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On the Nature of Time

• martinky24 2y ago
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• worstspotgain 2y ago
  Thought experiment on the nature of reality: - In a much larger universe, write down in a log book every event to every particle at every instant, from the Big Bang to the restaurant. - Put it on the fireplace mantle and leave it there. This is basically a log of a simulation. It exists in much the same way as an ongoing simulation would, except that its time dimension isn't shared with the simulating universe. But every observer within has had the same observations as if it did.
  • skissane 2y ago
    This assumes that a map, if sufficiently detailed, is identical to the territory. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t - but it is a highly debatable metaphysical assumption. I’m not sure how seriously we should take some people’s claims that they “know” that such an assumption is actually true
    • worstspotgain 2y ago
      It's an argument about simulations, not about reality. If reality is a simulation, then arguments about simulations apply to it, but that's the big if.
      • mistermann 2y ago
        The word "simulation" is it self a simulation. So is the word "is". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics Reality is a multi-disciplinary domain, but it gives off the appearance of being physics only, because of its metaphysical nature.
      • skissane 2y ago
        Not necessarily. Suppose that consciousness/qualia/etc is “something extra” which has to be added to non-mental reality, as some dualists believe. Then, it would be possible that we live in a simulation which contains consciousness because that “something extra” has somehow been added to it. And yet, maybe the “much larger” universe which contains our simulation also contains such a “log book” of a very similar universe to our own, also containing intelligent life - and yet, if the “something extra” has not been added to that “log book”, it would lack consciousness and qualia, unlike our own universe. I’m not arguing that a dualism (of this sort) is actually true, merely that we don’t (and can’t) know for a fact that it is false. But if we can’t know for a fact that it is false, then even if we (somehow) knew our reality was simulated, that wouldn’t give us grounds to make confident inferences about the nature of other simulations, or the nature of simulations in themselves
        • worstspotgain 2y ago
          I agree with your post. However, I was using the most mechanical meaning of simulation: "the production of a computer model of something, especially for the purpose of study," which implies determinism and excludes the "something extra."
          • skissane 2y ago
            It doesn’t actually exclude the “something extra”, it is neutral as to whether or not there is any “something extra” Panpsychists claim everything is conscious, even rocks, even atoms. Again, I don’t claim this is true (I’d be rather shocked if I somehow found out it was), but we can’t know for a fact that it is false. Yet if panpsychism (or at least certain versions thereof) is true, every simulation (even a simulation of the weather, or of crop growth) is conscious, simply because absolutely everything is. But I don’t think most standard definitions of “simulation” are excluding that possibility - on the contrary, they are agnostic with respect to it, treating its truth or falsehood as outside of their scope It also doesn’t necessarily imply determinism because some computer simulations use RNGs. Most commonly people use pseudorandom RNGs for this, but there is nothing in principle stopping someone from replacing the pseudorandom RNG with a hardware RNG based on some quantum mechanical process, such that it is indeterministic for all practical purposes, and the question of whether it is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic depends on controversial questions about QM to which nobody knows the answers
    • FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Except for the randomness introduced in Quantum Mechanics. If they ever solve the randomness, then if the map is down to every particle, then yes, the map and reality could be the same. But think at that point you need a computer the size of reality to keep track of every particle. Or, maybe the entire universe is one giant wave equation. But again, I think you need a computer the size of the universe to solve it.
      • worstspotgain 2y ago
        Are you saying that some things are just not simulable, given a sufficiently large and powerful computer, or that the universe is or might be infinite?
        • FrustratedMonky 2y ago
          If the universe is real, not simulation. If you know the position and speed, everything, about every particle, then you should be able to extrapolate the future by calculating it. The problem is you need a computer the size of the universe to do that calculation. So even thought the map is the territory, equal scale, and you have the map. It is little worthless because the map ends up being reality. Edit: Little different than the idea that if this is simulation, you can do clipping and only render what we see. I'm saying the entire universe is 'real'.
          • tines 2y ago
            > If you know the position and speed, everything, about every particle, then you should be able to extrapolate the future by calculating it. But isn't that the exact thing that quantum mechanics refutes? You cannot know the future just from the past; you can only know the probabilities of different futures.
            • FrustratedMonky 2y ago
              Yes. I referred to the randomness that would prevent this, "once that is solved". Guess I'm in the camp that eventually we'll find some model or discover something new, to discover what is behind the randomness, so it is no longer just random. But, yes, that is big IF. Until then, with current theories, we couldn't do these calculations. They'd just be approximations accounting for some randomness.
    • partomniscient 2y ago
      I am King Ozymandias look upon my complete data dump/backup*, ye mighty and despair! *May be subject to entropy over time.
  • amelius 2y ago
    If I took the binary representation of that log and XOR'ed it with a random binary string, then would the result also have observers with the same observations?
    • worstspotgain 2y ago
      Good question? :) I'd say no. How about an exact copy of the log book, but with one bit flipped. Voila, mostly universal physics.
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  • kouru225 2y ago
    Ok but the act of writing it down would always take longer than the actual unfolding of the universe itself. Just like the halting problem, we can’t skip ahead at any point and we have no idea what will come next.
    • worstspotgain 2y ago
      Sure, but the timebases are different. Maybe it took the butterflypeople a thousand butterflyweeks to write it out. Let me restate the metaphysics a bit differently. Let's say there's no us, no butterflypeople, nothing at all. Entropy reigns supreme, no information is organized. Now add the butterflypeople. They write the humanpeople's log book. Information exists in organized form. The humanpeople's bits have been divined out of the great entropic nothing. Maybe that's all it takes?
      • garaetjjte 2y ago
        Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
  • julianeon 2y ago
    There's a hidden condition here. How do you know every event to every particle? The answer to that will literally change what gets written in the log book.
    • kridsdale3 2y ago
      The point is the log is a graph or a tree, not an array.
