Solving the Problem of Consciousness | Stephen Wolfram

Everyone who watches is an "observer." And what I've published is called observer theory. What is your latest discovery? About observer theory, what is that? It's about the question of what kind of characterization of what it means to be an observer. We have, for example, when it comes to the question of what it means to do a computation, we have some way of understanding that. We started out with Turing machines, sort of. We know that they're equivalent to a lot of other kinds of computational models. We have this idea about what it means to do computation. I've been interested in what it means to be an observer? Why do I care about that? I care about that because in our physics project, it's become necessary to understand what we look like as observers, because it appears that what we look like as observers determines the laws of physics that we perceive. So it becomes important to be able to characterize what we like as observers, because if we were different observers than we are, we would perceive, I think, different laws of physics than the laws of physics that we perceive. Perceive. So in fact, I think that ultimately, the picture will be that the laws of physics are what they are because we are observers of the kind that we are. So it's a different kind, it's a kind of reframing of thinking about what it means to have a fundamental theory of physics. It's a theory of physics, and it's the theory that must be what it is for observers like us. It can't be the case, where there could be some kind of wheeling and dealing in another theory, where, you know, God could have invented a different theory of the universe. For observers like us, I think it's inevitable that the laws of physics are what they are. So, okay, so how do we understand what an observer is, what an observer is like us? Right. So what is an observer like us? So we first have to ask, what does an observer do? The world is a complicated place. We have finite minds. Our goal as observers is to take the complexity of the world and find a way to cram it into our finite minds. And in a sense, what that does is it says that there are a lot of details in the world, but they won't fit into our finite minds. We have to somehow compress what we see in the external world so that it fits into our finite minds. There's another way to think about it, which is that we have to make equivalences between different kinds of things. And it's like, you know, I'm sitting here staring at this camera, and, you know, on my retina, there are all sorts of photons falling and sort of making an intricate pattern there. But all my mind perceives is, oh, there's, you know, this, this thing in front of me. So I make a lot of equivalences. And what I extract from this sort of raw nature of what's going on is something, there are, there are many things, there are many different arrangements of photons that would lead me to perceive the same thing. And what you perceive is that this is a common feature, not just among us humans, but among all the measuring devices that we use and all these sorts of things. It's all about, there are a lot of details in the world. We just want to measure a particular thing. So the quintessential example is that you have a gas, and it has a bunch of molecules bouncing around trying to measure the pressure of the gas. How do you do that? Well, maybe you have a piston on the side of the box and you say, how hard are the molecules in the box pushing the piston? And there are all sorts of different configurations of molecules that are hitting the piston, and moving in this direction and in that direction and in the other direction, but all that matters in measuring the pressure is the total force on the piston. So there are all these different configurations of molecules that we equate together to infer the one thing that we care about, which is the force on the piston. And so I think that, when we think about ourselves, the fundamental feature of an observer is that we make a lot of equivalences. We take many different states of the world and say, 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 think of as an observer. Now, it's interesting to see when we imagine sort of a computation going on, we're always generating new states of the world. We go from one state of the world, and we compute the next state of the world, and the next state, and so on. We're always creating new states of the world. On the other hand, when we're observers, we're sort of doing the opposite. Instead of creating new states of the world, we're trying to equate a lot of states of the world. We're trying to say that there are many things, that we might think of, that are sometimes different, to some extent, but we're going to treat them for our purposes as equivalent. Now, you might say, how can you infer anything interesting from knowing these kinds of equivalences? It turns out that this kind of idea of these kinds of equivalences is crucial for inferring what we might consider to be the laws of physics. Because in a sense, a physical 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, it just does what it does, and it has all these little things spinning around in it, but we don't have any narrative explanation of what's going on. The nature of physical laws is that we want to take what the universe does, and we want to somehow get a description of it that fits into our minds. And so, for example, when it comes to something like, I don't know, a gas that has a bunch of molecules bouncing around, the thing that fits into our minds is some sort of macroscopic description that talks about pressure and temperature and things like that and not the detailed motions of those molecules. For us, we talk about the gas laws for the system that's underneath. It's making all these molecules bounce around. It's important that we're able to just talk about things at the level of gas laws, because if we were able to talk about things at the level of molecules, we would draw completely different conclusions about what's going on in the world. So, this is necessary, for example, for the second law of thermodynamics, because what does the second law of thermodynamics say? It basically says that things tend to become more disordered over time. What's the application of that? You know, if you're, if you do some mechanical motions, you're sort of pushing something back and forth. Well, that's a very ordered motion of the atoms in this thing, but that ordered motion tends to turn the earth into disordered motion of molecules that we call heat. And once things get hot, it's hard to turn them back into ordered motion. You don't find all those molecules that are jumping around randomly suddenly lining up and starting to push a block of wood or whatever it was in a systematic way. So there's a tendency for things to become more disordered, but from the point of view of individual molecules, that's not what's going on. From the point of view of individual molecules, they're following certain laws of motion. You can even reverse the laws of motion if you want to. The molecules are just doing specific things. It's only from the point of view of observers like us, with our finite computational abilities, that we say, we don't know how to keep track of all these details. For us, what the molecules are doing has to be considered random. And all we have to be able to infer is something about their average properties, like their average temperature, their average pressure, and whatever else. So the fact that we believe that the second law of thermodynamics is true, or that the gas laws are true, is a consequence of the fact that we are observers of the kind that we are. If we were observers that routinely kept track of every motion of every molecule, we would say, what do you mean by there being randomness in what's going on? There's no randomness. I can see what each individual molecule is doing. In a sense, this is an example of where our being observers of the kind that we are is the thing that makes us perceive the laws of the kind that we perceive. If we were observers that kept track of every molecule, and we could do all the computations to figure out what was going to happen with every molecular motion, we wouldn't say, oh, it's just random motion. You can just look at the averages. We would be sort of focusing on the details of what was going on at the molecular level. That's an example. And by the way, the exact same thing appears to be happening in spacetime and in quantum mechanics. And the thing that's sort of a stunning realization to me is that in 20th-century physics, there were three big theories. General relativity, the theory of gravity, and the theory of spacetime, and quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics, basically, whose prize is the second law of thermodynamics, and it's a theory of how systems of very large numbers of components work. Those three basic kinds of 20th-century physics accomplishments, I think one might have thought that perhaps the second law of thermodynamics was derived from something less fundamental. Perhaps just from the laws of mechanics and some mathematics, you could derive the second law of thermodynamics. People thought that in the 19th century, they were sort of, and by the early 20th century, they were sort of giving up on that idea. And it was sort of a mystery that was left hanging there. But there were some who thought that the second law might be derivable in some way from something more fundamental and already known. For general relativity and quantum mechanics, that wasn't really the thought. The thought was, at least, you know, the way I always thought about it, is that we just got those laws of physics. We, you know, the universe that we live in just, you know, for reasons we don't understand, has those particular laws of physics. Well, I think that, and I think we can say more than that now. I think we can say, and it's really stunning that we can say this, but I think we can say, that all of these three accomplishments are a consequence of the fact that we are observers of the kind that we are, and that it's inevitable that we perceive that the physical world has those particular laws because we are observers like us. If we were different kinds of observers, we would perceive different laws of physics, but we perceive those laws because we are observers like us. Now, okay, there's a lot that can be said about how all this works, but the thing that I've been trying to do in my efforts in observer theory is to characterize something about what observers are. It's all about these equivalence things. It's all about taking the complexity of the world and cramming it into a finite mind by equating many different states of the world to say, all we care about is these features. That's one aspect of it. And then to be able to see sort of how it flows from the properties that observers like us have. And by the way, many of those properties are things that are so obvious to us that we've never mentioned them as things that we should actually say, yes, this is a feature of ours. So, one example, which seems really important is that we believe that we are 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 physical models, for example, at every moment in time, we're made up of different atoms of space. And so, to some extent, we're always different at every successive moment. But somehow, we have the perception that we have this continuous thread of experience, which seems very obvious to us, but it's nevertheless an assumption. It's not obvious that we would have a continuous thread of experience. We can imagine that we're sort of alien intelligences that were different at every moment. It was as if we had successive generations of humans, and each had their separate experience. We can imagine that it was somehow compressed. It's very hard for us to think through what the situation would be when we don't have any kind of memory of ourselves. I don't really know how that would work. That's sort of a science fiction scenario that would be interesting to think about. But the fact that we believe that we have this continuous and unique thread of experience for each one of us is not trivial. It's also possible that it's the case, that instead of experiencing things in one thread, there might be multiple threads. One can sort of imagine what it would be like if you had sort of multiple consciousnesses in the same brain, so to speak. JSON, would you be able to imagine what that's like, or is it integral to you being the kind of observer that you are, that you can't even imagine it? Simon: 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 an interesting challenge to imagine what it would be like when you're a very alien intelligent being compared to us. I've done some attempts along those lines, actually, and I would say I've made a little bit of progress. But I would say it's really hard for one to wrap one's mind around. I mean, I think one of the things, it's sort of a side point, but I've been aware of sort of the Western tradition of thinking about things and philosophy and so on. And, you know, I've been curious because people have kept telling me for years, you know, that the things that you do resonate with different kinds of Eastern philosophies and so on. And I've been curious to try to understand how that works. And, you know, my initial take, yes, there are things that look like things that I've been talking about for a long time, so to speak. But it's very hard for me, even at that very small distance, it's very hard for me to get sort of an intuitive feel for what it means to think about things in terms of, for example, Eastern philosophy. And it seems like something sort of alien. The way we think about things is built on sort of a tower of experience. And it seems like you can jump into this sort of unknown realm of possibilities. And it's completely disorienting and completely alien. I mean, to some extent, this is something that I've been doing for the last 40 years or so, which is investigating what I might now call the science of rules, the abstract behavior of simple sets of arbitrary rules. So you just write down some computational rules. You start running them. You see what happens. You get all this complex and intricate behavior. The question is, can you humanize that? Can you provide a human narrative of what's going on? And it can be really hard. It's sort of, well, it seems obscure like this or that. But it's a definite rule. It's sort of a possible law of physics for some kind of artificial physics. And do I have a human way of describing that? No, not necessarily. But in order to get to the point where you have a human way of describing it, you're going to end up having some kind of civilization's tower. Like, okay, there's this weird pattern. Do we have a word for that? If we have a word for that, I'll be able to say, yes, remember that, the wobbling pattern. And I'll know what I was talking about, and you'll know what I was talking about. But without our civilization having gotten to that point, as I call it, the rule space, without us having gotten to that point, we haven't colonized it. We haven't said we're going to leave the place, we're going to call this city whatever. And we're on our way to put a word here for that purpose. And once we have that, and we all have a shared experience of that, then we can start talking about it. But without that, it's really hard for us to have, you know, it's really hard, for us to talk about it, and even for me to do a good job of forming ideas about it. Because I think, you know, when we form ideas about things, the way we form our ideas, you know, our words and our language and so on seem very important to us in forming ideas. I mean, it's the way we achieve our thinking process. I mean, the way I see it these days, and this, again, is sort of a side point to the main things we were talking about, but this whole question is sort of, how do we communicate, how do we communicate ideas? There's something that happens inside our brains, which is a bunch of electrical signals or whatever, but those electrical signals somehow add up to something abstract, or an idea. And, you know, my electrical firings are going to be different from your electrical firings. What, you know, how can we put together an idea that corresponds to some electrical signals in my brain? How do we package it, send it to your brain, unpack it, and have it correspond to something like the same idea? And I think that's sort of the role of concepts, which we embody in words, in languages and human things. We package it into a concept, the concept is a powerful thing, it's a cat, for example. And then, you know, I can transmit that concept to your brain, and you can unpack it, and you might have a similar perspective on what I'm talking about as I have internally. And I think that, I mean, in a very strange way of thinking about things, this is jumping a bit now, but when we think about spacetime, and we think about particles like electrons and so on, what is an electron? An electron is a chunk of existence that is not changed in some way by moving through space. There's an electron moving here, it's the same electron, sort of. It travels through space and time, its electron. Its existence is transported, sort of, unchanged through space and time. Although in our physical models, this electron is made up of different atoms of space. As it moves through space, it's made up of different atoms of space. It's like, you know, a vortex in a