I’ve heard of Stephen Wolfram, but don’t know much about him. Google AI enlightened me as to his impressive background
- Wolfram|Alpha: In 2009, he launched Wolfram|Alpha, an online service that computes answers directly from structured data rather than searching pages like a traditional web search engine. [1]
In the July 18 issue of New Scientist, there’s an interview with Wolfram where he talks about his conception of the universe and of how time arises. The interviewer, Leah Crane, notes that Wolfram has been working on The Wolfram Physics Project, “an effort to redefine physics in terms of computation, rather than the typical maths and thermodynamics used by most physicists and cosmologists to understand the universe.”
This caught my eye, because it echoed one of the points in a book that I’ve blogged about recently, Physics Fixes All the Facts. The author noted that in nonlinear systems, like the famous three-body problem, it isn’t possible to arrive at a prediction of what will happen via an equation. Rather, the system has to be simulated, which sounds to me a lot like Wolfram’s computation.
Wolfram says “Time is the irreducible doing of computation.” When asked to explain what that means, he said, “What we perceive as time is our experience of the process of the universe computing its successive states.”
We can’t jump forward or backward in time, even if we knew the rule by which the universe computed successive states, because of computational irreducibility. I found this the most fascinating part of the interview. As noted above, Wolfram considers that it isn’t possible to work out a formula for what the state of the universe will be at any given time. Rather…
The only way you can figure out what’s going to happen is to explicitly do each of those steps and see what happens as the system in question evolves forward in time. In an irreducible computation, you have to go through that entire evolution — there are no shortcuts.
Asked to give an example of this, Wolfram cited the digits of pi (pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter). Many of us recall from our school days that pi =3.1416. But that’s not accurate, because pi is an irrational number. Its digits go on forever and are never repeated in a pattern. So if you want to know the 1200th digit of pi, you have to calculate the initial 1199 digits first.
This leads Wolfram to say, in response to “If my brain were a better computer, could I predict the future?”:
If you had a computer that would do each step twice as fast as the universe does, then yes. But since the only computers we have are ones made out of things in the universe, if we’re trying to predict the universe, there’s no raw material out of which we can make a computer that will run twice as fast. You can’t out-predict the universe from inside the universe.
Since I don’t believe in free will, I found the next question and answer especially intriguing.
But if everything is just computation, where do humanity and the prospect of free will fit in?
In a deterministic system, it’s like you think, “Oh, I know the rules for the system, so I can predict everything that’s going to happen. There’s no free will going on here, because I can just predict what’s going to happen.” But with computational irreducibility, the only way you can know what the thing is going to do is to run the computation and see what it does.
So, in other words, you as the external observer, and the computer with its internal experience, you’re sort of running at the same rate. You can’t outrun the system itself. To see what’s going to happen, you have to experience it.
So, at some level, you might say that’s really a bad thing, because it’s a limitation on science and its predictive power. But on another level, it means that when we live our lives and we experience time, we’ve actually achieved something. There’s some irreducible computation that’s been done by that passage of time; the experience of time means something.
This makes sense to me. Everything is determined. So we don’t have free will in the usual sense of that term. We’re unable to stand outside the causal order of the universe and decree, this is what I freely choose to do. But since the only way to know what the universe is going to do, is to experience what it is doing, in any situation other than very simple cause and effect relationships, the future is going to be unknown until it arrives.
That isn’t free will. It is ignorance of the workings of determinism. But it stands in for free will, given that what other people will do, and indeed what we ourselves will do, is unknown to us.
As much as I like Wolfram’s notion of a computational universe, a letter to the editor in the next issue of New Scientist also made a lot of sense to me.
18 July, p. 40
From Carl Zetie
Raleigh, North CarolinaStephen Wolfram’s suggestion that the universe is essentially a computer calculating a succession of states reminded me that, for as far back as we can tell, humans have described the physical world by comparing it to the most complex thing they know at the time.