  • throw310822 2y ago
    Now shred that log to particles and scatter them everywhere, and you have the "dust theory". Neither the time dimension or the log are shared with the simulating universe, and yet they are still valid for the observers within the universe. If the sequence of the log states is entirely deterministic based on the initial state, then you don't even need to actually write down the entire log for it to "exist". This is Greg Egan's Permutation City.
    • worstspotgain 2y ago
      Can we reduce this to an estimate of survivorship bias? If there is only one universe, then our survival is clearly explained: we're in the only reality there is. If all possible universes exist, then we really lucked out in ending up in this one (well, depending on who wins the election I guess.) In the middle are the permutations selected through the filter of other realities, when they chose which universes to simulate. We lucked out but not as much, because uninteresting universes never made it out of the entropic soup. It would have to be a conditional estimate of course, because our sentience biases our contemplation.
  • oersted 2y ago
    Quick appreciation for the Douglas Adams reference :)
  • buginprod 2y ago
    Randall has you covered: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
  • nonameiguess 2y ago
    This kind of thought experiment seems like it breaks down due to the uncertainty principle. We can't exactly specify the full state of every particle in the universe. The universe might also be infinite and you can't enumerate an infinite set even without uncertainty, though you can write a generating function or recurrence relation for it, which seems to be Wolfram's point. But why bother with this kind of detail? What's the difference between what you're imagining here and a normal reel of film? It can be played back, but even if it isn't, it records the state of events that happened, including observers that once existed and no longer do, experiencing events that once happened but no longer do. It's possible for a record to describe a canonical sequence even if the record itself doesn't change. Somebody outside of the record can view it out of order, speed it up, slow it down, pause it, reverse it. A film reel doesn't share the time dimension of its own universe in that way. I'm struggling to come up with what this implies and why.
    • worstspotgain 2y ago
      To your first point, if it's a simulated universe, the simulators can just choose to make it finite, and come up with their preferred particle behavior rules. As observers, we perceive time as passing, but is there anything special in this perception? Looked at another way, everything could be frozen in a 4D log book and we couldn't tell the difference, or could we? In this interpretation, Napoleon is as alive (in 1820) as we are (in 2024.) A film reel is a similar concept, except it's just a 3D projection rather than a complete detailed 4D account.
      • nonameiguess 2y ago
        I get the questions of eternalism, the reality of the past and future, why privilege the present (or at least my present), and all that. I just don't understand why the fact that you can record events in a medium that doesn't experience the time that it records has any implications for how we should think about this. Whether or not you want to say "Napoleon exists" or "Napoleon existed" seems to be a matter of linguistic convention and the more common latter would reflect speakers privileging their own time. If you want to look at it another way, Napoleon exists, but entirely in my past light cone, and I exist entirely in his future light cone. I can't send him any kind of information, but he can send information to me. Is there anything special in this perception? To who? To observers at the absolute end of all time, my future is just as written in stone as Napoleon's. To observers I can receive information from, my future is unknown. To any particular observer, there are regions of spacetime in which you have no past. There are regions in which you have no future. There is a region in which you have both a past and a future. Is there anything "special" in perceiving the sequence of events within the third region as passing rather than existing forever as a log? Not really. You're just describing a different variety of the Copernican principle or relativity as far as I can tell. But so what? None of us are the center of the univers. None of us exist in a special inertial frame describing absolute spacetime. These facts, however, have consequences in terms of how to measure and compute stuff. They change the kind of testable predictions you make given certain conditions. What computational or predictive consequences arise from observing that the entire world curve of the universe exists at once from a perspective outside of the universe? Going back to the I can't send information to Napoleon thing, if observers outside of our universe are keeping a log, none of us nor anything else in our universe can receive information from them, so what difference does it make? It's an interesting shower thought but kind of also a big so what?
  • jiggawatts 2y ago
    A fun variant of this is that the log can be taken at variable intervals and as long as it is sufficiently detailed, it can still capture all salient details. Similarly a simulation run at some "tick rate" can also be run at 2x the rate while taking 1/2 the step per tick. Within the universe nobody would notice, as long as the steps were fine enough to begin with. I think it was in Diaspora (or Permutation City?) that Greg Egan proposed that any tick rate would be unnoticable to that simulated beings, including "none". In other words, the movie Top Gun will continue to exist as-is, no matter how many copies are made of it, including none. Encoded as a digital file it is just a number, a pure timeless concept, it doesn't have to be written down to exist. It always existed on the number line, even before Tom Cruise was born. In fact, every encoding of Top Gun exists on the number line, in every compression format, in every resolution, even a future 16K resolution that was never filmed and has no display devices made for it yet. Its encoding as a 400GB long number is there, already, and will always be there. In other words, and simulation, an log of events, any experience already exists in mathematics, in every encoding... somewhere on the number line. This includes the entire physical universe. This isn't hypothetical, it's necessarily true! Anything that can be represented by a finite amount of information must be on the number line. Even if you assume the Universe lasts forever, you can break its history up into a sequence of states, each of which is finite. Then the series will exists on the number line as a set of points heading off to infinity.
• hyperhello 2y ago
  Okay. Time is a computation. Patterned or otherwise predictable computations can be performed instantly and thus are not time. Only results that can’t be precomputed are part of our perceptions. That’s what I got out of it.
• twilo 2y ago
  I believe it's simply a unit of measurement we use to understand the movement or rhythm on which the universe operates, so it could be termed the "progress of computation" if that makes more sense but it's all in the same effort.
• lisper 2y ago
  I wrote up more or less the same idea ten years ago, but in what I think is a more accessible presentation: https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of-time.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-a...
  • smfjaw 2y ago
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  • WhitneyLand 2y ago
    Thank you so much for this. Whenever people criticize Wolfram the comeback is often, he’s just trying to discuss big ideas that mainstream science won’t talk about. Of course that’s not the reason for the criticism at all and I think your work here shows that it’s totally fine to speculate and get a little philosophical. The results can be interesting and thought provoking. There’s a difference between big ideas and grandiosity. It also shows big ideas can stay scientifically grounded and don’t require making up corny terminology (Ruliad? lol).