fluid, where the vortex moves, even though it's made up of different atoms at different moments in time. And so I think this idea of concepts is a concept that's like a particle, but not in physical space, but in what I call rule space. And minds are similar, and they exist in different places in rule space. And so when we exchange, when we use concepts to sort of exchange ideas, it's like sending a particle from one place in rule space to another. And we have sort of a - can you reverse that? Sorry, can you reverse that and also say that instead of the concept being like a particle, the particle is like the concept, and the universe is talking to itself and exchanging ideas, and that's what we see in physics? Yes. Yes, maybe you can. I mean, it's sort of, it resonates a bit with sort of a universe in which God's ideas are realized, so to speak, which is sort of a common theological view of the universe in the vein of Spinoza's view. Yes, I think that, to some extent, the idea that what the universe does is like thinking, is sort of this kind of thing, it's all computations, so to speak. This idea that I've had for decades, the principle of computational equivalence, the idea that you can think of all processes as computations. They're not just computations, but they're also computations of a similar level of evolution, sort of. So the computations that go on in our brains that we interpret as thinking are the same level of complexity of computations as what's going on in the universe that we interpret as physics, for example. But I think, I mean, going back to, oh my God, well, going back to these questions about sort of concepts and how we think about it, and you were asking, can I imagine something as a different kind of observer than who I am? One experiment that I did a few months ago was the following. So you take a creative AI that does image capture and you can tell it, make an image of a cat wearing a party hat. And it will - Right, right. And I'll bring up the blog post on the screen now. I read through that. Right. Yes, that's one of those images that's worth a lot of word-story. But you say, I have, how can one know what a cat wearing a party hat looks like? Well, that's because it's seen a few billion images on the web and has captions and can associate these things and so on. But one of the things that it realizes is that when you say cat wearing a party hat, that turns into some vector of numbers in some embedding space and so on. And you can ask questions like, well, what if I slightly change these numbers? I have a cat in a party hat here and I have things that are less cat-like the further I go away. And, for example, I think I have an image of what I've been calling the cat island, which is sort of an island in the space of possible concepts in the sense that corresponds to things that we can identify as cat. When you move away from that sort of place and concept space, you get things that are less cat-like and very quickly you get to things that we humans don't have words for. Very quickly you get to what I've been calling the interconcept space, which is sort of an analogy to inter-stellar space or something where you're far away from everything else. It's an uncolonized region of concept space. And the question you might ask is, well, what fraction of the interconcept space is occupied by concepts? The answer is incredibly small. So the concepts that we humans have, and even the basic way that I've used to draw a space of interconcept, we have 10 to the minus 600 of the size of the interconcept space filled with concepts that we currently know. So, there's a lot of stuff that we haven't imagined yet, so to speak. And I mean, I've continued to post that blog, and continued that article, I don't know, it's sort of blog posts, but by the time it gets to a few hundred pages, I'm not sure how bloggy it really is. But anyway, that piece of writing. I have a lot of questions about the way you write, which will be asked later. But as a point now, about this interconcept space. So it's not clear to me, the question that I have is how much of the interconcept space is in inter BS space, like Harry Frankfurt's space. And what I mean by that is that if you have 10 points on a two-dimensional level, there are an infinite number of graphs that can connect them. You mentioned embedding, and concept space depends on embedding. And it's not clear to me that if I choose another point that connects these points, that that's also a concept. So it could have meaning by chance, like some numbers that look like noise, but somebody like, oh, that's my social security 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 interconcept space, it's not inter BS space, and that it actually represents something meaningful? Well, these words we have to unpack a little bit. The question is, can we make meaning out of the things that are there? I think that would be a more sensible starting point. So let's give some examples. Let's say we have mathematics. And mathematics, we imagine it's built on certain axioms. These might be set theory axioms. They might be arithmetic axioms. We can just look at all possible axioms in mathematics, all axioms that can be conceived of that we can build the foundations of mathematics on. And we can ask the question, the ones that we have, are they more meaningful than others? Or can we build a completely rich, and completely alien to us mathematics, based on a different set of axioms? I think, well, that's complex to say, but I think the answer is basically yes. You can start from any basis, and you can end up with a rich set of concepts, and a rich kind of narrative. I'll give you another example. Again, we don't really know in this case, but let's say proteins. We humans have, I don't know, about 30,000 kinds of proteins that make us up. And why those and not others? Well, you say, well, evolution found those, and so on, and so on, and so on. But there's really no good evidence that we couldn't have picked completely different entities and they would have fit together in some way as well. And there would be, perhaps we would have some of the same general features that we have, but on a completely different basis. And my personal guess is that wherever you choose, you can create a rich narrative out of those things. That's sort of the principle of the idea of computational equivalence. It's something where, you know, pick a program. It can be any kind of program. It doesn't have to be a cellular automaton. It doesn't have to be a Turing machine. It doesn't have to be lambda calculus. It can be any of those things. Pick it. It can be a very simple program like that. Pick it and from it you can build this tower that will eventually reach the same places. So I think it's likely that the concepts that we have are the ones that are there, and by the way, once we have concepts, we build a lot around them. You know, we have words for them. Once we have a word for them, we can, you know, order them from an online store. If we want to buy one, we can do all sorts of things. And so we end up in this sort of loop where once we imagine a concept, or once biology picks a protein, for example, it starts building a lot of things around it. And so for us, it seems, well, how could it be different? Because look at it. We have all these things in the world. You know, how can we avoid having loops in the world? For example, how can we avoid that happening? Well, because we've built so much around these things. So my view would be that we could also build a civilization, and build life, and build a lot of other things from completely different foundations. Once we commit to those foundations, we've built a long tower on those particular foundations and then everything else seems far away. But I don't think it's unbuildable in that way. It's for us, from our perspective, from the tower that we've built, it seems like nothing or it seems far away. I see. So I was going to ask the question that a lot of people ask, which is is there any hope of communicating with aliens? And that's contingent on a shared conceptual space. But I wonder if you would ask if that question should be reframed as with alien observers like us? Because if an alien were an observer like us, it would have the same conceptual space. But you seem to be saying no. Well, I think the way to think about it is that I haven't talked much about this sort of true rule space, but basically there's a different kind of fundamental computational rules that you can run or that you can attribute to the universe being what the universe is running, so to speak. And in a sense, we can think of ourselves as being different from ourselves as existing in a particular place in physical space. We can also think of ourselves as existing in particular places in rule space. The way I see it is that different minds exist in different places in rule space. And for example, this whole point about exchanging concepts and so on, is like these particles are propagating from one place in rule space unchanged to another. So there's this sort of complete map of minds in rule space and minds that have sort of a shared history and the same cultural background and the same education and so on. These minds are sort of close to each other and communication is fairly easy between them. The translation from ideas in one mind to ideas in another mind is not that difficult. And the further apart these minds are, the more difficult it becomes. Let's say a mind is the mind of a dog, for example. Well, there are some things that you can communicate with dogs, maybe some emotional states, and things like that. But it's really difficult to communicate a lot of things. And then we can say, well, what about something further away? What about some other kind of computational system that, with the principle of computational equivalence, we can think of as a mind-like system? My favorite example usually is the weather, which people might say sort of has a mind of its own. But the weather is very far away in rule space from us. It does mind-like things, but the translation from its mind-like activities to our mind-like activities is difficult. It's far away. We wouldn't think of it as having experiences like us. When we look, and this is always an interesting ethical problem and so on, when we have certain internal experiences, we look at other people and say, I imagine these people have similar experiences to mine. And the further away these people are, whether it's culturally or other things, the less it seems, you know, you're less sort of, oh, yes, I can empathize with this person. I can imagine what they're thinking, so to speak. By the time you get to a cat or a dog, it's very far away. What is the thing that it's thinking? We can sort of make up a story about it, but it's very difficult to get into its head, so to speak. And I think that's sort of, you know, when we imagine these kinds of minds that are very different from our own, we can't access them in the same way that we can access another human mind. Now, there's an interesting case which is artificial intelligence, because if you look at people's interactions with AI, and especially with, oh, I was just, a friend of mine has made a human-like robot which is sort of interesting because you can watch people's interactions with it. You know, it's an LLM AI plus a human robot. And it's really interesting because, you know, we all empathize with it very quickly in many ways. You know, even though we sort of rationally know, it's a bag of pieces, more or less, we still treat it in a somewhat human way. And, you know, at some point, we can think, well, every brain is just a bag of neurons with a bunch of electrical activity and so on. Why should we treat it in a special way? We treat it in a special way because we empathize with it, and we incorporate it into our internal experiences. And I think, you know, in the case of AI, that we, often, we're going to embody it increasingly to the point where it seems like something like us, so to speak, just where others feel like they're like us, even though we don't have that internal experience of being like them, so to speak. So, I mean, I think, let's see, I think you asked about sort of communication with aliens and so on. I think the way I see it is, you know, we go explore the universe, we send a spacecraft, and they get to a certain distance. When the spacecraft, you know, gets outside the solar system or something like that, it has a different perspective on the universe, because it's in a different place in physical space. We can also imagine sending a sort of a real spacecraft, to try to understand the universe from these different perspectives. And that's sort of, it's sort of a big intellectual activity, I suppose, a big intellectual journey about can we colonize rule space? Can we get different perspectives on how to think about things? How far can we go? And I think one of the points is that until we can discuss it, we all have to go somewhere in rule space together. Otherwise we won't have these shared words to talk about what's going on. CW2 Right. If we send something into rule space, and it's far enough away, will we be able to say that we colonized it? LBW That's a good question. I mean, I think by the time we have, you know, I think it's sort of like translation from one language to another, you know, if you have a sufficiently obscure language, there's probably no English dictionary for it, it goes through five steps or something like that. And that's the thing that one can see in this case. And then the question would be, you know, does it translate into language X? Well, no, it's gone through this step, that step, that step, that step. So, you know, I guess that's how it would be diluted, so to speak. CW2 What is the difference between consciousness and observation? LBW Well, I mean, I think consciousness, to some extent, people imagine it as sort of an inner feeling of being. And that, I mean, what I'm interested in, in the sort of work of observers, is something that could be said to be an outer membrane of whatever you might think consciousness is. And that means that it raises the question, how can you take what's in the world and turn it into something that can be processed by the mind? The question of the inner feeling of the mind, which I think is what you might think of as consciousness, is a question 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 about what consciousness is. For example, this continuous thread of experience is a symptom of consciousness, so to speak. Similarly, this end is a symptom of consciousness. And I think for me, I've been more interested in sort of cataloging the symptoms of consciousness, because it allows us to get some idea about the laws of physics that we would infer, so to speak. I've been more interested in that than in asking a more self-enclosed question like what is that thing inside that has these particular symptoms? And I think, you know, the exercise that I've been doing, and I need to finish it, I started it two years ago, is just to write a story about what it would be like when you become a computer. It's like you go from boot-up time to crash time. It's like a human life. You accumulate a certain memory, you have certain experiences, and all those sorts of things. What is that like? What would be the inner experience of being a computer? Now, at the present time, we don't expect much. I mean people always talk to their computers and say the computer is having a hard time now. It's, you know, the computer is feeling X, Y, Z, but it's sort of still a little bit far away. I think it's going to become less far away with the presence of sort of human-like robots and with sort of steadily better LLM technology and so on. But I think that's the feeling that we have when we are a computer, and we might discover when we try to project ourselves into that, just as we have, you know, we have this non-trivial thing that we're all very good at, or most people are very good at, is sort of projecting themselves into another human, so to speak, to imagine what that other human is thinking. And, you know, we don't imagine very much what a computer is thinking yet, but we probably will be able to. Once we can imagine that, all sorts of terrible things happen, you know, sort of our ethical principles towards others, oh, we don't want others to feel bad and so on, once we feel that like a computer, so to speak, we have all these problems too. There's a lot of intelligence in the universe. Every physical process, all these things are examples of mind-like activity. The problem is that those minds are far away in rule space. And in a sense, what we're doing in

