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What is matter made of? The answer, whatever it is, cannot be matter. From what fundamental thing does 'space' arise? The answer, whatever it is, cannot be anyt

What is matter made of? The answer, whatever it is, cannot be matter. From what fundamental thing does 'space' arise? The answer, whatever it is, cannot be anything that would exist in a 'space' as such. And so we creep towards the idea that at a low enough level, everything is just information.

tux1968 11y ago
My confusion arises from his model of space emerging from something than in and of itself requires space to exist. It just seems circular. And i don't see how the term "information" has much descriptive power when discussing nature at its most fundamental level. That may be a way to model it, or describe the physics of it, but that's just an abstraction of whatever that fundamental building block is.
- philipov 11y ago
  It seems to me that the fundamental thing that Wolfram is saying is that reality is non-local. Locality itself is an emergent phenomenon. This is his clever way of getting around Bell's Theorem. His networks don't require space to exist, they are space. When we think of spacetime, we think of a manifold, and he's saying that what looks like a manifold at a macro level is really just a discrete network at a micro level, and this sort of data structure is more suitable for explaining non-local phenomena, because locality is an effect, not a property, of the model. But for that to work, he has to derive all the current laws from his new model, and he is far from doing that, even though it is a quite fantastic thought experiment. I think the confusion comes from the fact that at a fundamental level, we do not have the capability to know anything but models and abstractions derived from sense data, and no one is claiming their theories are more than models.
  - tux1968 11y ago
    But a theory is supposed to model something that actually exists, yes? So for instance when philosophers made the conjecture for the existence of the atom, their theory was either correct or not, on the basis of whether the atom actually existed in nature. So if Wolfram is correct, then there exists at the lowest level of nature a network, upon which everything else follows. Wolfram is trying to describe reality, something that exists, analogous to the existence of the atom? Do we agree this far? If these Wolfram-nodes of our networked-reality do indeed exist, how are they connected in unique patterns if there is no "space" between them? If his theory is not meant to predict something that actually exists, as in the prediction of the atom, well then, i'll bow out of this conversation because it's well and truly beyond my conception of what science is about.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > But a theory is supposed to model something that actually exists, yes? Yes, but "model" is the key word. If it provides a set of rules which predict the way thing that exist in the world behave, then it models something (or set of things) that exits in the real world.
    - philipov 11y ago
      This is a classic debate in the philosophy science. Should theories describe the world, or merely make predictions about it? Because no one these days believes that quantum mechanics really describes the world, we live firmly in the realm of theories being things that make predictions. The existence of the atom, however, is not what is being predicted. A theory should predict the sensor readings of particular instruments during particular experiments. Those sensor readings are what is real; "The Atom" is the abstraction. The very idea that "things exist" is an abstraction. A thing exists if we can model it, and that model corresponds with reality.
    - drdeca 11y ago
      I don't understand why you feel that there needs to be a space in order to have a collection of nodes and edges that connect the nodes. It isn't as if there is an actual line connecting two dots across space. It's just, there's a set of "points" (there doesn't need to be any things about these "points" other than that they are distinct. You could think of them as urelements I guess.), and another set of "edges", which are each a set of two elements from the first set. A pair of "points" are "connected" by an "edge" iff the set comprised of those two "points" is in the second set. This doesn't need a notion of space to work, unless you need like, an idea of space to have collections of things. So unless "the collection of odd numbers" needs an idea of space, then graphs don't need space.
      - tux1968 11y ago
        This conversation has given me lots to think about and I was ready to let it trail off. But wanted to answer you just out of respect. My mistake was thinking that he was proposing something about the nature of physical reality. Ie. that physical reality was literally a network of interconnected nodes at its fundamental level. Something along the lines of macroscopic -> atomic -> sub atomic -> wolfram-nodal. A la, string theory, et. al. From the replies here, I gather this has nothing to do with physical reality.. he's not describing how this nodal network might be implemented in reality... just that it must be, because the predictions come out correctly.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> What is matter made of? The answer, whatever it is, cannot be matter. Sure it could (in principle) be; its matter all the way down, and there is no lower-level thing of which matter is made. (Though, actually, I think the standard answer to "what is matter made of" under current way of interpreting things would be "energy", but then you could repeat the exercise with "energy" in place of "matter" and its the same issue, mutatis mutandis.)
- brianberns 11y ago
  Greenness disintegrates: https://goo.gl/2X4288 https://goo.gl/2X4288

tux1968 11y ago

My confusion arises from his model of space emerging from something than in and of itself requires space to exist. It just seems circular. And i don't see how the term "information" has much descriptive power when discussing nature at its most fundamental level. That may be a way to model it, or describe the physics of it, but that's just an abstraction of whatever that fundamental building block is.