    • pishpash 2y ago
      More than that, "ruliad" is complete vacuous, too. "All possible rules applied to all possible states infinitely many times", like, every possible theory, including the right one is in it, ok... thanks for defining this useless object.
  • whyenot 2y ago
    I have read and appreciated your writings going back to the comp.lang.lisp days, but a blog post that starts with “if you haven’t read the previous post, please do before reading the rest of this one” is not what I would consider accessible. …and that previous post then asks the reader to first read a paper or watch a video before proceeding. While a decade later than what you wrote, Wolfram’s article is much more self contained and complete.
  • Q_is_4_Quantum 2y ago
    It is possible to make quantitative statements that I think capture many of the intuitions you assert. Here was one attempt: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.080401 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10... That particular proposal was mathematically wrong for reasons I still find physically perplexing (it turns out that for some events quantum theory allows for stronger memory records - defined via classial mutual information - of entropy decreasing events!). A simple example is in here: https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1726 https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1726 (I am second author).
• mistermann 2y ago
  > If we were not computationally bounded, we could “perceive the whole of the future in one gulp” and we wouldn’t need a notion of time at all. Maybe, if we assume we aren't axiomatically bound, despite knowing that we are (but that knowledge is rarely in context, so we can only know it sometimes...once again: time...weird). "Thought is Time." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • downboots 2y ago
    > perceive the whole of the future in one gulp "Therefore, as regards such knowledge, they know all things at once" Summa
  • Vecr 2y ago
    You could perceive (maybe? Depends on how it's hooked up) a future (a simulation based the information you have), but there's no reason to think that's what the future is with certainty. Map/territory stuff too.
    • mistermann 2y ago
      > but there's no reason What is it that you refer to here?
      • Vecr 2y ago
        You can't exactly predict the future unless you have all the information, even theoretically.
        • mistermann 2y ago
          You can certainly predict portions of it (1=1 will continue to be true indefinitely, and that's just one example). And, there is no need for predictions to be true, or claims of fact about whether there are or are not "reasons" for things. In fact, epistemically unsound claims such as this are very often the only type of speech ~allowed, as crazy as that may seem.
• drdeca 2y ago
  Is any of what he’s saying here, something he hasn’t essentially already said before? The parts of this which were a little surprising to me (e.g. the bit about comparing time to heat, and the bit about running out of steps to do at an event horizon) iirc all linked to a thing posted a while ago? I don’t share his enthusiasm for the phrase “computational irreducibility”. I would prefer to talk about e.g. no-speedup theorems.
  • whatshisface 2y ago
    It has been said before, but by Stephen Wolfram.
  • ants_everywhere 2y ago
    There's "digital physics" which goes back to the late 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics. The connection between heat/entropy and time is well explored. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_as_an_arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_as_an_arrow_of_time
  • nitwit005 2y ago
    It feels like this could be a perfectly decent article if he toned down his ego and referenced existing work (other than his own). But I don't think that's possible for him.
• squirrelChrist 2y ago
  groans in metaphysicist
• zaptheimpaler 2y ago
  I think he's a quack trying to torture an explanation of the universe out of his pet theory that uses a lot of words to say simple things but doesn't predict anything. If "time is what progresses when one applies computational rules" then how is the order in which the rules are applied defined in the first place? Computational irreducibility is a neat idea but i'm not sure its novel or something that explains the entire universe. My basic intro course on differential equations taught us that the vast majority of them cannot be solved analytically, they have to be approximated. I don't know if the irreducibility idea is anything fundamentally different than saying some problems are hard, whether its non analytical equations or NP hard problems.
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  • kouru225 2y ago
    I think you’re slightly misunderstanding his concept of computational irreducibility. It’s more like the halting problem than anything: basically he’s saying that dynamic systems can’t be reduced to an equation that is easier to calculate and so you just have to simulate the entire system, run it, and watch what happens. This means we can’t ever predict the future within these systems.
    • niobe 2y ago
      Well I wouldn't put it quite like that either.. because you have to be careful what you mean by 'simulate' and 'easier'. There could be multiple ways to simulate the same system, i.e. produce the same evolutionary output steps. Wolfram tends to imply there is only one most-expensive way for systems that are computationally irreducible and that way is grinding through a recursive computation. I think that's partly because the simple experiments, like cellular automata, he used to come up with this principle actually explore the 'space of simple rules', not the 'space of ordered sets of states of systems'. Of course the latter is a much more computationally expensive things to do but it seems to me it would generalise better to the universe. Because in the universe what we're really observing is the evolution of states not the outputs of rules. There may be other hidden assumptions in the principle if you assume that all systems can and do evolve from simple rules as much of Physics does. Nevertheless, you need a high bar if you're going to state universal principles. Perhaps the simplest way to state the principle is: say we set up a simple iterative computation where the input to step n, is the output of step n-1. Then there's no way to compute state n without having previously computes states n-2, n-3 etc. That's what he means by irreducible. In other words it's "necessarily recursive" which may be a better and more focused term. I'm cautious about making it mean more than that, since Wolfram tends to write in great leaps of conclusions without showing us his working. Nevertheless I enjoy following his ideas, and I did find aspects of this article quite thought provoking.
• openrisk 2y ago
  Seems like an appropriate post on a day when the Nobel of Physics was awarded not for Physics discoveries but for computer science... But from Wheeler's "it from bit" to Wolfram's computational universes, the question is: where is the beef. Now, there might be ultimately something worthwhile with the obsession with digi-physics. Mental models that seemed disparate may merge and become fruitful. It doesnt even have to be a fully formed toolkit. Newton's invention of calculus was kinda sketchy. But he was explaining things with it, things that were not undestood before.