Science, in natural science, is an attempt to build bridges across, as you know, we try to say, there is this order in nature, and it does what it does, and we we are looking for a way so that we can get some human connection to this order in nature. Because otherwise, we are watching the order do what it does, and in a kind of pre-scientific society, or for many things even today, we don't have a way to think about it in terms of science, it just does what it does. And it's not that, we don't have that kind of, and we haven't been able to build that kind of connection to it. And that kind of makes us able to say, oh, we can, I mean, a lot of the connections we make in science today are of the type where we say, we will crush this thing. We will be able to say, that we know exactly what it does, we can sort of imagine in our minds what it will do, instead of it doing what it does, and we have to sort of connect to it in some way, where we treat it as an equal mind, so to speak, to our mind, and we are just trying to understand it. I mean, it's like saying to different humans, you can say, I will crush this, and I will just say, I know how humans work, this person will do this, and this, and this. You know, I don't have, you know, everything is predictable. But in reality, with humans, we are quite used to the idea that we do what we do, and that there is another human doing what they do, and we can sort of communicate with them, but both are sort of equal minds, so to speak. For nature, the kind of vanity in a lot of science has been that we are the responsible minds, so to speak, and that nature is fair, you know, we can just say, we know what will happen, I have the science that tells us what will happen, instead of us being sort of equal minds with what is happening in nature. I mean there are other traditions, not the Western scientific tradition, where that is much more important. And again, you know, it's hard for someone like me to, I mean, although I might have a slight advantage because I've thought scientifically about these things a lot, to get into this way of thinking about things. But that's what I tend to believe, you know, by the time people realize that AI is no different from us, by the time people decide that there are aliens everywhere, there is a kind of alien intelligence all around us, so to speak. All that's happened is that we haven't necessarily been able to build those bridges to be able to communicate with it. I mean, a kind of interesting thought experiment came from an idea that some people presented to me a few years ago about how to create a company that would send starships, and they would do that, you know, go out into the universe, and they would discover alien technology, and they would bring it back to Earth, and they would accelerate our technology by a million years. Well, I hear far-fetched ideas all the time, and this might be the most far-fetched idea I've ever heard for a startup, so to speak. But what's interesting about it is the kind of philosophically revealing that it throws up. Because what does it really say? It says, you know, when we say that we've gone out into the universe and discovered technology, alien technology, and we bring it back to Earth, and we accelerate human technology by a million years. Well, the problem is that there is alien technology all over the universe. There are pulsars doing all sorts of intricate things with magnetic fields, and there's this, and there's that, and there are all sorts of things happening in the universe. The question is what is technology? Technology is something that we've been able to harness to connect to human purposes that we care about. I mean, you were asking before, is there, you know, is there meaning in the space between concepts? Well, the issue is as if we say, is there technology that can be made from this kind of physical process? It's not that, the physical process does what it does. The technology that's made of it is, can we connect it to the things that we care about? Similarly, can we sort of build meaning on top of this thing? Can we connect it to the things that we care about? And so, what's interesting is to realize that technology is everywhere. No, there isn't technology. There is the raw material for technology everywhere. But this question, you know, is this very human activity of saying, oh, yes, we've found, you know, piezoelectric material. Great. Now we can use that to make a watch part or something. Sure. But, you know, it's the thing. And the question is: can we connect it to human purposes? And human purposes have evolved over time. I mean there are a lot of random elements. I don't know, lutetium or something. You know, it's like a random chemical element. And then people realize, oh, no, no, we should really care about mining it. It's useful for this or that thing that shows up in a smartphone. It's sort of, the thing is out there, but it's a slow process on our part of colonizing the possibility space to realize that this is something that we humans actually care about. Speaking of observation and equivalence, is that understood as like coarse-graining, so you don't care about the details? Coarse-graining is a version of that. I mean there's a whole bunch of different ideas that are all versions of equivalence. Coarse-graining, things on tractors, pressure, there's a bunch of different names for that. I mean, it's a fundamental idea that has come up in millions of different places. But yes, coarse-graining is sort of the name that Gibbs invented for statistical mechanics in the early 20th century as a version of that. The challenge is to talk about coarse-graining and just say, oh, we're just coarse-graining and then we understand what's going on. The problem is, what is the right kind of coarse-graining to do? That's the real question. Let's say we're grouping things together, but what are the equations that we can do? Because there are some very ornate equations 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 grind the coarse-graining so finely that it becomes synonymous with the system. Absolutely. So you can grind the coarse-graining down to the level of atoms. Exactly. But the question is, what is this fuzziness that you're putting in there? What is it that the fuzzifier can do and cannot do? It's important to discuss the mechanisms of coarse-graining. You should discuss the process of equivalence as well as discussing the fact that you get equivalence, so to speak. Right. That's very interesting. So are you saying that observation is the fact of equivalence or is it the act of equivalence? Well, I mean the output of observation is the result of equivalence. The process of observation is a process of equivalence. So, for example, this becomes important. Oh, I don't know. For quantum computation, this is important. We don't fully understand this, but it's important. And that means, in our physical models, there's sort of these many possible histories that correspond to a multi-directional graph of possible things that can happen in the world, so to speak. And there are branches, and there are merges. There are branching and merging all the time. I think the main observation is that it's like us humans, you can say, that coarse-graining is sort of large on the scale of space atoms. We are large on the scale of individual molecules and statistical mechanics. We are also large on the scale of different parts of history. So in the fuzz space, as we call it, the space of quantum branches, we are extended entities in the fuzz space. So, we are effectively averaging or equating different branches of history. It's a weird thing. I mean, this means that we, and this is where it's really important, that we believe that there's a single thread of our experience, and yet this single thread of experience is actually a sum, I think, of many different parts of history. And this kind of idea that is sort of an equivalence for different kinds of paths in parts of the fuzz space is sort of, well, then there's a question of what is the mechanism by which that happens? If we are, and this is important for quantum computing, it's one thing inside a quantum computer that has many different threads of computation going on, but then the question is, well, humans will look for the answer. If they were quantum observers looking at the answer, it would have been done by then. It would have had many computational threads, and there are many different threads, and there are different places in the fuzz space, and everyone is happy. There's nothing more to do. But to get it to the point where we simple humans can sort of grasp it, you have to equate the threads of history together. You have to find a way to say, this is what happened. This is the only thing that happened. We can't have in our minds this sort of multiple branching of quantum history. That's the thing that, in our shared experience, we equate these things together. It has to be the output stage for a quantum computer is this thing where we do those equivalence things. Now, the fact is that in the traditional formalisms of quantum mechanics, that's not really mentioned. In the traditional formulation of quantum mechanics, and perhaps that's a mistake, the idea is that there are all these quantum amplitudes, and then, oh, there's this measurement operator, and boom, you get the answer. And I think that sort of negates the fact that there is actually an equivalence process 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 the human mind that thinks there's a definite thread of things that happened. So, I have two questions here. The first is, what does this equivalence process do? Then number two, you've mentioned the word belief several times, like we believe that we have continuity in time and so on. So, mathematically, what is meant in your model by the word "belief"? Is belief the same as assuming? Assume so-and-so? What is belief? Well, well. So, first, what does the equivalence thing do? Different states, different things. You know, in some of these physical systems, like a piston with a bunch of molecules bouncing around it, what is the equivalent thing there? There's more to analyze in this, and there are about 10,000 kinds of measurements that we know how to do. And for each one of them, you can ask, what is actually going on? And it turns out that they are all, in fact, two different categories, but they are almost everything that's aggregated. A lot of individual molecules come in, but there's an overall pressure. There's one different state, which is things like scales, where you say, you know, there are many different ways you can get a certain weight, but at some point, the scale tips. So it's sort of a discrete output, somewhat like what happens in standard quantum mechanics with qubits and so on. There's a discrete output, whereas in the case of measuring pressure or something like that, you just have a continuous number. But what happens when you measure pressure? Well, what happens is that every time a molecule hits the piston, it causes a deformation at the atomic level in the shape of the piston. But that deformation at the atomic level is quickly smoothed out, because the speed of sound is high in solids. It's sort of this deformation, you know, atoms wiggle. Quickly, and that disappears quickly somehow. And that's sort of common, that the equivalence process happens on a short timescale compared to the way you observe it. So, you know, for our brains with timescales of a millisecond, it's sort of things that happen in less than that time, we perceive them as atomic things. We don't consider those as separate. If things are separated by a millisecond, we don't notice it. They're just the same kind of thing. But this comes back again, well, you know, we have this internal experience of things happening, and it's this internal experience that has done this aggregation. And it says, what does it mean to believe in something? Well, what is it, what is it, how is it done, how does this sort of work, I think the way to think about it is this kind of thing that you would do to make a decision about what to do next, in a sense, is the thing that you practically believe in, so to speak. And that means, if you're making a decision, it's sort of like a blockchain, you're sort of making a series of decisions, and then you go ahead 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, I've gone into a lot of detail about what could happen, and I've said, I think this has happened, and then you go ahead and say, I think this has happened, and so on. I think that's the meaning that I mean, in terms of sort of our attempts to build theories, this point about belief is the question, well, what exactly can we do, what can we observe? What can we talk about? I mean it's the same thing that happened in the early 20th century, when Einstein, you know, was inventing relativity and things like that. What Einstein highlighted, you know, is what can we talk about, about simultaneity? What can we know, there are things we cannot know. So, don't worry about that. Make a theory that it's not necessary to know things we cannot know. And we just talk about the things we can know. And it's the same thing that I'm talking about here. Make a theory that just talks about the things we can know, and then it will be a characteristic of that theory that the theory must have certain properties because it just talks about the things we can know. In the case of a gas, for example, the fact that we cannot know where all these individual molecules are going means that we have to focus on certain properties of the gas that we can make formulas and things like that about. And it's the fact that we cannot go in, well, if we could go in and look at individual molecules, we would say, wait a minute, PV does not equal RT, because, for example, we can't really define pressure, because in reality, this whole battalion of molecules could be going off in this direction, and we have to worry about that. We can't just say, it's pressure. I'm not sure if your model itself dictates the laws of physics, because if so, then this belief in the continuity of time, then someone like Heraclitus, who didn't believe it was a continuous thread through time and made some arguments about that, do they see physics differently? Yes, an interesting question. I mean, I think we are all so close to each other in real space that observers, you know, do cats and dogs see the same physics? Do whales perceive the same thing? Does weather look at physics in the same way? You know, I'm not sure how close, as I say, we humans, I think, are to each other in the ways we perceive things, because we all have the same sensory apparatus, more or less. We have many similar ideas, give or take. I think the distance between the ways humans can perceive is not very large. So if we say what is physics as perceived by weather? I don't know. Very different, probably. What is physics as seen by a mosquito? I don't know. I mean, maybe what matters to a mosquito is a set of air currents and this and that and the other, which we don't really have a description for. I mean, even if we think, for example, about dogs, which have a sense of smell, where smell is a much more important sense than sight, for example. Imagine what the laws of physics, the laws of smell in physics is, I don't know, it's a good exercise to try to think about what that would be like. I mean the fact that we perceive the laws of physics as we do, for example, our physical size is important to the way we perceive the laws of physics. For example, the fact that we talk about space as a thing is a consequence of different kinds of aspects of our size. Let me explain that. We think, and we look around, and we say, there is a space of space, and the room I'm in is in this particular state at this particular time, and at another time it might be in a different state. But we see space as a unified, extended thing. So we can look around and just say, space is there, and we have a state of the world, a state of space. But the reason that worked is that we look around, I can see perhaps 100 meters away through the window. The light that comes to me from 100 meters away, arrives in a microsecond, in a microsecond or something like that. That time it takes for light to arrive is really short compared to the time it takes for my mind to process the scene I'm looking at. For me, it's a good way to think about things to say that the world is made up of a series of frames, where, you know, a series of frames in time where the state of space is at this moment in time, and then the state of space at that moment in time and so on. So it makes sense for me to aggregate my view of the universe into the existence of space there, and you know, things evolving over time. Now, for example, if my brain were to work a million times faster than it does, and I replaced human neural circuits with digital electronics, it would be a million times faster. What would the world look like if we thought a million times faster? Well, the light that comes to me from there, I would have already, I would be able to process by the time the light arrives, I could already be thinking of something else, so to speak. So it wouldn't look like that anymore, and it wouldn't be obvious that I should aggregate space as something that exists at this moment in time. It's something, similarly, if I were much larger than I am now, even with the same processing speed that we have now, if we were the size of planets, for example, we would, you know, if one person the size of Earth, let's say we would always think of a planet, oh, at the speed of light, we can't just think of it, we can't think of, oh, the entire solar system is just one bubble of space, because different parts of it, we would always be thinking, oh, you know, this part of the light signal from Neptune hasn't arrived yet, write something. And we would be able to think of things while we were waiting for that light signal to arrive. And again, we wouldn't be able, it wouldn't make sense for us to aggregate some kind of space like this point that exists, which has a state at a particular moment in time. I mean, we see that very concretely when we start to think, you know, about reference frames for talking about proper time for interplanetary spacecraft, and things like that, we can see that you can't do that. By the time you're talking about things on that scale with human-level processing