In prehistory, this was ourselves, so we explained the universe in terms of malicious gods and capricious spirits who were pretty much like us. The scientific revolution of Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei spawned physical laws based in differential calculus, equations with theoretically precise solutions, and so the universe was described as the most complex piece of clockwork imaginable.
In the 19th century, with the rise of statistical theory and the industrial revolution, we thought of it in terms of thermodynamics — like an incredibly complex steam engine. And in the 20th century, the digital computer arrived — no surprise, then, that we came to understand the universe in terms of information theory and computability. I predict it is only a matter of time and wider familiarity before the universe is compared to a quantum computer.
Whenever we are presented with a model of what the universe is really like, we should pause and ask ourselves whether we are looking at a new idea or an old mistake.
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It’s provocative because they are imitating the universe. The universe was in existence way before any computers. So the computer is much like the universe possibly but without any soul whatsoever. Okay now here’s where the confusion starts with the wacky idea that your mind is your soul. It’s not.
That the computer has become so ever present but it’s not omnipresent like nature and artificial intelligence just means more lies. Artificial, fake, made up, not real…all mean the same thing. ” Man has created his Doom . The first step was walking on the moon”. B Dylan
Correction. ” Man has created his Doom , the first step was touching the Moon ” song Lisence to Kill by Bobby Dylan . Yeah like I say this is my social media my only active reading online other than the news and the internet addiction they’re telling me there’s no way you can talk a kid off of it and maybe that’s true but maybe it’s not. Remember there’s only three Masters out of all the millions of rssb worldwide so why would you expect more from the uninitiated. Once again I don’t expect anything. I think the computer has done as much harm as it has done for convenience across the board. So like everything else it won’t even know it ever existed once it dies. It can’t reincarnate so in that sense it will outlive all of us. The computer.
Where does it all begin? Where does it all end?
Go within. With meditation you will experience that bliss, and truly you will realise the illusion of free will, because now you are truly free, by the impermance of the all-resounding Shabd.
Or some shit like that. Just saved you all time from this guy. You know who I mean.
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
But so is criticism, understood correctly.
And both combined! Nothing beats that!
My takeaway from the ‘Continual computing universe’ is that Wolfram states, “You can’t outrun the system itself. To see what’s going to happen, you have to experience it.” And Brian adds: “But since the only way to know what the universe is going to do is to experience what it is doing…”
Sounds like it is confirming that all we can really do is experience what the universe is presenting. I would add that this can only happen now; everything before and after is conjecture (and even that conjecture happens now!).
Free will rightly ‘goes out the window’; basically, to have something called free will is to have an ethereal agent that is free from the dictates of our biology and the brain’s mentation – none can be found, except as belief or conjecture. Apologists would advocate for a separate soul of self. Some may point out that we can make choices, even though the act of choosing can be seen to arise from the information our brains have accumulated during our lifetimes. Choosing arises from this mass of data.
In his letter, Carl Zetie lists the phases of history in which we explained the universe according to the current understanding. And even as he predicts that, in time, it will be compared to a quantum computer, beliefs in various schools of the supernatural that purport to explain life, the universe, and everything will still exist.
Wolfram makes excellent points. Predictive models, mathematical models are human reflections of reality, and therefore cannot accurately contain all the elements of reality, and therefore prediction is at best limited.
The notion that by observation, or by measurement, or by simple recording, we reduce a vast nearly infinite variety of possibilities down to a singularity is a clear indication that much more is going on than the few variables we can measure. But our act of doing, of measuring, even of thinking and observing drags reality around us, reduces it just like gravity and time are manipulated around matter.
We see things as linear, one-dimensional vectors, and for the most part it appears that way. Our brains are wired to reduce reality this way.
But we are inextricably bound to matter, velocity, space, and energy, and as these change, so the pace of time changes. Matter, Energy, Space, Speed and Time are in some ways qualities of a third element that we cannot measure. And they share both inverse and direct proportionality. Where there is much matter, time is slow and gravity is greater. Where mass is smaller, speed can be greater, but moving mass at greater speeds draws from time, which slows down. They seem like they draw from the same fixed bucket.