  • WillyWonkaJr 2y ago
    Wolfram does offer an interesting alternative to viewing the universe as a manifold with a tensor (the GR view). He believes it's a graph with computational rules. Are they the same? Mathematically, manifolds have a clear notion of dimension. This affects things like the inverse square rule. Wolfram's view of the ruliad, an evolving graph with rules, does bring up the question of dimension. But at the end of the day he needs to make a concrete prediction that differs than the current view in order to have people devote a lot of time studying his world view. He's a brilliant guy and the Wolfram Language is fantastic, but he really needs to humble himself enough to value the work of convincing others.
    • XorNot 2y ago
      Worth noting this is ultimately the problem with string theory: String theory does provide a suite of mathematical tools which can solve real physics problems and give valid answers but they're known physics problems that can also be solved with other tools. To be useful as a theoretical framework it always needed to be able to predict something which only string theory could - as a "more accurate view of reality". Which is the same problem here: you've got to make a prediction, an accessible prediction, and ideally also not introduce any new incompatibilities.
    • kridsdale3 2y ago
      I honestly don't think he cares about 'mainstream acceptance'. He is a prolific publisher of his detailed thoughts, which in the pre-academic-gatekeeping-establishment era, was enough for any serious philosopher. He's a hobbyist. That doesn't make him any less prestigious if his ideas are neat.
• lostmsu 2y ago
  Discussed in Permutation City
  • A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    Yeah. I'm in the middle of writing a book about this, but in a sense it was also discussed by the Pythagoreans. And they (correctly, I think,) went a step further: "The Pythagoreans too used to say that numerically the same things occur again and again. It is worth setting down a passage from the third book of Eudemus' Physics in which he paraphrases their views: ‘One might wonder-whether or not the same time recurs as some say it does. Now we call things 'the same' in different ways: things the same in kind plainly recur - e.g. summer and winter and the other seasons and periods; again, motions recur the same in kind - for the sun completes the solstices and the equinoxes and the other movements; But if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur - that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else - then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.’" - Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 732.23-33. Branching paths, "all possible mathematics," etc. In a universe which appears to be discrete, which can support finitist arguments, and where the potential number of paths is starkly finite -- this eventually leads to the conclusion that all paths eventually recur.
    • Filligree 2y ago
      Strictly speaking, it only leads to the conclusion that eventually the universe will enter a loop passing through a finite number of states. There’s no requirement that the current state is part of the loop. Or indeed that any state containing conscious observers is.
  • pizza 2y ago
    The bit in Permutation City about siphoning compute by exploiting the magnitudes of vector computations as a kind of scratch space out of algorithms that only needed the resulting angles… wonder if you could modify the DoRA parameter-efficient finetuning algorithm to do something like that lol, since it also splits up the new weights into angular and magnitude components..
• Koshkin 2y ago
  I guess I’ll just wait for Sabine to say something about this.
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  • goatlover 2y ago
    I'm guessing she'll be pretty sarcastic as she's not overly fond of mathematical theories that aren't testable, to say the least.
    • kgwgk 2y ago
      Except for superdeterminism - but maybe she doesn’t have a choice.
• DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Its certainly interesting, though the language its couched in wouldn't be found in any philosophical discussion on time. This is all to say that it deals with concepts that have been discussed in philosophy for a long time, and these insights wouldn't be considered "new" to someone from say mid-19th century Prussia. Certainly the "progressive unfolding of the truth," in qualitatively different steps which Wolfram adopts here as his concept of time is no different from Hegel's concept of time and the movement of history. I would recommend, for anyone interested in this sort of thing, to just read the "Preface" to his Phenomenology of Spirit.[0] [0]https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%20Hegel%20-%20The%20Phenomenology%20of%20Spirit%20(Terry%20Pinkard%20Translation).pdf https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%2...
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• hiddencost 2y ago
  I really think that Wolfram's descent into fringe science has hurt a lot of well meaning people that don't know better and think that because he's developed useful software that he should be listened to in these domains.
  • XorNot 2y ago
    The crackpot trajectory of otherwise smart people is fairly well trodden with a number of indicators and nobel laureates who have walked it - one of which is when people start stepping well outside their field...and then also tend to start stepping into "the biggest problems" of wherever they point themselves.
    • Mistletoe 2y ago
      I call it helicoptering, my old boss used to love to do it. Helicopter down onto a problem, act like everyone that already studied it was an idiot and hadn’t spent their life trying to solve X, stir a bunch of dust up, accomplish nothing, and helicopter away again to something else.
  • qaq 2y ago
    Oh maybe because he has a PhD in particle physics from Caltech ?
    • xanderlewis 2y ago
      Eric Weinstein also has a PhD in physics; it doesn't preclude you being (or becoming) a crank.
      • qaq 2y ago
        What is specifically crank about his theory? From outsiders perspective having theories that require a bunch of extra dimensions just to make the math work sound no less cranky.
        • 2y ago
• foundry27 2y ago
  I think it’s really interesting to see the similarities between what Wolfram is saying and the work of Julian Barbour on time being an emergent property. Both suggest a similar underlying ontology for the universe: a timeless, all-encompassing realm containing all possible states / configurations of everything. But what’s really fascinating is that they reach this conclusion through different implementations of that same interface. Barbour talks about a static geometric landscape where time emerges objectively from the relational (I won’t say causal) structures between configurations, independent of any observer. On the other hand, Wolfram’s idea of the Ruliad is that there’s a timeless computational structure, but time emerges due to our computational limitations as observers navigating this space. They’ve both converged on a timeless “foundation” for reality, but they’re completely opposite in how they explain the emergence of time: objective geometry, vs. subjective computational experience
  • m3kw9 2y ago
    So you are saying there is a version of me that is king of the universe in some timeline?
    • pixl97 2y ago
      If the universe is infinite then there is a possibility that you are a king of an observable universe somewhere.