speeds, you know, the idea that we sort of aggregate space into moments in time is no longer valid. This is an example that we, because of who we are, choose to talk about the universe the way we choose to talk about the universe. And by the way, I think there are a whole bunch of other aspects of ourselves that we take for granted, like that aspect of ourselves related to our size and the fact that space makes sense to talk about, we take that completely for granted. And you know, this is another example of something we take for granted. We take it 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 were a scientific experiment, we could perform any scientific experiment we choose to perform. We imagine that we could take this polarizer in some quantum experiment and we could 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 turning it to that angle changes the world in such a way that we would then have to turn it to another angle. We have a belief that we have free will, and that's important for a whole bunch of things related to our perception of the world. And there's a whole series of these kinds of things that might seem obvious to us. Another good example is motion. The possibility of pure motion is not trivial. It's the fact that we can take a step forward and remain the same as we were when we were in a different place, which is not obvious. If we were made of little vortices in a fluid, we might be able to do the same thing, but it might not be surprising to us that, in fact, we can't move easily. We have to be, and you know, the idea that pure motion is possible is another kind of assumption about the world, something else about the way we follow, because of who we are, we choose to describe the world in a certain way. I mean, the discussion about space, because of who we are with the scales that we are at, we can choose to describe the world in terms of space and time separately, for example. So- explain. You know, I think the more we understand about the way we are as observers, with all the arbitrariness of the way we've had biological evolution to where we are now, technology has given us measuring devices of the kind we have and so on, with all this arbitrariness, when we think about what that means, we'll probably learn more about how physics ought to be as we perceive it. And you know, we can have, and so I think this, you know, I've always assumed that we would be in some kind of search for what is the rule that gives us the universe as the universe is. And what I've realized is, and this is sort of Roulard's idea, that the universe runs all possible rules. It's just that we take a sample of all those possible rules. There's a slice that's determined by our way. Something similar. We are in a particular place in the universe, physically, in physical space. We don't have a theory about why we are here and not somewhere else. I'm not sure such a theory would make sense. We happen to exist in this galaxy, on this planet, and so on, and so on, and so on. And that is, and therefore our view of the universe is based on the perspective of creatures existing on this planet looking at the sky or whatever. And if we were somewhere else, or lived near the center of our galaxy, or lived in a completely different place, or lived at a different time in the history of the universe, whatever, we would have a different perspective on the universe. And it's the same story with sort of a governing space where we have a different perspective on the universe. The non-trivial truth, the real kind of scientific truths, you know, here is that once we are observers with certain general properties, we can draw some general conclusions about the laws of physics that we will perceive. And so it's sort of what goes in and what comes out. What happens is some characterization of us as observers, and what emerges as the laws of physics for us to consider. And that's 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 who we are. And that, you know, for me, has always been very puzzling. You know, in the end, why did we get this universe and not another? And the answer, I think, is that we got this perceived universe because of who we are. And why are we who we are? Well, you could say, well, how did we come, you know, 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 on some other planet? It's a possible fact about the world that we are here and not somewhere else. Similarly, our being who we are as observers, so to speak, is something, you know, that happens sort of this way, but it's not something we expect to have, nor do we expect to have a theory for it. Stephen, if what you're saying is that the question of why these laws and not another set of laws is like why this planet, Earth, and not some planets in, say, the Andromeda galaxy, I don't see what's non-trivial about that. Well, yes, but the really non-trivial thing is that you say, well, why is general relativity correct? Well, for any observer with these very general properties, you are certainly going to have those precise laws. That's the non-trivial part. If it's just saying, well, you know, given the details that we live in, there's really a non-trivial kind of heavy science between this impression that we have about, you know, these very coarse statements about observers of who we are and precise statements about the laws of physics that we perceive. So Stephen, you've had a variety of achievements recently, especially since coronavirus, remarkably. If you had to tie most of your recent achievements to one overarching vision, what would it be? So, for example, it could be the introduction of hypergraphs or the formulation of computational irreducibility or the employment of Jonathan Gerard. Jonathan has been very helpful indeed. No, I mean, you know, I think, look, the first statement is sort of, it's computation all the way. What you can really do is that computation is a way of thinking about the world. You know, if you look at how the world is formalized, it's sort of, you know, the invention of human language is a formalization of the world. Logic is a formalization of the world. 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 to where I've gotten, a large part of that is taking the idea of computation seriously as a way of formalizing the world and building the tools, you know, building the entire Wolfram Language technology stack and so on around the idea of computation as a way of formalizing the world. Now, once you have that idea, you start to think, well, what about physics? How can I formalize that? So, the next big truth is the principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility. Those are very closely related. It's a fundamental intuitive idea, you know, that I originally had in the early 1980s and that, you know, is the engine for a lot of other things. More recently, I would say that this whole work related to multiway systems, understanding the Ruliad, understanding the role of observers, is sort of the idea of the relationship between fundamental computation and the Ruliad, which is sort of the entangled limit of all possible computations, and understanding the interaction between that and who we are as observers. The fact that you can derive science from that is really interesting. And I didn't expect that. I mean, you know, if you asked me, even four years ago or something, did I think we would be able to derive general relativity? Well, I knew we could derive general relativity from the evolution of the underlying hypergraph. I've known that since the 1990s. I thought it was graphs at the time, but hypergraphs are easier. But the concept that there is sort of, that there is a determinism to these kinds of laws of physics for observers like us, I didn't really expect that to happen. And I think, I'm sure it has echoes and resonances in a lot of things that people have imagined, especially a few thousand years ago or more in sort of early ideas about philosophy and how it relates to our descriptions of the world. You know, the main thing we've achieved in the last two thousand years is, you know, that we can do computational simulations and actually, you know, see how this works with some clarity, so to speak, rather than just sort of having a vague idea about what's going on. But I would say, I mean, for me, this sort of role of the observer, and the idea of multiway systems, and the Ruliad, and this sort of, you know, the determinism of science, as it is, those are important ideas. And I think, you know, I think a lot of the technical details of rewriting the hypergraph, all that sort 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 those things where you can think of the theory of computation, and if you don't have Turing machines or something like that, you can't. You can't talk about it concretely. You're still sort of saying vague things. You need a concrete basis for discussing things. But in the end, the fundamental ideas are independent of that basis. And I think that's the case with the whole observer theory, the Ruliad, sort of, you know, the determinism of the laws of physics, and so on, the story. Yes, many of these ideas are like fountains from which other ideas flow. You've mentioned the power of computation or thinking about computation as fundamental, or equivalence, or computational irreducibility, or observers, or multiway systems, or the Ruliad. So let's call those fountain ideas for this conversation. What recipe would you give yourself in the past to get some of these fountain ideas more often? There's a whole set of computational irreducibility and what ultimately happens when one tries to come up with these things. You know, I think I don't think I have a particularly hard time in terms of getting these ideas with some, and with decent frequency. I mean, because frankly, some of these ideas, if you have them too quickly, there's not much you can do with them. They need a certain amount of development before they become very meaningful. I mean, I think that, you know, there's a maximum rate. In fact, one of the things that's been frustrating for me recently is that there's a lot of these things coming, you know, I'm writing down all these different things. And I think some of the things I'm writing down are, you know, important and seeds for a lot of other things, but I'll do it so quickly that they don't have much of a chance to develop as they probably need to. So I think there's a maximum rate of generation of these potentially big ideas. And if you exceed that rate, it'll be completely overwhelming and you won't be able to achieve anything. So it's not that when you saturate it, some fall by the wayside. It's somehow like spinning plates that all fall off. No, I mean, if you do it too quickly, it'll be like I have this idea, but each of these ideas needs a certain development. I mean, you know, when it's first, I mean one of the things I personally put a lot of effort into is sort of cleaning up ideas. And that's when I have a vague sense of an idea, like, what is the essence of that idea? What is the really simple thing, I can say it in a sentence or two of that idea. And that takes time. I mean, maybe, maybe a smarter person would be able to do that more quickly, but it, you know, it takes and figures out what is the essence and what is important and what is not important. I mean, I've been fortunate, I think, in my life to do that a number of times. And in fact, the thing I do for a living, building and designing and building our computational language is sort of critically dependent on that skill, because it's all about taking all these things that one might think of computationally and sort of breaking them down into these kinds of primitives that we apply in our language and so on. So, you know, I can do that almost every day and I've been doing it every day for 40 years. And that's a useful experience if your goal is to sort of unpack ideas for sort of fundamental intellectual development, so to speak. I think that's one thing. I mean, another thing for me is the tools. And you know, when I can do an experiment with Wolfram Language, you know, I've built the whole technology stack, well, conveniently, millions of other people use it too. But first and foremost, I built it sort of so that I could do things myself, as sort of my personal superpower, so to speak. And that works really well. And it's really essential, you know, that I wouldn't have been able to figure out many, many things, and I never had the internal intuition to know that the way they work is the way they actually work. I figured out the way they work by doing experiments, computational experiments. And I wouldn't have had the confidence, in fact, even if I imagined that this is the way things might go. I wouldn't have had the confidence to say this is the way things work without seeing it as a result of an experiment. And I think that, you know, maybe I imagined, although I didn't imagine it, in the early eighties, that really simple computational rules could lead to complex behavior. I didn't imagine that. And the fact is that I imagined the opposite. And if it weren't for the fact that I did explicit computational experiments where I could see what was going on clearly, I wouldn't have believed it. So that's a necessary piece. You know, if it were purely, I would sit and think about these things in my head only, and I would never have gotten there. And that's the case with a lot of things that I've been doing. So I would say, you know, perhaps the two things that have been important for me are the tools, having built a tall tower of tools that allow me to do experiments, and get intuition and so on. That's one thing. And even just putting my ideas into a computational language is a way of crystallizing what I'm talking about. It's like I vaguely imagined this and that and the other. Ah, interesting. Let me write a function that does that. And it's like people say, I'll write down a mathematical proof. Yes, it's very important to see the proof and make sure you get the right answer. But more important is the fact that you're doing the formulation, the setup is the important part. You know, it's like, you know, when people, I don't know, do math exercises or something and they get the setup completely wrong, that's a different story than if, oh, they did a slightly wrong calculation and they got this minus sign in the wrong place. It's sort of like, can you, can you visualize things in this formal way? And by the way, computation and computational language are that amazing superpower that we have, you know, we've developed, so to speak, to sort of crystallize ideas, human ideas into something that has much greater power. And not just because, but both because it's a way of formalizing what we're talking about. And because then we can have a computer help us to move forward with what we're thinking. But, you know, for me, it's sort of the tools, sort of the crystallization of ideas starting from their representation in an orphan language, and then actually running them to see what happens and getting intuition that I wouldn't have otherwise had. And I suppose the other thing is the effort to get to the essence of things, for example, what is, what is, what is the fundamental point that all this comes from, so to speak. And I think that for me is somewhat related to the presentation. And you know, I spend a lot of effort writing things down, trying to explain things, doing live streams, and all that sort of thing. And for me, that, you know, that's part

