Two different and completely unrelated topics (OR ARE THEY?) today, just because they’re both small, and hearkening back to the days when I would just post utterly random unconnected things in a weblog entry those title was just the date (and noting again that I could easily do that now, but for whatever reason I don’t).
First, whatsisname Wolfram and his Ruliad. Reading over some of his statements about it again, it seems like, at least often, he’s not saying that The Ruliad is a good model of our world, such that we can understand and make predictions about the world by finding properties of the model; he’s saying that The Ruliad just is the world. Or, in some sense vice-versa, that the world that we can observe and experience is a tiny subset of The Ruliad, the actual thing itself, the one and only instantiation of it (which incidentally makes his remarks about how it’s unique less obviously true).
I’m not exactly sure what this would mean, or (as usual) whether it’s falsifiable, or meaningful, or useful, or true, in any way. My initial thought is that (at the very least) every point in the Ruliad (to the extent it makes sense to talk about points) has every possible value of every possible property at once, since there is some computation that computes any given bundle of properties and values from any given inputs. So it’s hard to see how “beings like us” would experience just one particular, comparatively immensely narrow, subset of those properties at any given time.
It might be arguable, Kant-like, that beings like us will (sort of by definition) perceive three dimensions and time and matter when exposed to (when instantiated in) the infinite variety of The Ruliad, but how could it be that we perceive this particular specific detailed instance, this particular afternoon, with this particular weather and this particular number of pages in the first Seed Center edition of The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment?
The alternative theory is that we are in a specific universe, and more importantly not in many other possible universes, and that we experience what we experience, and not all of the other things that we could experience, as a result of being in the particular universe that we are in. This seems much more plausible than the theory that we are in the utterly maximal “Ruliad of everything everywhere all at once”, and that we experience the very specific things that we experience due to basically mathematical properties of formal systems that we just haven’t discovered yet.
We’ll see whether Wolfram’s Physical Project actually turns out to have “vast predictive power about how our universe must work, or at least how observers like us must perceive it to work”. :) Still waiting for that first prediction, so far…
In other news, The End of the Road is Haunted:
These are in the cheapest one-credit mode, because I was in that mood. Also I kind of love how the AI takes “haunted” to mean “creepy dolls”.
ceoln 
Hm?