    • xandrius 2y ago
      Infinite does not mean that all the permutations are possible. You being you and you becoming a king might simply not be a combination which is compatible.
      • mensetmanusman 2y ago
        You vastly misunderestimate infinity if you don’t recognize that anything feasible will happen.
        • 2y ago
• nis0s 2y ago
  Do physicists think time actually exists? I wonder if someone has reasoned that time is an accounting method that humans have developed to make sense of their experienced change of systems. Wolfram uses the words progression and computation a lot in his essay, but there’s an implicit bias there of assuming a process is deterministic, or has some state it’s driving towards. But none of these “progressions” mean anything, I think. It seems they are simply reactions subject to thermodynamics. If no one observed these system changes, then the trends, patterns, and periodicity of these systems would just be a consequence of physics. It seems what we call “time” is more the accumulation of an effect rather than a separate aspect of physics. For example, I wonder what happens in physics simulations if time is replaced by a measure of effect amplitude. I don’t know, tbh, I am not a physicist so maybe this is all naïve and nonsense.
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  • goatlover 2y ago
    > Do physicists think time actually exists? Yes, spacetime is important for General Relativity, cosmology and thermodynamics. Whether it's fundamental or emerges from something more fundamental is an open question though.
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Time is just a measure of change. No change. No time. We are interested in a peculiar rate of time based on the heart beat of our experience.
    • deepfriedchokes 2y ago
      It could be that what changes is our perception of reality, not reality itself.
  • bubblyworld 2y ago
• fuzzfactor 2y ago
  You have to figure time would carry on even if nothing else was happening . . . . . . at the time ;)
  • ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    That doesn't seem likely. If there was nothing happening, then how could you determine one instant from another - without any change there can be no concept of time.
    • fuzzfactor 2y ago
      >That doesn't seem likely. Really I guess I've always felt that way when you think about it conceptually, but maybe all it has to do is be slightly more likely than time standing still while other things do not ;) You might also very well be able to say that without time there would be no concept of change either :)
• neom 2y ago
  Every time I read stuff like this I get super drawn to thinking about Sunyata* - In Mahayana buddhism, my understanding is that Sunyata doesn't mean absolute nothingness or no existence, but all things are devoid of intrinsic, independent existence. Everything is empty of inherent nature because everything is interdependent... phenomena exist only in relation to causes and conditions. This relational existence assumes that things do not possess an unchanging essence... the ultimate sense, there is no fixed reality. What might seem like "everything" is actually permeated by "nothingness" or "emptiness" and that phenomena arise dependent on conditions, without intrinsic, permanent nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
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  • kridsdale3 2y ago
    My mind also went here when reading TFA. The all-time-all-space-all-branches brane of the Ruliad we call the Universe is the continuous one-ness and our selves are just the single-perspective projection models of that universe in our neurons that persist across edits to the neurons, until such as point as we update the model to see the larger picture and we can call that Nirvana, if we wish.
  • throwaway_4179 2y ago
    Indeed. Not only that, but it can be a lived experience. One sees that the need for something called "time" is actually an invention of the mind, and totally unnecessary. I know this sounds bizarre and like mystical woo-woo, but when it's seen, it's the simplest and most obvious thing in the world.
    • neom 2y ago
      Doesn't seem like woo-woo - if there isn't even mind, how can there be time? ;) it makes sense, at least to this Buddhist lol.
• codelion 2y ago
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• akomtu 2y ago
  Time and space probably belong to consciousness, rather than the real world. The objective "true" reality may be utterly incomprehensible in its complexity, but we can imagine a "slice" of that reality that arbitrarily defines space and time so that the interior of that slice follows some reasonable rules. That slice of reality can be thought of as a high-level consciousness that defines rules of our physics. Other slices of the same reality are possible, GR-like or QM-like, including those that are computational and discrete in nature. One universe, but many interpretations. Within each slice of reality, it may be possible to define smaller subsets of reality, corresponding to smaller consciousness, down to the human or even more primitive levels. So what Wolfram is describing may be true, objectively, to the observers of a computational slice of the universe, just like the MWI may be simultaneously true to the observers of the MWI slice of reality.
• jpitz 2y ago
  Almost like time is the stack and space is the heap. Meh. Almost.
• FDAiscooked 2y ago
  Disregard anything Stephen Wolfram says about anything other than his Mathematica software. He's a pretentious, arrogant twat who thinks he's unlocked the keys to the Universe and is trying to convince the rest of the world of his brilliance.
• sammycdubs 2y ago
  He literally only cites himself in that article… https://media1.tenor.com/m/v6Awsd0YO7IAAAAd/metal-gear-rising-metal-gear-rising-revengeance.gif https://media1.tenor.com/m/v6Awsd0YO7IAAAAd/metal-gear-risin...
  • kridsdale3 2y ago
    So did God.
• projectileboy 2y ago
  Fascinating, but I really wish this work was being published as a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals. Otherwise it’s hard to take the work seriously.
• deleted 2y ago
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• hnax 2y ago
  Where it's nowadays standard practice in science to conceive of time as the dimension along which events are tagged, I would suggest the opposite: process, as a sequence of events, induces time. But also in the modern conception, time is derived from atomic events produced by a nuclear source. So, fundamentally the two conceptions are the same, but the process conception allows for greater freedom in what the underlying process may entail.
• fpoling 2y ago
  Physics does not explain flow of time at all. If one films a thrown ball, physics can tell from few frames its speed or where the ball is on the following or previous frames. But it tells nothing about why, when see the film, we perceive the ball moving. Articles like the above misses this. In fact there is no even notion of direction of time in physics. All physical models are time-reversible. And even if we observe violation of, say, CPT, in nature, it still will not explain while we perceive time flowing in a particular direction. This is very well discussed in the book “Time’s Arrow” by Huw Price.