From the process of grinding things down to their essence. As is the case even in this conversation we've had, I've said some things that I hadn't thought of saying before, so to speak, and which I think are useful ways to sort of crystallize some, some ideas that I've been having, and that I've had in the past. And this, you know, my archetypal experience is that this kind of exposition is an important engine for getting to the essence of things. But that's for me, and the other important thing is, what's the core point? Now, you know, this question, ah, you know, I've been carrying around a lot of things that I'd like to figure out someday. And I, sort of, gradually accumulate knowledge about those things. Part of what I need to do is that in any new field you're working in, there's a kind of local intuition in that field. Right. And unless you've been steeped in it for a while, it's hard to have that local intuition. I mean, you know, I've been interested in the foundations of biology, the foundations of economics, ah, things related to neuroscience and so on. In each of those fields, slowly sort of over the years, I've been trying to get a kind of general knowledge and intuition about those fields because otherwise, you really, it's going to be very difficult, you know, when you say I'm going to go now and figure out the essence of economics, for example, unless you have some kind of big intuitive grasp of what economics is about, it's very difficult. At least for me, it's very difficult to do that. If you're like, well, you know, somebody says the definition of economics is this, well, that's nice, but it might be wrong. And unless you have some kind of broader vision of what's in that field, it's really hard to dig deep and not be led astray by things that people have already said are the case. So, you know, that's a slow process for me. I mean, you know, there are many fields that I've been following I don't know, some of them for almost 50 years now. And you know, you slowly try to get the intuition. I mean physics, for example, is a good example. I mean, the fact that I, you know, can make, you know, decent, you know, I can do the things that we've done in foundational physics, I think, depends entirely on the fact that I, you know, you know, learned physics research when I was very young. And you know, you can talk to me about quantum field theory or general relativity or something like that. And I know all the technical stuff. And that, even though that's not something we use on a day-to-day basis in moving forward a physics project, for example, the fact that the person has that foundational knowledge of how things roughly work. I mean, just like Jonathan and I were just talking about some cool things he was doing, using our models to do simulations of spacetime. And you know, we're talking about why do these things happen this way? You know, he sees these things in these simulations. Why does it happen this way? It's very important in those conversations that, you know, I, for example, and he also, but, you know, sort of knows, sort of the full irony of how typical general relativity works, and how typical quantum field theory works and so on. Without that, you, without that, I think it's really hard to think rationally about that field. If you're like, if you had to invent everything yourself, you'd never get there. But, you know, once one sort of lives in this environment, well, there's a certain amount of surrounding knowledge that's been developed, and then you have the opportunity, if you understand that surrounding knowledge well, and that's one of the problems. If you sort of know, oh, I've read this textbook and I've got one perspective on things, that's not enough. If you want to make foundational progress in a field, you really have to understand it at a very deep level and it's not, it's usually your internal understanding which is not the thing that you've just learned from something like a textbook. And you know, for a lot of these fields, it takes some time to get there. And it often takes for me, doing practical projects in these fields where I was sort of, for example, in economics, you know, working on things related to blockchain and distributed blockchain and so on has helped me. I don't think I've gotten to that point yet, but that has helped me understand what I don't know about the role of liquidity and what that means and the concept of, of individual prices of things and so on, to get that kind of practical experience in the weeds of that field. And seeing how things work in practice, is really important in being able to get a kind of larger foundational theoretical idea about what's going on. Is there a difference in the way you do research now and even in your philosophy of research from what it was when you were in your 30s or 40s, other than the technology? 30s and 40s, not so much. I mean, earlier than that. Yes. I mean, look, I started doing research when I was in my early teens, and I think by the time I was a little over 20, I had cottoned on by this moment, the most important thing is the essence of what's going on, so to speak, digging, digging, so to speak, rather than sort of building the technical tower. I mean, when I was doing things like particle physics for the first time, you know, I was mostly, you know, if you look at sort of the output, I was mostly taking a tower that was already built and adding an extra floor to it somewhere or another. And I sort of understood that the foundations of the tower were something, you know, it took me a few years to get to the point where I realized that it was worth doing. That was something I could do. And you know, at first, it seemed like a waste of time. It's like, let's take the tower that people have built and let's build on top of it. Who cares about what's underneath because people have already proven it. And I realized then that the biggest impact comes from working at the bottom of the tower, so to speak, the big impact, to some extent, in this analogy, at least comes from, you know, if you change the foundations just a little bit, a lot of changes. Whereas if you're sort of working at the level of, you know, technical details, your maximum reach is much smaller in terms of, no, I mean, I was, oh my God, I think, um, um, my way of doing things there are some differences. I mean, for example, in my 30s, I spent my 30s writing this big book, a new kind of science. It's sort of terrible to say that one spent a whole decade of one's life doing something, but yes, I spent that decade of my life. Why is that terrible? Because it's a long time. We don't have that many decades in life. And that's a big commitment, to say, you know, this is the thing that I did in this decade. I mean, I, I, I, that project had a number of features. One of them was, well, there was a kind of medium of delivery problem. In today's world, I could have done this project differently than I could have in the world of the 1990s. The only way I could have put out a large body of intellectual ideas is that you write a big book. That was the only thing, you know, it's sort of like, this is how you sort of, ah, you know, if you write, you know, a paper, a hundred papers, that's sort of all very small steps and it's completely unrealistic to expect people to assemble a hundred small steps together and say, oh yes, I've got it. So, but at that time, the only medium I could resort to, to get big ideas, was to write a big book. And I also had this, I really, I sort of put, ah, you know, I wanted to achieve a certain level of perfection in what I was putting out because it was like, I, I spent a decade on this. This, I didn't know it was a decade at first. Maybe I wouldn't have done it, but, it became a decade of course. And it feels like this must be, you know, this is my greatest work. It must be perfect. It must be, you know, every page, you know, if I was lucky, it was a page a day, and you know, every picture, you know, every detail was done with extreme care. I, you know, I use what I produced almost every day. You know, I use the electronic version of NKS, the new kind of science book all the time. It feels like I'm talking to people. I say, I need an example of this. Okay. I have a page in NKS that has this example. It's remarkable how often I use it, and I end up using it. So it wasn't a bad investment from my point of view. In the modern era, I had a different optimization. My best is to write as fast as I can and as much as I can. It's more a question of, you know, let me get things out there because the alternative is that I can go and I can work on it for another five years. And then, ah, it's not clear. It will be much, it will be better. It might actually be worse. It might be harder for people to digest. I think the kind of writing style that I've developed, you know, by writing it in a somewhat conversational way, people seem to have a good time digesting that. And that, you know, if I had written the NKS book in that way, I probably would have had a better time in that decade. Um, it might have been longer. Um, but it would have been, ah, ah, you know, and I probably wouldn't find it as centrally useful as I do now. Um, but you know, that's the style that has changed is that I, I'm undulating, um, oh, I don't know how much. Maybe, maybe, I don't know, I should work on that, but I bet I write at least a thousand pages a year. Well, and that means I write the equivalent of the NKS book, which was 1200 pages, you know, every year and probably much more. Um, and that, ah, you know, that's the difference, um, in those things. I mean, I would say in terms of tools, one thing that's perhaps not appreciated enough is what we call click-to-copy. That is you look at one of these things that I write, you'll find it has a bunch of pictures. You can click on any one of those pictures. You'll get a piece of orphan language code. You can run that code, and unless something goes terribly wrong, you'll get the same picture that I had. So everything is completely reproducible and perfectly buildable upon. And you know, when we do our summer schools and winter schools and so on, people all the time and people in general say, I'll just take this piece of code from here and I'll build on that. And that's sort of a new opportunity in research because normally when people do research, you know, somebody writes a research paper, other people read the paper. It's sort of like concepts you know, particle concepts or something that gets transmitted from one mind to another, but then it has to be unpacked at the other end. What we have the opportunity to do with sort of things like click-to-copy code and computational language in general is that you just love it, here's the idea you can use it immediately. You don't have to unpack it. You don't have to make your own copy, make your own version of it. And I think that has been a powerful thing in terms of being able to push things forward. Having said that, you know, there are now a fair number of people who, you know, have internalized a lot of things in our physics project quite well. And the things that have come out of the physics project and the mathematics stuff and so on are difficult things. You know, making real progress is technically complex and it's technically and conceptually complex. And I think one of the things I've noticed was a rather strange observation, which is that I've talked to a lot of people about what we're doing and things. You talk to scientists, or physicists, for example, or other kinds of scientists. You have one experience. You talk to people who have thought, at a professional level or sometimes, about philosophy and things like that. You have a different experience. The thing that I found interesting is that scientists are used to technical complexity and technical progress. They are not used to conceptual progress and conceptual complexity. It's sort of, well, just tell us, you know, we have another formula. We can write another equation, you know, more or less. We can write down something else, whatever those things are that can become very complicated, but they are tracked in a certain way. Whereas what has happened ultimately, with what we've done is, you know, it has ultimately become a little bit different conceptually from what has happened before. And that's something I've noticed, I've noticed that there's this rather strange disparity, which is more easily understood by people who have a kind of philosophical bent than people with a technical scientific bent, which is a kind of interesting phenomenon. I don't know where that ends because in a sense, you know the science we have today was born out of philosophy, you know, 400 years ago, or 300 years ago, whatever. And that was, you know, there was a certain set of concepts that got condensed into science as we know it today. We have a somewhat different set of concepts that are condensing into a new kind of direction in science. And there are many technical things that have to be done that are traditional scientific things. I mean, things that, you know, like what Jonathan and I are talking about now has to do with sort of observational consequences of physics models, you know, what can you actually observe with a telescope? What can you do, you know, and so on, and so on, and so on. And that means there's a lot of technical physics to be done there. But, you know, these questions about the determinism of physical laws, the nature of observers and so on, are mostly a different kind of thinking. Although it again has a lot of technical touches about how this particular kind of measurement apparatus works and what the consequences are and so on. JS The question that a lot of people are asking now that you've mentioned it is where is the evidence for the Wolfram physics project? How do you respond to that? Answer: Well, my God, I mean it's not very common to look at the great achievements of 20th-century physics and know why they are correct. It has never happened before. Nothing even close to that. It's remarkable how much you get from a rather small, you know, from a small set of foundational ideas. That's just a big reach in all these different directions. Now, you know, if I said, do we know that, do we know that it's our model and not XYZ model? One of the interesting things is that a lot of the things that have been developed in mathematical physics seem to enter into our models. They seem to be limits of our models. They seem to be, you know, specific cases of our models, and things like that. So the idea that we're against them is not the case. I suspect all the popular directions of mathematical physics, 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 be embedded in our models. Our models provide such, and that's why ADS CFT is correct. These, you know, string theory lives in these particular corners, and it's a specific case of our models. Maybe we don't know that for sure yet. But that's what I think will happen. So, it's sort of, it's not us against them, but there are foundational things about our models which are quite different from what has happened before. For example, the idea that space is discrete and that's something that's sort of amusing if you look at the history, which I've only recently learned, which is, you know, in ancient times, people were arguing all the time, you know, is the universe discrete or continuous? They would say, you know, the Democrates would say space is discrete. You know, others would say it's continuous, and so on, and so on, and so on. They were arguing about that. Okay. Then we got to the point where people were arguing about the same thing for light. Then we got to the end of the 19th century and there was a kind of big struggle about molecules, and you know, is matter discrete or continuous? And it really looked like continuous things were going to win until molecules and Brownian motion and things like that were discovered. And at that point, it looks like matter is discrete and then, well, light is discrete. I mean, Einstein, when he introduces, you know, the photoelectric effects and the idea of photons comes out directly and says, we've discovered that matter is discrete. Let's check the electromagnetic field. Maybe it's discrete too. My God, it actually is at that time. And that's something I didn't even know until very recently at that time, where most people thought space was continuous. Even Einstein apparently. Absolutely. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, the whole crowd, they all believed that space was discrete. And as I continue to discover more and more of this history, but what happened is that they couldn't make it compatible with relativity. And that was a technical problem. I mean, that's a problem that we solve with hypergraphs, and so on, and so on, and so on. Um, and so they gave up. And so for a hundred years, people said, oh, space must be continuous. And when I said, well, wait a minute, space might not be continuous. People were like, that's just crazy. Now, you know, they wouldn't have said that a hundred years ago, people wouldn't have said that. It's something that happens in science and other fields that people develop. Oh yes. You know, for very technical reasons, it has to work this way. And after a few academic generations, it looks like, well, of course it works this way. If, okay. Is space discrete or not? You know, for molecules, people were sort of lucky that Brownian motion was visible. The question is, is a similar Brownian motion for space, is it detectable? And can it be detected in our age? And that's a really interesting question. And you know, we're working on that, and you know, maybe there are some things related to black holes which are fine-grained effects. And maybe there are some things that I have a slight hunch that dark matter will eventually turn out to be a feature of the microstructure of space. And that will be, once we know what it is, everyone 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. Yes. Yes. But, but I heard a quote from you about dark matter, or space, or time, or heat, or thermal matter in our age. Yes. Well, we don't know that now, but, let's imagine you don't know that, let's imagine you do know that. Let's imagine you were able to extract that. So can you also say, because there's abundant evidence that dark matter behaves like matter. And for that reason, can you also say that some matter or the matter that we see is also a form of spacetime heat? For example, if spacetime heat can behave like matter, what's the limit to that? Right. But okay. Heat is a form of energy, and kinetic energy, you know, large-scale motion is a form of energy. It's the same meaning. I think here that particles, ordinary particles are like large-scale motion. And whereas it would be my guess that there's something different, which is the microscopic features of spacetime. So for example, if we look at matter, we're used to macroscopic things happening to matter, throwing a ball from here to there, that sort of thing. There's a large chunk of matter 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 related to individual molecules. So my guess is that particles are macroscopic effects, not macroscopic on our scale, but macroscopic relative to the atoms of space, and they are macroscopic effects in the structure of space. Whereas spacetime heat would be microscopic effects in the structure of space. And my guess, this is my guess so far, is that that leads to, you know, it will lead to a change in the things that we say about the structure of space. And you say, well, well, there's one thing to understand, which is a fundamental feature