Even movement, mathematically, is nothing more than an infinite series of static discrete points. Where do these infinite points that make up every second reside? And if they are only the ones we reduce to a singular dimension by measurement, how many lines of time can exist in any single discrete static point? An infinite number?
The issue of free will is an issue of thinking, not physical reality. Yet our thinking determines our reality.
If you believe in free will, you may see many opportunities, many choices, though these will at some point be reduced to one, because we live on one time line, or so we think. That thinking is always retrospective.
What if you actually lived three different lives, but think you lived one only because that is the one you remember? Because your brain reduces memory to a time line?
You see yourself as an individual in one place, at one time. Maybe that isn’t true. Maybe that’s just how the brain functions.
How would you know things differently? Altering your experience, learning to see things differently.
Then you may discover, that while you think there has only been a single life, a single choice in any moment, because that is how your brain works, you may yet come to realize that reality and your own experience is actually much larger. You chose Door B, but you also chose Door A, but you only remember B.
You married three spouses, had a full life with each, different in different ways. You knew it instantly when you saw each of them. But you remember only one.
If you were living three lives simultaneously, but you could only remember one life at a time, and only that life, then in each moment, you would think you were just in that one life. And as we only exist in the Now, and all history is selective memory, we would never realize the range of our existence in any moment. We would look around and only see evidence of the one life we could see.
If our brain, like all measurement, reduces an infinite range of possibilities to a single one dimensional point of “now” then we are simply unaware in any given moment.
But anything that broadens this experience opens the door to free will, at least a greater range of will and experience within the larger, unreduced, reality.
That “You” that married someone else, went to a different college, took a different job and is happily living with them, with that job, with those different experiences somewhere, has a different sentiment.
You both may not have free will. But if by attention you managed to expand your vision and memory, then even though you may physically be limited here, your understanding isn’t, and so your sentiment and choices are now different as a result of the change in your mind.
Raise your consciousness. You are already existing in far more places and times simultaneously than you know. Learn to look without judgement, learn to see without reducing reality.
Yes, you find this central point of attention within. Then when you look out, you see quite a few things differently.
It’s all a matter of where your attention is.
I had Free Will whether to shave or to grow a beard and I chose to shave. I later merged my will with the master when he asked me at first to grow a beard and when I made excuses he ordered me to grow a beard, so I did in order to live in his will . I did it for him. The devil made me do it the first time but the second time I did it on my own. But when the world stage finds out I can always just say God made me do it. So I had no free will to start with. That’s like some of these celebrities in private are really horrible people but on the world stage they’re great influencers. That was their karma to not have any karma. Now here’s where I lose the unwanted reader. Let’s give AI and the algorithms something that they’ll never understand or compute and that way they’ll never be able to outgrow my individuality and my disdain for AI. It’s the cesspool of lies mixed with science that created the monster that’s controlling Elon Musk. So in the end I had free will but I just chose not to practice it. Gurinder believes that sometimes we choose right and sometimes we chose wrong. He chose wrong.
We feel we freely choose what to order from the menu, but the truth is that the menu choice is made before we are conscious of it, driven by the huge input our brains and genes produce from our upbringing, past experiences, and particular taste buds. The choice happens, and seconds later we become conscious of it, claiming, ‘I’ have chosen.’
I don’t think we need to worry that we don’t have free will. Nature is all we have, is all we are. We do not need to be autonomous creatures – nothing else in nature is, and nature has always got along just fine. Our problem here resides with our thinking, our ability to think in the abstract. Abstract thinking can conjecture and imagine almost anything. Handy for planning, but for trying to work out the many issues we come up with, particularly issues like meaning, the inevitability of death – all the endless ‘why’ questions. (The hows we can get to work out; it is the whys that perplex us.
The fact is, we don’t need the burden of free will. Augustine came up with the idea to account for a good and just God that allows evil, so he (Augustine) introduced free will, dumping the problem on Adam and Eve – and us. Also, because (and quite naturally) we have the persistent illusion that our thinking is the result of a thinker, we thereby create and maintain the mental structure we call ‘me’, ‘myself’.