  • Kapura 2y ago
    The author discusses some of these points. One excerpt: > But even at a much more mundane level there’s a certain crucial relationship between space and time for observers like us. The key point is that observers like us tend to “parse” the world into a sequence of “states of space” at successive “moments in time”. But the fact that we do this depends on some quite specific features of us, and in particular our effective physical scale in space as compared to time. > In our everyday life we’re typically looking at scenes involving objects that are perhaps tens of meters away from us. And given the speed of light that means photons from these objects get to us in less than a microsecond. But it takes our brains milliseconds to register what we’ve seen. And this disparity of timescales is what leads us to view the world as consisting of a sequence of states of space at successive moments in time. > If our brains “ran” a million times faster (i.e. at the speed of digital electronics) we’d perceive photons arriving from different parts of a scene at different times, and we’d presumably no longer view the world in terms of overall states of space existing at successive times. > The same kind of thing would happen if we kept the speed of our brains the same, but dealt with scenes of a much larger scale (as we already do in dealing with spacecraft, astronomy, etc.).
    • fpoling 2y ago
      This still misses the biggest question about the nature of time. The problem is not that we perceive the world as a set of space-like frames. The problem is why our consciousness perceives the frames moving from one to another at all and in particular direction.
• vivzkestrel 2y ago
  when you die, people say that your time has ended. Does anyone know scientifically speaking what happens to time for a dead person
• zanethomas 2y ago
  The web became trashed over a decade ago.
• tunesmith 2y ago
  I like thinking about hypergraphs that continually rewrite themselves. I've thought about it in terms of literary critique, or in "compiling" a novel. It reminds me of petri nets in a sense, where at any given moment, a character has a static model of the world, which can be diagrammed through a causal graph of conclusions and premises. Then, an event happens, which changes their understanding of the world; the hypergraph gets rewritten in response. I've toyed with this with my own graph software when writing novels. It's of course impossible to fully document every characters' model before and after every event that affects them, but even doing so at key moments can help. I've wished more than once that I could "compile" my novel so it could automatically tell me plot holes or a character's faulty leap in logic (at least, one that would be out of character for them). I've also tried the more common advice of using a spreadsheet where you have a column for each character, and rows indicating the passage of time. There you're not drawing hypergraphs but in each cell you're just writing raw text describing the state of the character at that time. It's helpful, but it falls apart when you start dealing with flashbacks and the like.
• Q_is_4_Quantum 2y ago
  Surely Wofram deserves the Nobel as much as Hopfield and Hinton? Not for this stuff of course (which I doubt many take seriously), but because he also provided us with an amazing computational tool without which physics would be very far behind where it is today? [And at least I knew his name already unlike our current laureates whom I just had to look up!]
  • CSMastermind 2y ago
    I think this is one of the rare times I feel comfortable speculating that had he not created Mathematica than someone else would have. There was a demand and plenty of people with interest. He was just in the right place with the right set of skills to execute on it before others and won the market in its infancy. Also it's a small enough market that the like of Mircosoft didn't feel the need to come in and crush him like they did Lotus 1-2-3.
    • Q_is_4_Quantum 2y ago
      I suspect you are right - but multiple Nobel prizes have gone to people who got there only very slightly ahead of others in the race. Would be tough to argue that there are many prizes which are for work that wouldn't have been done within a decade of when the winner actually did do it.
  • tux3 2y ago
    This year is an exception because of the AI Gen AI Artificial Intelligence AI AI zeitgeist. If we keep giving the physics Nobel to people building computer tools, soon it will have to be renowned physicist Linus Torvalds, whose computational platform underlies every big physics experiment. I'm not sure physicists would be thrilled if we keep going in that direction.
• Shawnecy 2y ago
  Is there anything testable or falsifiable here? Otherwise it's just preaching beliefs.
  • kridsdale3 2y ago
    That's the whole point of philosophy.
    • thrance 2y ago
      Not really, modern philosophy attempts to present valid arguments based on a few axioms. You can then decide for yourself if you assume these axioms yourself, in which case you also have to accept the conclusion of the argument.
      • ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
        Surely that's logic/maths where accepting the axioms means that the conclusion has to be accepted? Philosophy tends to be far less rigorous and can have very dubious steps so that there's often arguments where you don't accept the conclusion despite accepting the axioms. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_pro...
        • thrance 2y ago
          IMHO, the difference between math and (modern) philosophy axioms is that the latter's are way higher level (e.g. "the world is material", "every humans deserves to live"...) while the former's are very low level and concern themselves with "simple" rules (refer to ZFC). Philosophers also make their arguments in natural language, while mathematicians use a formal language (ultimately also described in natural language). Your exemple is interesting, as it makes a bridge between philosophy and mathematics. It's basically Gödel's attempt to prove the existence of God with mathematical rigor. It's basically a form of the original ontological argument[1] with extra flair. You can still translate the axioms into natural language, like: "P(¬ᵠ)⇔¬P(ᵠ)" becomes "a property is bad if and only if the opposite property is good" or "P(G)" becomes "being God is good". Finally, mathematicians don't usually concern themselves with "universal truth seeking" and are often content to add axioms as it suit them, if it means they can do intersting things (e.g. the Axiom of Choice). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument
• raldi 2y ago
  So you can't go back in time for the same reason you can't go left in Super Mario Bros.
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  How would a bag shaped universe experience time? https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?si=9Ga7PCeac4EV4Y4_ https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?si=9Ga7PCeac4EV4Y4_
• _cs2017_ 2y ago
  I don't understand how computational irreducibility matters for the perception of time. Surely, even a computationally reducible universe could be so insanely expensive to predict that it wouldn't matter? I also don't understand why our inability to predict the future is related to our perception of time. Overall, my impression is that this is an essay in philosophy (i.e, devoid of any content) rather than science.
• arkj 2y ago
  SW is the Derrida of computation. More words to add more confusion than explain anything.