well, well, Einstein's equations, for example, and the equivalence principle and so on. In Einstein's equations, you can trade off a kind of energy momentum for the gravitational field. You can sort of move things around. You can say, well, I have a gravitational wave. Is a gravitational wave a source of gravity, or a source of spacetime curvature, or is it just spacetime curvature? You can sort of trade off between those two. In our models, this trade-off is more extreme because in our models, everything is just a feature of the structure of space. So these particles are just lumps in space. In traditional general relativity, you can distinguish between things that are features of space and things that are sort of matter that exists in space. Now, for example, suppose we made a bunch of things out of black holes. Then we would be in the same situation because black holes, as they are usually formulated, are just a feature of the structure of space. So, if we were to make some kind of, I don't know, our planet or something out of a lot of small black holes or something else, if we could separate them from each other and so on, then we would have something that looks like, you know, something like matter, but it's actually made out of the structure of space. By the way, I suspect there's a close analogy between particles like electrons and things like black holes. They are both fixed structures in spacetime, except black holes, we've usually imagined in general relativity to be very large things, whereas we think of particles as being very small and subject to quantum mechanics and so on. In our models, there's not really such a distinction. You can have sort of features of space that can be at any scale, and in any case, I tend to think that the concept of dark matter as matter, I mean that's what always happens in science and many other things. The fact that it's called dark matter might be a big mistake, just as people called it caloric fluid and call caloric fluid heat, the fluid part of that name, was a big mistake, which I probably made, people said it was, you know, but they thought it was a fluid, just as we now, in the name of dark matter, think of it as matter and that might not be the correct picture. And I don't think the experimental features, you know, that are known are that it has certain gravitational effects. And it's not known that you can pick it up and get particles out of it and so on. Well, many people are trying to find non-trivial other models, like how can you modify gravity to reproduce the experimental results? Yes, yes, right. So, I mean, one thing about that is that the attempts to break into Einstein's equations, and figure out how that works, have not been very successful. I think one new degree of freedom that we have and is very important is changing dimensions. And because we don't have the idea that space must be fixed at three dimensions plus one, that provides a kind of reformulation of general relativity in terms of changing dimensions rather than spacetime curvature. And I think that although I don't know how it works yet, my intuition is that when one looks at those attempts to specify gravity variables, it looks like we've missed this change because it didn't seem natural to us. But once you think about changing dimension, a certain kind of change will be natural, although, for example, if you're expanding a string, you'll never get X to the half not something to get an expanding string. It's not like, you know, X plus X squared plus X cubed and so on will never make X equal to a half. And that, you know, sort of, it's like you've missed that sort of by thinking about things in a certain way. And so I sort of think that changing dimension might be the key to figuring out how to get effective modified gravity, because that's what we'll end up with. I mean, whatever happens, maybe, you know, it looks like we're talking about heat as a form of energy. It has certain properties that are like energy. And in the end, we'll describe it in terms of energy dynamics. Similarly here, this will eventually be described in terms of gravity dynamics. It's just, it will be modified gravity, but modified gravity in a way that comes out of the structure of our models. Do you think Ruliad itself could be an observer? I know we're going back to observers, but I'm curious. Boy, not really, not an observer like us. You see, that's the thing, the only feature about us, and it's another implicit assumption, is that we're sort of small and integrated. And that means our minds, you know, by the idea that we have a single thread of experience, our minds are not very extended. If our minds were very extended, we wouldn't have the same kind of sense of coherent identity. So, you know, there's one picture about Ruliad, which is that we say, let's go explore Ruliad. Let's look at sort of, you know, let's go colonize Ruliad space. Let's go explore more and more. And you say, maybe that's the purpose of civilization. Maybe that's what we are, you know, maybe that should be our purpose. Just as we explore physical space, we explore Ruliad space, and so on. Well, the problem is that when you're holding in your mind all these different possible views of what's going on, in a sense, but by the time all those different views are, are crammed together in your mind, there will be no coherence with what you think. So, maybe meaningless, can you say you still exist coherently? You are everything, but you are also nothing, so to speak. In other words, I think the concept of coherent existence depends on the choice that it is, there are things that represent you, and there are many things that are not you. If you say you are everything, then in a sense, there is no you in that picture, so to speak. So I think what is necessary, you know, is that in order to have a kind of coherent existence, we must be finite. This, you know, it's, I mean, a way to think about this and the more formal way to think about this in mathematics would be, well, you know, you want to prove theorems in mathematics. You know, what matters to you is to have a finite set of axioms, and then build a tower of theorems on top of those axioms. Well, you could say, well, what if I allow all possible axioms? You know, then you can prove anything. And why is that not a good thing in mathematics, so to speak? You can just prove everything. Well, what corresponds to that? In mathematics, it's an old result in logic, once you have something that you consider to be false, you can deduce anything from the false. Implication, the rules of logical implication, since you start from a false premise, everything becomes true. And at that point, it seems like you've sort of blown everything up. You can no longer make a coherent statement in mathematics. By the time you throw in the things that you believe in, something that is false, then you can deduce everything. Then everything, in a sense, everything is true. Once you know, once you take something false as a premise, you sort of have to conclude that everything can be deduced as true. And at that point, you can no longer build a coherent mathematics. And so I think it's the same kind of thing, you know, at that time, if you, by the time you are an observer across the Ruliad river, you don't exist in any coherent sense. And that's sort of a bummer for observers like us. There are different logical systems, like classical logic, and then there's paraconsistent logic, where you can have not explosion, but not explosion. So, in your Ruliad approach, is there something like a canonical logical system? So, I don't know, the intuition is logic. That's a good question. I mean, I think to some extent, everything we've done is sort of a constructive approach. The idea of logic with true and false and so on, I've never thought it was that great. I mean, there are many things in the world that are not true or false. You know, it will rain tomorrow. And that statement is neither true nor false. It is, as stated now. It's not yet determined. Yes, right. But I mean, practically, you know, you can try to manipulate everything, it has to be true or false. But that's not the reality of most of what we talk about. You know, if I say, in Wolfram language, for example, I say X is greater than three, but I haven't said anything about what X is. There's nothing I can do with that statement. It's just, well, it's the statement X is greater than three. Maybe there's another statement I can deduce from that, but that statement has no truth value. However, that statement has no, in any useful sense, truth value. It's just X is greater than three. We don't know. And I think the things that we do in the physics project and the mathematics that comes out of that and so on, are all constructive. We say you can build something this way. We don't ask the question. We don't phrase it as true. We phrase it as can you build? And, and therefore you don't really get involved in the same thing, you don't fall into the same kind of constraints and you don't have to force yourself into this kind of questions about what is logic, so to speak, because there is no logic. It's just, what can you build? You know, in other words, if I say what is true in the world? Well, in mathematics, you can say, what is true? Okay. I don't know if mathematics can answer that question because in mathematics, if you think about it in the typical foundations of mathematics, it looks like there are these axioms and given those axioms, you can deduce things. And you say: Well, is that actually true? Well, if you change the axioms, you might be able to deduce it, and you might not be able to deduce it. What we focus on is just what can you deduce? And I think that, you know, and that's similar to what can exist in the world, what can physics produce in the world? That's a similar kind of question. You don't say, you know, is the Earth real? You say more is the Earth existing? Has the Earth been produced by physics? Similarly, in mathematics or in other ways when we talk about things, we say, can this be produced? Not, is this quote true? Earlier when you were talking about, well, there's one view that you can go into a field and make progress because you have bright eyes and a bushy tail but you don't, and you don't have the dogma of the whole field taught to you. But there's another view that says no, what you have to do is learn the tools, gain the intuition. You have to understand where the field is before you can make some progress. So I understood you were advocating for the latter at least. Do you feel, well, what is the biggest myth, unquoted quote, in modern science that is preventing, in your opinion, some major progress? Like where do you feel we are most hampered? Other than that, we should think more computationally. Other than that. Yes, yes, right. No, I think, by the way, your sort of split between deeply knowing a field and not delving into the dogma of the field, that's an interesting split. And I think the main way to get out of that is, I think, to be arrogant or self-confident or something like that, because - Explain. Well, because I mean, if there's a dogma in a field and you don't, you're not really confident, and you say, well, I think this is probably true. Even if you are, you must have certainty, look, I know this is the dogma of this field. I understand that dogma. And by the way, I think that's nonsense, right? That's non-trivial, and it's almost emotional, isn't it? It has to be, you know, it's not like, most people who come and say, well, most people will come and say, I'm just looking at this field. I don't know much about it. And its dogma must be wrong. Maybe that's a loss. It's - Right. Most people, by the time they learn the dogma, it seems like that's what they live in and they can't see anything outside of that. And so I think, you know, in my own case, I was lucky that I worked in many different fields. And so I can see a little bit from the outside, some of them, you know, I've learned the dogma of a bunch of fields, but I can see it from the outside. And I've had the experience of seeing these dogmas turn out to be wrong again and again. And you know, I think that's, and I've had the experience, you know, of personal arrogance or something like that. Of realizing, yes, I got it right, even though the dogma said something different and the dogma was wrong. I mean, you know, early in my life, I was able to figure out some small things in particle physics where this sort of thing happened, but it was small, but it got progressively bigger because after you see, well, you know, I mean, I remember there was one thing when I was about 17 or something, you know, where I calculated a bunch of things in particle physics and there were some experiments that I said what I calculated, you know, it must be wrong. And I'm absolutely sure that this is the way it should work. Either QCD is wrong or this is the way it should work. And you know, it turned out that I was right. And I felt sort of stupid because I hadn't checked more carefully how the experiment was done and so on, because maybe I could have

I realize that, as you know, there was some suspicion there, so to speak, but it was, as you know, that was a rather minor thing. But after doing some of these things, you build up a certain amount of confidence, you know, just because everyone says X doesn't mean X is necessarily true. And that's a very useful thing from a personal point of view to realize. And, you know, one can say, well, I think something different than what people usually think. And, you know, one might be completely wrong. One might think so several times, and one might be wrong every time. You know, my personal experience, for whatever reason, it's probably happened because I started younger, I've had the experience of being right several times. And that really helps one to have the confidence to think differently, so to speak, about things that are considered, you know, some accepted dogma. As far as the present time is concerned, I don't know, things that people widely believe, I think there are different kinds of issues. There are places where people think the problem is too difficult, and it will never be solved. And, you know, we'll never know how physics fundamentally works or anything else. We'll never know how this or that works. It's hopeless, just give up. That's one category of error. The other, you know, there will never be a meaningful economic theory. There will never be a fundamental theory of biology. There will never be, you know, and so on, and so on, and so on. So the first thing is that the second thing I assume is that often when there's technical success in a field, things become completely locked down. I mean, you know, the belief in the continuity of space, for example, is something that had technical success. And, you know, it's a good approximation. It works, you can figure out a bunch of things from it. You know, a lot of mathematics has been built on the idea of the continuity of space. And I mean, the mathematics will still be there, fine, even if space is not actually continuous. But, you know, building this tower on top of that is something that, you know, people ended up assuming. I think there's a whole bunch of other technical things that people assume about how quantum mechanics works, and so on, and so on, and so on. They're more technical, and they don't have the big picture. I think the other descriptive observation, which I would only have said in recent years, is, you know, how important is the observer in inferring how science works? I would have expected that everything I could say about science would be, you know, clearly objective, so to speak, and in no way dependent on the observer. And I don't think that anymore. I'll tell you something else about something fundamental, which is how far will science go? In other words, what kind of thing can we expect from science? There's this idea, look, you know, we just write down the equations, we set up the answers, and we can predict everything. You know, if you give us the epidemiological situation, we can predict for you, you know, how the epidemiological things will go. We can predict for you how this will happen, this will happen. We can predict all these things. Sometimes things become very political and so on, you know, we can predict what will happen in climate or this aspect of society or this thing or anything else. We can, you know, there's an idea that science provides a kind of this, science is that kind of highway that allows one to get to the end, you know, without going through all the details. Computational irreducibility is the story that it's not like that. But nevertheless, the completely unified belief about this kind of scientific belief about the world is science, you know, science can explain everything. Science can figure out everything. We can predict, we can see what we have to do based on science. I mean, that's the thing that has led to, well, all sorts of beliefs in the world. I think that's something one has to realize, no, there's a certain set, if you pick the right slice of computational irreducibility, yes, you can figure out what will happen. If you can live in that slice, you can predict what will happen. Life is not very interesting if you only live in that slice. If you know everything that's going to happen, it'll be like, what is the passage of time really doing for you? You know, another version of this will emerge, I think at a very large time, is the kind of computational irreducibility as a pivot for AI. I mean, in other words, you have