Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality | Lex

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techstepgenr8tion
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31 Oct 2021, 6:11 pm

Really interesting discussion. I think Wolfram's getting to sort of a single 'place', ie. one universe rather than multiverse, where rulial space is either almost infinite or infinite and where it's being articulated on what he'd consider the same set of space 'particles' somewhere around 1 * 10^-100 m in size, connected as a single system (hypergraph), spun up from very basic rules but it's the ways in which the rules interact with themselves that spin up things like quantum mechanics and general relativity.

One of the things I like about this actually, particularly if he's right, it helps sort of 'stake down' what a lot of post-modernists have been trying to say, to some extent, about the fuzziness of reality but have had real trouble finding limitations to how much they're willing to deconstruct or which lines - when crossed - mean you're just wrong. I think of what I've read and listened to of Bruno Latour and I could he his worldview nesting in the kind of complexity Wolfram is describing, on one hand, but at the same time - this is an idea of physics which still holds a particular frame which predicts particular results.

Makes me glad I didn't get a phd in philosophy, already bad enough for job outlooks but this is another place where science is likely to even penetrate that area more.


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