• nyc111 2y ago
  "(as I’ve argued at length elsewhere)" Everything he writes is "at length". This looks like an interesting read with good ideas but it is so long and has no structure that I gave up reading. It may help to give an abstract in the beginning of the article. The problem with the treatment of time in physics is that we can only measure time intervals not the philosophical Time (with capital T). But physicists gladly conflate the two. Mach said: Absolute time [the philosophical Time] cannot be measured by comparison with another motion, it has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value. Which means that all of the "t" terms standing for time in astronomical equations are for time intervals and tell us nothing about the philosophical Time.
• marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Im curious about how this relates to deterministic time and the lack of free will. >Our minds are “big”, in the sense that they span many individual branches of history. And they’re computationally bounded so they can’t perceive the details of all those branches, but only certain aggregated features. And in a first approximation what then emerges is in effect a single aggregated thread of history. Does this allow free will?
  • floobertoober 2y ago
    I've actually thought about free will in the context of wolfram's ideas before, and I like the idea that our minds are computationally irreducible - I think it is a very close analogue to free will.
  • causal 2y ago
    I've yet to come across a satisfying definition for free will beyond "it's not determinism but also not randomness"
• thrance 2y ago
  Wolfram's theories are still largely pseudoscientific, in that way they look a lot like string theory, minus the public funding the latter received. Neither theory is really falsifiable : if new experiments are made that contradict the theory, it can just be adjusted to fit the new observations. As a consequence, those theories are unable to make any kind of prediction about our reality, which makes them pretty much useless. No wonder this "research" was never published in any physics journal.
  • smaddox 2y ago
    This model of physics does make some falsifiable predictions, and there are discussions about how to test them elsewhere. Unlike string theory, this theory does not have any free variables to adjust. It's either true or it's false. I, for one, find it to be trivially true. It fits every observation and is the only theory ever posed that doesn't have the "But why those initial conditions?" problem.
• inshard 2y ago
  Computationally unbounded observers see more of the future but what of free will?
• psychoslave 2y ago
  Ok, so after the article on time as ought to be an emergent property[1], here we go with time from a computational point of view. Can we at least receive a definition of computation that is not somehow depending of time being a given, explicitly or implicitly? Am I alone finding this a bit taking aback? Like this is not physics or even general philosophy but plain old theological focus on the prime mover. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-20240925/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-...
• hoseja 2y ago
  Wolfram article on the nature of reality. Cellular automaton on the first screen.
• GistNoesis 2y ago
  I think Stephen at least dares to ask the question. Here is a little thought-experiment on the Nature of Time. You take the three body problem and you pick an initial condition and generate the trajectory of the three body from 0 to T by integrating through time with some numerical scheme like Runge-Kutta. Now you do it again, and again, generating each time a "universe" of three-body trajectories. Doing so allows you to build a dataset of physically realist three-body trajectories. And now the kicker : You train a diffusion model on this (potentially infinite synthetic) dataset. Once trained, to build a "universe" (aka 3-body trajectories) you only need to sample from this diffusion model. There is no more need to integrate through time. Past, present and future inside the universe just fold themselves into place in order to make sure the universe follows the time-evolution constraint. When working numerically, both these schemes can theoretically be as accurate as desired (error smaller than any chosen epsilon), although the diffusion model seems to potentially necessitate more memory in toy model, it's not evident as the universe is stored in a compressed fashion which necessitate less memory when the universe is no longer a toy model. The underlying question I perceive from Stephen works are is whether it's more efficient computationally to explore all possible universes simultaneously in which case time is a mere constraint you have to solve, or to generate each universe independently stepping through internal time. Although it may seems to be the same (our perception only having access to a slice of the multiverse), as in the end you get in both cases a physically consistent universe, the nature of the sampling process change the distribution of possible states. It also opens the possibility of shifting across various universes, not that we would be physically aware of (the previous universe and future universe), but we would benefit by experiencing a "better" universe. It's the same vibe of ideas which states that our universe has been fine-tuned for life to be possible.
• alkonaut 2y ago
  Is this a guest writer? It doesn’t have the Wolfram tone at all. It describes a universe that isn’t centered on Stephen Wolfram, for example.
• wavewrangler 2y ago
  Wolfram has always been difficult for me to follow. I think it's because he tends to drone on, I don't know why. I don't think even he knows why. My understanding of what I have managed to listen to or read is that being who we are, we don't process information fast enough in order to see much of what is around us, even while it is happening before us. An example is to take a minute under consideration, you can think about how long a minute is. It's tangible to us. It's not very long. But if we think about how long a femtosecond is, it is not tangible at all. We can't experience a femtosecond. We can experience a whole bunch of femto seconds, but not just one. This is just one example of what I perceived the meaning of his thinking to be. Is that wrong, or so far off? Not only can we not experience a femtosecond, we will never be able to experience a femtosecond because our brains are simply not fast enough and aren't built to exist at such a scale. If that's what it means, then does that mean that he is referring to our ability to exist in certain scales, and our tendency to know the scale in which we exist? And, to exist outside of that scale, requires different computational parameters? Additionally, is this an extension of dimensions, just in time, not space? Does he differentiate between the two? I know that the perception of scale has more to do with, well, perception, whereas computational irreducibility (as I understand it to be, anyway) is more of a function of natural processes....or THE underlying function from which all other functions stemming from that, are built upon. ... Right? Between that and perception of the scale in which we have evolved to exist in, it seems like they are at least closely related... Some of what has been discussed here in the comments has me doubting my understanding, is the reason I ask. To extend my question, could computational irreducibility help to explain why the Universe tends to "recycle" so many parts of itself? Is that some sort of telltale sign that when we see these patterns (golden ratio, fractals, recurring structures in naturee), we are looking at a fundamental aspect of the universe in some form, or it's computationally irreducible equivalent, or is this to be determined?