an AI, and it's doing computationally irreducible things. That means you can't predict what it's going to do. And that means it might surprise you. That's door number one. Door number two, let's force the AI to only act in computationally reducible ways. Let's make sure we know what the AI is going to do. In door number two, you can't let the AI do the things it can do. You constrain it, and you force it to go down this path where it can only do certain kinds of things. You do that, you force it to be stupid, so to speak. So there's this big choice that has to be made. Does one go along with what the AI does, let it be computationally irreducible, surprise us from time to time, or does one say, no, we don't want that. We want to constrain the AI to only act this way. That's important, it's a kind of societal decision, I think, which I think will be very important in the coming years. And I think it will be, you see, not entirely separate from the decisions about, are you trying to control the world or are you letting it sort of, as one might say economically or market forces or whatever, or some other kind of dynamics just play out as they play out, so to speak. Do you go for constraint or do you just let the dynamics play out? And what are you looking for with respect to AI? Well, I don't, it wouldn't be helpful to just say let's completely constrain it because then we wouldn't have AI really. We'd just have things acting in predictable ways. We'd have kind of machines that are like the industrial revolution, so to speak. We'd have machines where you can see, where every gear and lever goes, so to speak. I think that, I mean, that, you could say, my God, the world would be better off if all people acted in completely predictable ways. I don't think that would be a very fun world, so to speak. And I think there are a lot of detailed questions about how I tend to think that the AI society is something more robust and less fragile than, you know, the single giant AI in the world doesn't seem like a very good idea. Just like a single world government, maybe a single world government doesn't seem like a very good idea. It's more robust if you have multiple different things, you know, if you have this fundamental ecosystem or something of different things interacting. I mean, it's something we see in countless examples in kind of physics and elsewhere, is that the behavior of the group is more robust and less likely to turn into some kind of, you know, more robust and less likely to go insane. Extinct, whatever, from one, so to speak. You know, it's kind of, so I tend to think that this, but, you know, these questions about what's best in these kinds of things, that's a question, you know, I have my own way of leading my life, and, you know, there are things I like, and there are things I don't like, whatever. Other people have different people. I don't think there's a right answer to any of these things. I think that, I think one of the things that's difficult for me, at least in thinking about ethics, something else where I'm trying to sort of slowly understand enough that I think I might have something reasonable to say, but one of the things about ethics that's very confusing to me is that I'm used to science where you can do controlled experiments, where you can say, I'm going to look at this subsystem of the world and I'm going to ignore everything else. I'm just going to study this little quantum system or whatever. And the fact that all these other things are going on 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 hit the giraffes instead of the llamas or something like that, that decision is never, despite the apparent setup, that decision is never a local decision. That decision is ultimately a decision about everything about humanity, so to speak, and it can't be contained in the same way. So, it's sort of something, and that's another kind of assumption that we make as observers associated with kind of free will in doing experiments is the idea that we can do something here that won't affect everything else in the world. And, you know, I'm not sure that's true, you know, that ethics can be done in this kind of segmented, normative, detached way, which makes it confusing when you think about it, try to think about it in terms of sort of from a scientific point of view. Is the idea of the 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. Yes, I mean, you know, yes, we have examples where, look, I mean, we humans are already extended. We don't observe things at a single atom of space. We aggregate very large chunks of space elements and so on. Now, what would it be like if you were an ant in an ant colony where you have a kind of collective mind about things? I'm not sure. You know, perhaps the real organism of Earth is the entire human society. And then we're all, you know, just ants to that. And you could say, what is the experiment of the entire human society? You know, human society makes decisions as we individuals make decisions. And it makes decisions. We watch those decisions happen. Sometimes those decisions are very confusing to us as individuals, so to speak. You know, society goes in this direction. They've decided that high hats are fashion or something like that. And it happens as a kind of collective dynamic. And, you know, and we as individuals don't really know what happened there. And so I think this idea, you know, can society as a whole, for example, be considered an observer with respect to some kind of questions, maybe, maybe yes. And in a sense, society, you know, for example, this whole valence is under investigation, you can ask that of society as a whole rather than individuals. You can say, we as individuals, believe all sorts of different things, but society as a whole concludes that high hats are fashion, for example. And that's just like in our brains, you know, one part of our brain says, you know, I hate this color. Another part of our brain says, I really like this color. And ultimately, we come to a conclusion that there's some kind of aggregation of those things where we say, hey, I kind of like that or whatever. And I think, you know, society does the same thing. And we're in this, with respect to society, with respect to, you know, we're like individual neurons in our brains. It's like, if we could figure out what that individual group of neurons was thinking, we'd say, oh my God, the whole brain made this crazy decision. You know, this group of neurons did its job correctly, but the whole brain did something completely crazy. And, you know, I think that's the case for us as individuals compared to the whole society. So think a little bit. Let's assume that the observer theory that you have will be able to give you a quantity like IIT has phi for this, you have 1000 units of consciousness and Ant has one. Well, let's assume we can do that. Let's assume we can then say that a cell inside your body has five units of it in observer theory units, and your total has 1000, and the society has actually 10000. Well, let's assume it was like that, but at the same time. Earlier in the conversation, we mentioned that roulette is somewhat incoherent such that it cannot be given a consciousness number, so maybe it's either zero or undefined. This means to me, it seems to me that there's a maximum of consciousness at some point on a scale, because when you expand outwards, you can get more. But if you measure too much, you get zero or undefined. So what do you think about that? What would be? What would be the most conscious being? I think it's one of these things where you have some parameters. You have coherence and you have coherence between the entity and what that entity contains. These things are directly related. The entity has a wider range of experiences and models and whatever else. The entity is also less coherent. Because it can have two different points of view, for example, which has some incompatibility, it by expanding to be able to contain two different points of view, it includes more, but it also becomes less coherent with respect to what it includes. My own guess is that, I think it depends, let's see, usually the answer to a question like this is, it depends on the purpose you want. Meaning, if you say, what is the thing that can make the maximum number of decisions per unit of time, let's say, what is the thing that can have... I understand. You can have these different criteria and I think you'll end up with a different answer, which may ultimately be a reflection of your criterion more than the thing itself. I think it's an interesting question. For example, the thought experiment, what if we gradually replaced our neural circuits with digital electronics, so we think a million times faster? What would that feel like? Our experience of the physical world would be different in that case. We would notice individual photon entries. And we wouldn't aggregate space in the same way. We would have all sorts of other unconventional relationships, different relationships with physics, but what would it be like talking to an entity that was thinking a million times faster than you were? I don't know. I suspect the main point is that it can spin and think very fast, but what matters to us is the way we communicate with what's happening. In fact, the perception of what's happening wouldn't be very different because what we see is only those things that we can be observers of, so to speak. All the details about what it's thinking, it's thinking a million times faster, and it's coming up with this and that and the other. Perhaps what we perceive from it, is like perceiving something in physics, for example, where many things are happening, but all we perceive is what we are capable of perceiving. In other words, the internal experience of things that think a million times faster would be invisible to us, and that when we talk to it, it would seem like all we observe are the things that we can observe, so to speak. Now, it's an interesting question. If I take the things I've discovered in my life and imagine a version of myself a million times faster, again, it seems like this connection to physics. Then, yes, you could say the things that might take me a year to practice, and a million times faster practice them in 30 seconds. But I think this interface is like the interface of physics. If we look at it, the speed of light is the speed of light. We experience different things if we're experiencing them at a different thinking speed. But I don't know. I think these thought experiments about what it means to be an alien mind, I find them very interesting. I have a very difficult time with them. I look forward to it almost, can you write a science fiction story whose protagonist is something that thinks a million times faster? How would it think about things? How would others feel about that? These are the things, in a sense, by writing a science fiction story, you're trying to create a human bridge to our everyday experience. I wish more people would do this. I think it's really interesting. I think it's really difficult. Speaking of this bridge to human experience, while you're engaged in ethics, what if it turns out you're right about the observer theory, and about the containment of things? Spacetime, about the computation underlying the fundamental? What if someone says, well, so what? What should I do now? I'm listening to this podcast. And as a result of this, what should I do? How should my behavior change? Yes. You could have asked the same thing when Copernicanism came along. It seems as though we know that the math is different because we think of the Earth revolving around the sun rather than the sun revolving around the Earth. So what? And the fact that the math was profound so what for people. Unless it was, our shared experience is that we sit on the Earth, and the Earth is stationary. But in fact, we learn from this scientific part that our shared experience is not how things actually are. That's important. If you said, well, everything we know about the world we can derive from shared experience, that blows up this idea. So, in our age, and it's interesting, there's another aspect to it, which is that computational irreducibility blows up the idea of just trusting science, and it will tell you what will happen. In other words, this idea that I would say was put in the Copernican age, was just trust the scientists, because it's sort of like just because you think the Earth is stationary, that's not really true, scientists can tell you that it's not. Well, now we've internalized that, it's sort of, well, science can tell you all these things, you know, you can put this scientific gloss on everything, and we understand, you know, how we feel psychologically, and we understand how we do this and that and the other. And it's very scientific. And this idea, you know, that science can answer all problems, and science can tell you what will happen, and science has solved it. I think that idea has been somewhat undermined by computational irreducibility. And that's kind of the realization, you know, to some extent, don't expect science to solve everything. It's not going to work that way. It's not something you can say, well, I'll just feed it to science, and it'll tell me the answer. So I think that's kind of the daily takeaway. I think another story is the story of the Ruliad, the story of Rulial space, the story of different Rulial fundamental reference frames. The concept, again, is that there are different ways of thinking about the world. There are indeed different kinds of reference frames from which reality can be viewed. And so, you know, people have had this intuition for a long time. But again, it's been like, well, there's this, and it depends on mathematical science or whatever. That's really not true. And there are others. They will have different power and different ability to discover certain things. But this idea, oh, this other kind of reference frame, this other way of thinking about the world, is completely wrong, perhaps not the right way to think about it. It's a different way of thinking about the world. We can arrive at different kinds of conclusions, but it's not that there's some kind of hierarchy, and, you know, we've got the right conclusion, which is mathematical science or something like that. So I think those two kinds of daily takeaways from these kinds of things. And I think, to some extent, arriving at these conclusions means knowing that the universe is computational all the way down, which means not giving anyone any choice about these conclusions. It seems as though we're thinking 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 won't be just mechanical, just rule-based. We're going to find something. It'll be quantum mechanics. It'll be mysticism. It'll be something else. You know, we keep looking for that. Well, if we really knew that the universe is computational all the way down, we could stop looking for that. We know that there isn't, you know, it's already enough to say that it's computational. It already contains those aspects of irreducibility and free will and so on. We don't need anything more. What is the thing that sticks in your mind for a while, the thing that makes you angry, not mathematical, not physical. What is the problem you've been dealing with, for example, over the last decade? Oh my God. I mean, you know, there are things, one can come up with, the world should absorb this, but it doesn't. It absorbs it at a painfully slow rate. And sometimes it even rejects it. You know, a lot of the kinds of technology built on science that you've built are, you know, I don't know. I don't know how far ahead of the world it is. I know some things that we discovered 35 years ago, kind of people were thinking about them about 10 years ago. So that was a 25-year gap. And I think those were rather trivial things. And it's sort of like, it's fun to make artifacts from the future. It has a bigger impact if they're absorbed more quickly because then, you know, this very active absorption, you sort of see a reflection of how it works in the world and you can see how to move forward with it. And also from a purely personal point of view, I don't know, it's, oh my God, if more people understood computational language, for example, a lot of progress would be made in the world. A lot of things that are confusing now, wouldn't be confused. A lot, what could be an example, let's say in biology, something that could be turned around because it only thinks in a non-computational way. What is the fundamental theory of biology? I mean, in other words, biology hasn't even believed in a fundamental theory. Biology at best has natural selection as a kind of fundamental theory. It's not a predictive theory in itself, and it has, you know, the idea that biology is fundamentally digital and encoded in genomics and so on. But there isn't, whereas in physics, we have kind of big theories. Biology doesn't have big theories. Biology fills countless books and texts and journals and so on with lots and lots and lots and lots of detail. And the idea of the possibility of a big theory is completely absent in biology. I mean, sometimes in the past, I would say in the 80s, there was a period of time when people were thinking about that period in the 50s, when people in the 40s and 50s, when people were thinking about theoretical biology that I wasn't around for in those days, in the 80s, I was around. So I was, you know, involved in that. And there was a kind of a certain degree of enthusiasm for it. But the idea of the possibility of