Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah. I mean, the first couple sentences of that paper disturbed people a lot. And I think they were really carefully constructed in exactly this kind of way.
Oh, it was really fun. But I think it's interesting because... I do, you know, sometimes I'm very upfront about it. I say I'm going to use the same word in probably six different ways in a lecture. And I will.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is part of the sort of brilliant thing about our collaboration is, you know, complementary skill sets. So I love playing with the abstract space of language. And it's a really interesting playground when I'm working with Lee because... he thinks at a much deeper level of abstraction than can be expressed by language.
And the ideas we work on are hard to talk about for that reason.
I think it's a very poor language. A lot of people think it's a really great one, but I think it has some nice properties. But I think the feature of it that is compelling is this kind of idea of universality, that if you have a language, you can describe things in any other language.
I don't think that they're outside our human languages. I think they define the boundary of the space of human languages. They allow us to explore things within that space, which is also fantastic. But I think there is a set of ideas that takes, and Stephen Wolfram has worked on this quite a lot and contributed very significantly to it.
And I really like some of the stuff that Stephen's doing with his physics project, but don't agree with a lot of the foundations of it. But I think the space is really fun that he's exploring. you know, there's this assumption that computation is at the base of reality. And I kind of see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere.
It's something that happened after many billion years of evolution. And it doesn't happen in every physical object. It only happens in some of them. And I think one of the reasons that we feel like the universe is computational is because it's so easy for us as things that have the theory of computation in our minds.
And actually, in some sense, it might be related to the functioning of our minds and how we build languages to describe the world and sets of relations to describe the world. But it's easy for us to go out into the world and build computers. And then we mistake our ability to do that with assuming that the world is computational. And I'll give you a really simple example.
This one came from John Conway. I one time had a conversation with him, which was really delightful. He was really fun. But he was pointing out that if you string lights in a barn, you can program them to have your favorite one-dimensional CA, and you might even be able to make them be capable of universal computation. Is universal computation a feature of the string lights?
No, it's probably not. It's a feature of the fact that you as a programmer had a theory that you could embed in the physical architecture of the string lights. Now, what happens, though, is we get confused by this kind of distinction between us as agents in the world that actually can transfer things that life does onto other physical substrates with what the world is.
And so, for example, you'll see people, you know, doing studying the mathematics of chemical reaction networks and saying, well, chemistry is Turing universal or studying the laws of physics and saying the laws of physics are Turing universal. But any time that you want to do that, you always have to prepare an initial state.
You have to, you know, you have to constrain the rule space and then you have to actually be able to demonstrate the properties of computation. And all of that requires an agent or a designer to be able to do that.
I think that's the intuition that people have derived from it. The intuition I get from cellular automata is that the flat space of an initial condition in a fixed dynamical law is not rich enough to describe an open-ended generation process. And so the way I see cellular automata is they're embedded slices in a much larger causal structure.
And if you wanna look at a deterministic slice of that causal structure, you might be able to extract a set of consistent rules that you might call a cellular automata, but you could embed them as much larger space. That's not dynamical and is about the causal structure and relations between all of those computations. And that would be the space cellular automata live in.
And I think that's the space that Stephen is talking about when he talks about his rule he added in these hypergraphs of all these possible computations. But I wouldn't take that as my base reality because I think, again, computation itself, this abstract property computation, is not at the base of reality.
One Rulliad to rule them all.
Well, it's interesting. So Stephen came to a workshop we had in the Beyond Center in the fall, and the workshop theme was mathematics. Is it evolved or eternal? And he gave a talk about the Rulliad, and he was talking about how a lot of the things that we talk about in the Beyond Center, like does reality have a bottom? If it has a bottom, what is it?
We'll have you to one sometime.
Yeah. So we had one that was called Infinite Turtles or Ground Truth. And it was really just about this issue. But the thing that was interesting, I think Stephen was trying to make the argument that fundamental particles aren't fundamental. Gravitation is not fundamental. These are just and computation is fundamental.
Showing 341–360 of 510 · page 18 of 26
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