Wolfram's Theory of Everything (Technical Understanding)

[Leo Gura]

Being a genius doesn't mean one's theory is ultimately correct.

I think Wolfram is capturing some limited aspects of reality, not the full picture.

[CARDOZZO]

48 minutes ago, CARDOZZO said:

 

Gorard talks about it.

He explains that what Wolfram's Physics project is trying to do is not a theory but a formalism.

He criticizes Wolfram for naming it like a fundamental theory of everything.

[CARDOZZO]

Full Interview:

 

[Ero]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Being a genius doesn't mean one's theory is ultimately correct.

I don't believe one can be called a 'genius' without having done some form of revolutionary work or fundamentally novel recontextualization of an existing field (you yourself have stated it has little to do with intelligence). Wolfram has done neither.

'Uncomputable' is a term coined by Church and Turing in 1936 as a response to Hilbert's 1928 Entscheidungsproblem. Wolfram simply renamed it as 'computational irreducibility' and claimed to have discovered it. Conway defined 'Game of Life' in 1970, which is 2D cellular automata. Wolfram simplified it to 1D and ran a few iterations, again claiming to be the first to discover it. I can keep going. The point is, there is nothing scientific or even epistemically genuine about what he does.

To me that isn't genius, but rather intellectual hubris. You a quote me on this - Wolfram will remain the crackpot at the outskirts of science because nothing of what he does is revolutionary. If one actually were interested in these topics, it would only take a little reading to realize that this so called new 'paradigm' has been brewing for decades - I can give you examples of far more sophisticated scientists from any field:

Biology and Medicine - Michael Levin

Neuroscience and Statistics - Karl Friston, Demis Hassabis

Physics - Giorgio Parisi, Chris Fields

Mathematics - Alexander Grothendieck, John von Neumann, Michel Talagrand, Stanislav Smirnov

Computer Science - Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Leslie Valiant, David Ackley

As part of Kuhn's argument, it new paradigms no longer occur due to the 'lone genius' as Wolfram imagines it does. Remember when you said in the university thread that if you don't study formally STEM, you will just be an 'ogre' in your lair? That is kinda what Wolfram is, having been disconnected of formal science for close to 40 years. 

 

[Ero]

1 hour ago, CARDOZZO said:

Full Interview:

 

Will watch, thanks. 

1 hour ago, CARDOZZO said:

He explains that what Wolfram's Physics project is trying to do is not a theory but a formalism.

He criticizes Wolfram for naming it like a fundamental theory of everything.

This is encouraging. He at least demonstrates epistemic nuance which Wolfram simply lacks.  

[CARDOZZO]

17 hours ago, Ero said:

Will watch, thanks. 

This is encouraging. He at least demonstrates epistemic nuance which Wolfram simply lacks.  

Sure  

[CARDOZZO]

 

[Ero]

Okay, having watched the interview, I have to say Gorard is positively brilliant. He is very sophisticated in both his philosophical statements, clarifying routinely the epistemic and ontological assumptions of his arguments, as well as in his technical expertise, actively recalling a formidable amount of mathematical background and scientific history. This is much more like what I would expect from a true mathematician/ scientists - epistemic neatness and giving credit where credit is due. 

On the technical front, I have to say that me and him basically have no disagreements when it comes to the actual meaning/role of Wolfram's 'formalism', which is exactly what he calls it. He rejects it as a 'fundamental theory' and classifies it as a 'contrapositive' program to that of the current continuous-based paradigm, i.e demonstrating that a discrete formalization is also largely applicable. Furthermore, he vehemently states that even if it is a successful formalization, it does not equal ontology - exactly what was at the core of all my previous statements. 

Lastly, his main point/thesis at around 1:02:00 mark, namely that 'coarse-graining an irreducible system can give you reducible laws' is in exact agreement with the fundamental postulate of what I describe in the Chaos, Entropy, Order formalism, namely that the fundamentally intractable (irreducible) nature of Chaos requires the development of levels of abstraction (the ordered macro-state with 'reducible laws') by fundamentally using the ergodic assumption (ergodicity is what allows the calculation of entropy).

When I have more time I will examine more deeply his actual formalizations. On the physical verification front, he himself has admitted that it is highly speculative without any substantial results that they have been able to produce due to the lack of their own 'Abdus Salam', i.e. someone who can craft a dedicated experiment from a deep understanding of the theory. 

TLDR: Gorard is brilliant and we do not really have technical disagreements, as he is careful to not make the type of statements Wolfram does. 

Edited September 24, 2024 by Ero

[Ero]