big theories in biology is not really there. And that would be an example of something, if you really absorbed a kind of computational way of thinking about things, that's the thing that a big theory could be. And you know what the consequence of that would be? You know, we might say, well, this is how aging works. This is really what's going on. This is what's really going on, you know, what's fundamentally going on, I don't know, cancer or something like that is fundamentally what's going on in neuroscience. You know, we don't know those things. We don't have big theories in those areas. And, you know, I've asked what is the place where people go off track. You know, I think the assumption that there can't be a big theory is an example of something that might be off track. I mean, maybe I would have said, well, about a lot of things in physics, for example, there can't be a big theory for this, but then it turned out there was. And I think that's where it is. So I think that, and when I say big theory of things, it's interesting because on the one hand, we have computational irreducibility, which says there's no theory for a certain kind of certain kinds of things. But then we say, but could there be a big theory? And the way that doesn't conflict is that the big theory is a slice of computational irreducibility. And the question is what slices of computational irreducibility can you find? And those that, you know, our physical laws represent a certain slice of computational irreducibility that observers like us can see with respect to the whole Rulard. And, you know, I think when we look for a theory in biology, that theory might not be a theory that has the same character as the theories that, you know, might not be a theory that says a Stegosaurus would have, you know, four spikes on its tail. It's unlikely there's a theory that says something like that. But, you know, what kind of thing can be said, we're not sure. You know, natural selection is a theory that says different kinds of things than what we would have imagined a theory would say before. I mean, even today, you know, what are the predictions of natural selection? Well, it doesn't really have the same kind of predictions, you know, it's a theory where you do computation from existing axioms into something. I think the challenge in some cases is to ask the right question. Once one has the right question, for example, in biology, what kind of thing would the fundamental theory of biology talk about? And what, you know, for example, one could be unlucky. It's possible there's a fundamental theory in economics and it's about something we don't care about. There's a fundamental theory in economics and it tells us something about the correlation between transactions here and there. And it's something that we humans say, well, that's interesting. You know, we can measure that. It's like Bard. It works, but we don't care. And now it won't actually stay that way. If something like that is found, just like we find in engineering ways to leverage things that we can say about the world, I'm sure anything we can say will be leveraged. And, you know, whether it's hedging hedge funds based on that or whether it's some other kind of use that some of us would consider more productive, but that's a different question. Stephen, thank you for spending so much time with me. This was a good conversation. You asked a lot of interesting questions. And you said a bunch of things here that I haven't said anywhere else because I only understood them when we were talking about them. Well, that's very fun, man. It was very fun. This is the video as well as the audio, isn't it? That's right, yes. Keep up the good work. Thank you. The podcast is now over. Thanks for watching. If you haven't subscribed or hit that like button, now would be a good time to do so, as every subscription and like helps YouTube spread this content to more people. You should also know that there are a very active Discord and subreddit for Theories of Everything where people explain their toes, respectfully disagree about theories, and build our toes as a community. Links to both are in the description. I also recently discovered that external links are of great importance to the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube. And this in turn greatly helps with distribution on YouTube as well. Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, and on Spotify, and on every audio platform. Just type Theories of Everything and you'll find it. I often take advantage of rewatching lectures and podcasts, and I read that in the comments. Hey, TOE listeners also benefit from re-listening. So, what about re-listening on those platforms instead? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, consider visiting patreon.com slash CURTJAIMUNGAL and donating whatever you'd like. Again, it's the support from patrons and from you that allows me to work on TOE full-time. You can also get early access to ad-free audio episodes. For example, this episode came out a few days ago. Every dollar helps much more than you think. In either case, your viewership is generous enough. Here's a bonus for sticking around. I'll be doing this more and more, so always check out the end, like the mathematical physics version of the Marvel end credits scene. Just for the record, can you hold up some books behind you so I can list them in the description? The real question is can I wrap around and not get everything mixed up? And let's see, what do I have here? I'll have to go find them. Well, if it's too difficult, that's fine. No, I think, let me see what I have. You know? In fact, I don't have the current versions of some of them on this bookshelf. Thank you for bringing this point out. I got it. In fact, if you, yes, wait. I'll solve this problem, but you have to do it, just a moment. Let me, wait. Just set this up. Well, this was a fun question, can I hold up some books? I have this big pile. This is like a shopping channel, you know? Okay, let's do it. So, let me see. I've written a whole bunch of books. In fact, oh my God, I forgot the biggest one, a new kind of science. Well, that's a big problem. That's good. Don't worry. And the viewers are aware of that. So, recently, you know, I had a whole bunch of books that I started in 2016, and I had this book called "Idea Makers," which is about, it's kind of a biography of biographies of somebody. A variety of people, which I think is very interesting. Then let's see. Then we have, just before 2019, when I started the physics project, I put together a bunch of things, which were computational explorer adventures, which was perhaps a kind of story, this is the end, guys. But then came the physics project, then we have the physics project book, which was my initial writings on the subject. Then I had a book which was about a topic that had been obscure for 100 years, and I thought, I put this book together because I wanted to, because it was the centenary of the invention of accumulators, which was kind of the first idea about how computation worked. And I found this much more useful than I had expected. It's a great kind of laboratory for understanding a lot of the fundamental ideas about computation. So that was interesting. Then there's my book on beyond mathematics, foundations and embodiment, which is about applying ideas from the physics project and the Rulard and so on to mathematics, the foundations of mathematics, to understand that, you know, Plato was right in the sense that mathematics, there's something real and that's mathematics. If you believe in a kind of material reality, then you should also believe in mathematical reality. And then, what do we have next? Then we have, this was a rather fun book, 20 years of a new kind of science, which partly explains how the NKS book was written and so on, and some of the history of that, which I was actually, as is often the case in history, it was harder to put together and write than I had expected. But it's an interesting story if you're interested in how big projects actually happen. Then we have my book on the second law, and that was, I kind of started this book when I was 12 years old, in 1972. I was interested in the second law of thermodynamics, and the kind of thing that was my kind of motivation for it was the cover of the book, let me see. There we go. Where is it? Let's see if I'll carry it. If you can see the cover of the book. So, you'll notice a certain resonance between the cover of the book and this cover, this book cover. So, the cover of the book was a book I got when I was 12 years old, and 50 years later, I wrote this book, which I hope will finally explain the phenomenon illustrated on the very old book cover. And then I have two small books. This is unusual for me. I have this book on Chachi B'tee and kind of on how LLMs... Yes, I announced that where we met. Yes, maybe. Yes, maybe. The book was ready around that time. I wrote this, you know, because everyone kept asking me, how does Chachi B'tee work? What does it do? Why does it work? And so I thought it's best to write this. I wrote it rather quickly, and then millions of people read this blog post and so on, and then people said, you should turn it into a book. And now there are versions of this in about 15 languages, and it remains, I think, the only kind of high-level description of what's going on and why it works. It's sort of surprising, but when I thought about it after it happened, I sort of realized that the set of things that you need to know kind of and put together is more peculiar than I had thought. Well, I've just authored another book that came out just a few days ago, which is a very utilitarian book, but it came out in 2017. There was an eclipse visible from the United States, and I decided to write something about the history of how one could predict eclipses, and we also built a website that could predict when an eclipse would happen at any given location on Earth to within one second. And so, well, at the time of the 2017 eclipse, you know, I just produced this kind of history of eclipse prediction for two more days of eclipse time. But this time we knew the eclipse was coming because, ultimately, we could predict it. And so my team said this time, let's put a description of this and about eclipse prediction in a book in time for the April 8, 2024 eclipse that can be seen in the United States, so that's a fun story about that, which I have to tell. If that's the case, I was able to write the history of eclipse prediction in 2017 because I wasn't working on the physics project at the time. But now that I have this whole pile of other things I'm doing, a book like this wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fact that it's already written, you know, the core parts of it were already written in 2017 but that's all the books I mean - they're reasonable - I mean I don't know. I feel - do you feel that you are now more productive in your 60s than you were when you were younger? In terms of writing, yes. In fact,

I must mention another book. This is another book. This is the third edition of a book on the Wolfram Language, which is intended to some extent to serve as an introduction to how to use our computational language to think in computational ways. And, in fact, I've just embarked on another book project, which is a book called An Introduction to Computational Thinking. It's a rather ambitious project and I'm doing it as a background project and I'll probably start releasing parts of it on the web. You ask, am I more productive now than I was in the past? As you know, it's really helped me that I've found new mechanisms to sort of leverage my productivity. I mean the fact that I can write things down and publish them and so on is that there are a lot of things that I was actively doing in the past but I didn't really have anywhere to do anything with them. So that's been nice. I think, you know, I feel reasonably productive. Yes, certainly -- you know, if you sort of count, you know -- I don't know, if you count the volume of paper over the last four years, it's pretty good. Do you write the majority of that? Like writing physically? Are you writing? Are you dictating? I write. I write. In fact, I have a really crazy habit, which is that I record these video work logs actually -- you know, as I'm writing these things down and figuring them out and even publishing them. I don't think anyone -- maybe no one should watch them. Yeah, the work sessions, the live work sessions. No, no, no. And that's much worse than that. Those interact with other people. These are video work logs, silent, I'm working by myself. And the only interesting thing about these things to me and useful to people sometimes is if there's something random I said somewhere and someone wondered, why did he say that? Do you know, did he know what he was talking about or not? You know, you can in principle go and find the video work log where that very sentence was written and you can see the six versions of that sentence before the final version and you can see what the actual experience that I was looking at led me to conclude what I wrote in that sentence. So it's a screen recording? It's a screen recording, yes. It's a screen recording -- it's a silent screen recording. So I thought about recording it with audio of me sort of muttering to myself, but I decided that was just too silly and too distracting. So they're just silent screen recordings. But it's -- I mean, I don't know. I haven't felt -- I feel -- I'm interested in this kind of open science kind of idea. You know, it's an idea -- this idea that you can reveal the process of doing science. And I've -- you know, I really -- I like that. I think it's -- to me, it's sort of -- it makes it more important when doing it if one reveals the process sort of. And I think for the whole world, I think it's interesting to be able to see inside that process. And, you know, I've been surprised by that -- I mean, I've been live streaming now for things like our software design for five years, or six years now? Probably more. Let's see. I must have started in 2016. It's been seven years now. And I don't think anyone else does these things. I think it's -- you know, maybe it's -- yeah. You know, I'm sort of surprised when people in universities say, oh, you know, we -- everything -- you know, we're very keen to open this, and that, and the other. It's like -- right, right. You know, what about some open science guys? That would be interesting. And people say, I didn't want to do that. I mean, I might make a mistake when I'm -- you know, writing on the blackboard to myself. It's like, yeah, it's interesting to see that happen. And then you fix the mistake and people learn something from it, and so on. And I -- I mean, I'm sure -- I mean, maybe that's just a consequence of -- I mean, I really -- you know, I don't care about that, you know, the things that I'm publishing out there as sort of propaganda. Something's open, it's like it makes no difference to me. Well, I made a mistake. Maybe somebody learns something interesting because they'll say, well, I made the same kind of mistake and so I fix it and I can fix it now the way too, and so on. Anyway, that's -- that's another activity. And I think -- yeah. So, yeah, I still feel reasonably productive, and I'm happy to say that. So you don't know this, but I'm working on a project on TOE. So, through this channel, I'm investigating various TOE theories, theories of everything like string theory and loop quantum gravity and then your theory. And I was -- I was realizing that there wasn't much comparison between them. I'm exploring them using category theory because that's the most general of all mathematics. But now I'm thinking, well, maybe I should use or at least explore the thinking of loop quantum gravity and string theory in the context of the Wolfram Language physics project. I think that's the most promising avenue. By the way, I don't think you're right about category theory. Category theory is a framework for mathematics assuming computational reducibility. It's -- it's likely -- well, can you say that the infinite set point is the same as the Rouillard point or not? It's certainly very closely related. So from that point of view -- but I think when you think about category theory at a lower level of weeds, the thing that's sort of a major observation in category theory is that you have a morphism, you know, a form F, another form G. And the basic assumption of category theory is that there is a form F that consists of G. Yes. And -- oh, you're saying it assumes shortcuts in the axioms. And the interesting thing about that, I think, is that it might be a general way of thinking about computational reducibility. It might be a sort of general formalism for what is reducible. And it's, in a sense, built on the denial of irreducibility, which is a problem. I mean, it's a problem in terms of, you know, capturing reducibility in a general way is interesting and very useful, but it's not the whole story. And I think what's most likely happening when you get to Rouillard entirely and the whole infinite set and so on is that it's similar to this point about observers when they get too big, they're nothing. And that is that by the time you become, you know, by the time you become an observer that has everything inside of it, you become simpler. And in privacy you get complexity, so to speak. By the time you've done everything, you can make a simpler statement about it than if you were steeped in the knowledge of this mathematical theory or whatever.