.

Starting point is 02:39:31 Let's see. I must have started in 2016. So it's like seven years now. And I don't think anybody else does this stuff. stuff i think i think it's uh you know uh you know maybe it's um yeah i i you know i'm sort of surprised when people at universities are like oh you know we everything is you know we're so keen on open this that and the other it's like right right you know how about some open science guys that would be interesting um and people like i don't want to do that i mean i might make a mistake when i'm doing you know writing on my blackboard for myself and it's like yeah that's that's kind of interesting

Starting point is 02:40:11 to see that happen and then then you fix the mistake and then people learn something from it and so on and i i am um i mean i'm sure i mean maybe it's just a consequence of, I mean, I really, you know, I just don't care that, you know, things I do put out there as an open thing, it's like, doesn't make any difference to me. Okay, I made a mistake. Maybe somebody will learn something interesting because they'll say, well, I made that same kind of mistake and that's how he fixed it and I can fix it this way too and so on. So anyway, that's another activity. And I think, yeah. So yes, I'm still feeling reasonably productive. I'm happy to say.

Starting point is 02:40:59 So you don't know this, but I'm working on a project about toes. So with this channel, I investigate different toes, theories of everything like string theory and loop quantum gravity, and then yours. And I was realizing that there's not much of a comparison between them. I'm in the process of exploring them with category theory, since that's the most general of all math. But now I'm thinking, hmm, maybe I should use,

Starting point is 02:41:26 or at least explore, thinking of loop quantum gravity and string theory in the context of Wolfram's physics project language. I think it's the most promising possibility. By the way, I don't think you're right about category theory. Category theory is a framework for math assuming computational reducibility. It is a, it is probably- Would you say that the infinite group point is the same as the Rulliad or no? It's certainly closely related. So from that point of view, but I think when you think about category theory at a more down in theeds level, the thing that is a key sort of observation in category theory is you have a morphism, you know, morphism F, another morphism G, and a fundamental assumption of category theory is then there's a morphism F composed G.

Starting point is 02:42:19 Yes. And… Oh, you're saying it assumes shortcuts in the axioms? It assumes shortcuts. Yeah shortcuts so yeah and what's interesting about it i think it may be a general way of thinking about computational reducibility it may be sort of a general formalism for that which is reducible and um it in a sense it is structured to deny irreducibility which which is a problem. I mean, it's a problem in terms of, you know, to capture reducibility in a general way is super interesting and useful, but it isn't the whole story.

Starting point is 02:43:04 And I think that probably what's happening when you get to the whole Rulliad and the whole infinity groupoid and so on is that it's similar to this point about observers. When they get too big, they're nothing. That is, that by the time you're an observer who has everything in you, you become sort of somehow simpler, and it is in the specificity that you get the complexity, so to speak. By the time you're everything, you can make a simpler statement about it than when you're sort of down in the weeds, figuring out this particular, you know, mathematical theory or whatever else.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Solving the Problem of Observers & ENTROPY | Stephen Wolfram

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