  • ziggyzecat 2y ago
    > THE underlying function So this is about where it clicked for me: A function, to us normies, is something consisting of at least one part that doesn't do anything and another part that does something but has no tangible form, 'the operation'. So, to me, irreducible can only mean that there is some level where the function is the thing and vice versa, so that this irreducible function, from our (current) space-time-perspective, has no constituents except 'self'. Which is nonsense, because self is worthless without stuff it can react with or to. Except, is it really? A femtosecond can't be experienced because subpixel-sized movements/fractions of reactions happen during this short measurement. But that's irrelevant for the interface between this function and nature and evolution from their current space-time-POV and their, and thus our, space-time-blind-spots. It's like thought and action when there is not enough time to stop a movement or when stopping that exact movement would terminate the intended result. But I actually don't think that irreducibility is the right term. It should be liminality or something, focusing on the fact that nothing temporary is measurable before the emergence of THE underlying function, which is what I used to think The Planck length is for (more or less) constant space.
• DataDive 2y ago
  Without even visiting the page I can predict what this writing will be about with uncanny accuracy. 1. Big words at the start - pretending to hack at a problem so big that just swinging the axe is a major undertaking 2. The prose slowly drifts to make less and less sense; words have no practical meaning anymore. 3. Simplistic images galore. Various plots via cellular automata and "pretty" images show things that have nothing to do with the topic and are only distant metaphors at best. Yet these images are the proof that it all "works." 4. A nothingburger by the end. Leaves you wondering, why did I read all this? Every essay by Wolfram is the same.
  • moi2388 2y ago
    You forgot ample use of “computational irreducibility”, and “like I showed 30 years ago (proceeds to not have shown this)” but yes. Very much this.
• curiousgeorgio 2y ago
  The thing that bothers me about the idea of the "Ruliad" is that it's completely unfalsifiable. Even if we existed in a reality where true randomness existed, or computational irreducibility wasn't a given, you could always argue that what we observe is just one finite local slice of that Ruliad where things appear to be deterministic (or computationally irreducible) due to our boundedness as observers. It's basically the modern equivalent of "turtles all the way down" because it pretends to explain the nature of reality by extending our definition of reality to fit within an all-encompassing mental model that only makes sense on a surface level. Granted, the words "universe", "multiverse", etc. are insufficient in describing everything in a way that includes everything we currently want to include, but giving a new name to that abstract idea of "everything" isn't itself a compelling argument to also say that everything exists as a static construct and that everything is computationally irreducibile and deterministic at a fundamental level. Yes, that makes sense in a physics simulation, but in reality, we don't know what we don't know. Placing the unknown in a conceptual box doesn't imply that it's now known.
  • causal 2y ago
    Right. It feels like conjecture built upon conjecture, I can't tell where the foundation lies. It at least needs to make some rigorous, real-world predictions we don't already have. I'm also dissatisfied with the notion of time is just "rewriting" of the hypergraph - that feels ill-defined. It borrows our intuition for flipping bits in physical memory, but what does "rewriting" actually mean in the metaphysical domain of this hypergraph? I have a lot of respect for Wolfram, but much of this feels so hand-wavy.
• herodoturtle 2y ago
  > At the lowest level the state of the universe is represented by a hypergraph which captures what can be thought of as the “spatial relations” between discrete “atoms of space”. Time then corresponds to the progressive rewriting of this hypergraph.
• gibsonf1 2y ago
  I'm a big fan of Wolfram's physics project, however, he seems to be confusing thinking about physics (computation) with the continuous and ever-changing substance of the universe itself. Time is a human idea to grapple with the fact that everything is both continuous and constantly changing. Time is simply picking out from that continuous change a sequence of changes or state(s) that occur during a measured standard sequence of change, such as the earth making a single rotation around its axis (day). It helps us manage and refer to and measure both the order of changes and the duration of changes or states using standards.
  • inthebin 2y ago
    I thought spacetime was a fundamental concept of physics which explains gravity and not merely a human invention for measuring change...?
    • gibsonf1 2y ago
      Indeed it is, but that fundamental concept is for human understanding of how physics works based on how we perceive/think about the universe, its not the metaphysics of the universe itself.
• immmmmm 2y ago
  Did he tackle Lorentz invariance?
• lambda-research 2y ago
  The idea that time is tied to computation makes me wonder if everything we see as 'progress' is just the universe showing us the loading screen percentage of the game of life.
• visarga 2y ago
  Space is distributed and time is a centralizing force. The serial action bottleneck forces the brain, for example, to unify and send one action at a time. This is also replicated in LLMs that are distributed internally, but generate one token at a time. So time is like the force of centralization while space supports the distributed side. These two tendencies are reflected in the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. The exploitation part is centralized in language and culture, while the exploration part is distributed across the components of a system. They work together to achieve intelligence, both are needed.
• aaroninsf 2y ago
  Everytime this work of Wolfram's comes up, I think the same thing: what this is more than anything else, is a tacit argument that the universe we inhabit and are structures/processes within, is computed in a strong sense. I.e., that we are living in a computational "simulation," the substrate of which is not currently accessible. That he doesn't come out and lead with this, I find quite peculiar. I've asked him about this in person and not gotten a less cagey response. I assume that is because he does not want his theoretic hypotheticals to be binned under "simulation theory" and his overall world view so categorized. But I don't see another reason to pursue this line of conjecture the way he does. And as I suspect that that premise is actually true, it's all good IMO. Unrelated directly, but certainly adjacent, is that at the intersection of simulation-theories and AI, is the premise that a computed person (i.e, an AI) is uniquely situated to "jail break" our own reality, to exist in the framing one. (And you know, maybe it's turtles all the way down a la Flatland, so...) As Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett foregrounded, a simulated hurricane doesn't get you wet, but a simulated poem is a poem in every frame. So too travel entities defined well by computation. A good reason, if we needed one, perhaps, to get on with the business of elevating ourselves into a purely computational embodiment, I think. I'd like to pop up a level and take a look.