philipov 11y ago
It seems to me that the fundamental thing that Wolfram is saying is that reality is non-local. Locality itself is an emergent phenomenon. This is his clever way of getting around Bell's Theorem. His networks don't require space to exist, they are space. When we think of spacetime, we think of a manifold, and he's saying that what looks like a manifold at a macro level is really just a discrete network at a micro level, and this sort of data structure is more suitable for explaining non-local phenomena, because locality is an effect, not a property, of the model. But for that to work, he has to derive all the current laws from his new model, and he is far from doing that, even though it is a quite fantastic thought experiment. I think the confusion comes from the fact that at a fundamental level, we do not have the capability to know anything but models and abstractions derived from sense data, and no one is claiming their theories are more than models.
- tux1968 11y ago
  But a theory is supposed to model something that actually exists, yes? So for instance when philosophers made the conjecture for the existence of the atom, their theory was either correct or not, on the basis of whether the atom actually existed in nature. So if Wolfram is correct, then there exists at the lowest level of nature a network, upon which everything else follows. Wolfram is trying to describe reality, something that exists, analogous to the existence of the atom? Do we agree this far? If these Wolfram-nodes of our networked-reality do indeed exist, how are they connected in unique patterns if there is no "space" between them? If his theory is not meant to predict something that actually exists, as in the prediction of the atom, well then, i'll bow out of this conversation because it's well and truly beyond my conception of what science is about.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > But a theory is supposed to model something that actually exists, yes? Yes, but "model" is the key word. If it provides a set of rules which predict the way thing that exist in the world behave, then it models something (or set of things) that exits in the real world.
  - philipov 11y ago
    This is a classic debate in the philosophy science. Should theories describe the world, or merely make predictions about it? Because no one these days believes that quantum mechanics really describes the world, we live firmly in the realm of theories being things that make predictions. The existence of the atom, however, is not what is being predicted. A theory should predict the sensor readings of particular instruments during particular experiments. Those sensor readings are what is real; "The Atom" is the abstraction. The very idea that "things exist" is an abstraction. A thing exists if we can model it, and that model corresponds with reality.
  - drdeca 11y ago
    I don't understand why you feel that there needs to be a space in order to have a collection of nodes and edges that connect the nodes. It isn't as if there is an actual line connecting two dots across space. It's just, there's a set of "points" (there doesn't need to be any things about these "points" other than that they are distinct. You could think of them as urelements I guess.), and another set of "edges", which are each a set of two elements from the first set. A pair of "points" are "connected" by an "edge" iff the set comprised of those two "points" is in the second set. This doesn't need a notion of space to work, unless you need like, an idea of space to have collections of things. So unless "the collection of odd numbers" needs an idea of space, then graphs don't need space.
    - tux1968 11y ago
      This conversation has given me lots to think about and I was ready to let it trail off. But wanted to answer you just out of respect. My mistake was thinking that he was proposing something about the nature of physical reality. Ie. that physical reality was literally a network of interconnected nodes at its fundamental level. Something along the lines of macroscopic -> atomic -> sub atomic -> wolfram-nodal. A la, string theory, et. al. From the replies here, I gather this has nothing to do with physical reality.. he's not describing how this nodal network might be implemented in reality... just that it must be, because the predictions come out correctly.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> What is matter made of? The answer, whatever it is, cannot be matter. Sure it could (in principle) be; its matter all the way down, and there is no lower-level thing of which matter is made. (Though, actually, I think the standard answer to "what is matter made of" under current way of interpreting things would be "energy", but then you could repeat the exercise with "energy" in place of "matter" and its the same issue, mutatis mutandis.)

brianberns 11y ago
Greenness disintegrates: https://goo.gl/2X4288 https://goo.gl/2X4288