Through our various mental conjectures, we have inadvertently (and only mentally) divorced ourselves from the natural world – of which we are an indisputable part. But we still like to imagine that we are above nature, that we are somehow special where nature does not really apply to ourselves, all continuously maintained by thought processes that imagine and hope for some sort of salvation.
Paradoxically, the mind-made justifications we concoct tend to go against the concept of free will in that, in trying to maintain our assumed specialness, they reveal how we automatically resort to ingrained mental gymnastics in order to maintain our constructed views of ourselves.
Everything is true to the uninitiated but to the initiated we’ve given over our control and will (no more me , myself and I except in fiction). It begins with the physical form of the master but once you outgrow that and realize that you are at the mercy of the universe. And by being at the mercy of the universe you become the master of the universe. These are like kindergarten books to us. These science books and physics class. Laughter is our main concern. Just ask God. I heard him laughing. At least you have to make up a name for it because it’s fiction and I’m a writer and just like most ( good ) writers I’ve earned my disrespect and low pay grade so I’m allowed , just like the people who wrote the Bible. Just remember John Lennon was shot in the back four times and they’re still trying to decipher his poetry. It never ends.
Brian is a smart man. He meditated for two and a half hours a day for years and maybe he just doesn’t want to expose his inner experiences. He never said he never had any. He just couldn’t stand the new guru. And I’m with him on that. He’s built up a lot of credit on that bank account of meditation though and it won’t go to waste I promise. I don’t hold any grudges because I know a lot of the things that bother me about Babaji are just that whole Indian culture he’s involved in. They’ll touch anybody’s feet ( toenail fudge or not). There’s so many gurus there they’re practically falling over on each other. Anyway good girls don’t make history. Anyone that’s had as much sex as Sheena would know that lol.
Maybe not much sex but just with a lot of lot of men. And that’s who Babaji likes to look at, the men involved. He has a special softness for the men , not the women. Just look at his body language. I promise to leave a woman as a successor to me. That Indian and Arabic male culture they’re only proud of their male children generally. So once again that’s a cultural thing. Of course there are exceptions and that one exception might comment as a male . Anonymously. India is a free country too it’s just hard to tell.
I think we can all agree , whether this world was created by God or whether it just created itself by expansion and through science I think we can all agree it had a creator. Maybe more than one. How simple do you want to boil it down? There are a lot of flaming idiots in this world but as long as they’re peaceful they can be idiots. The problem are the smart people with the guns and the war machine. Not the dumb people with nothing but a sense of humor. So I think we can all agree that there was creator. Now if Sheena will just save water and bathe with a friend we can all get out of this clean.
Re: no free will: You can see how it works now; we all do it. The intention and act of commenting is a reaction to other comments. The content of the comments comes from a repertoire of years of accrued information and experience. All just bubbling to the surface like a disturbed nest of ants.
Also, whether the universe is continually computing or whether we choose some other hypothesis to explain it, the truth is, we do not know – and perhaps never will. As for postulating the existence of a creator or creators to explain things, again, something no one can ever know (except through the usual channels of beliefs and conjecture).
Anyway, perhaps like a number of things we feel we need to know to assuage our fears and insecurities, maybe the universe ‘just is’.
Well reacting to a comment is a lot better than being found unresponsive. That’s what Gurinder is afraid of and he’s not alone now. It would be insane to think that I never looked up to him and I continue to live in his Will. I just hope it’s in a safe place. Everything I’ve said is true. I just can’t prove the constant computation yet. And the beautiful part is I don’t have to. There’ll be a lot more people thinking I’m totally wacko if I was official master of rsst than there are now . I’m already Master enough to know who else isn’t. It’s a dichotomy attached.
https://prem-rawat-bio.org/satpal/top20_gurus.html
I have no delusions of grandeur. I’m just saying what I was told by Gurinder Singh . I’m just sharing information that I don’t necessarily even agree with. I’m Catholic like that.