Stephen Wolfram

And this idea of, you know, being at a certain place in the rulliad, which corresponds to sort of a certain way of, a certain set of computations that you are representing things in terms of.

Okay, so as you expand out in the Rulliad, as you kind of encompass more possible views of the universe, as you encompass more possible kinds of computations that you can do, eventually you might say, that's a real win.

You know, we're colonizing the Rulliad.

We're building out more paradigms about how to think about things.

And eventually you might say, we won all the way.

We managed to colonize the whole Rulliad.

Okay, here's the problem with that.

The problem is that the notion of existence, coherent existence, requires some kind of specialization.

By the time you are the whole Rulliad, by the time you cover the whole Rulliad, in no useful sense do you coherently exist.

So in other words, the notion of existence, the notion of what we think of as definite existence requires this kind of specialization, requires this kind of idea that we are not...

all possible things, we are a particular set of things, and that's kind of what makes us have a coherent existence.

If we were spread throughout the Rulliad, there would be no coherence to the way that we work.

We would work in all possible ways, and that wouldn't be kind of a notion of identity.

We wouldn't have this notion of coherent identity.

Is the Descartes kind of- Yeah, yeah, right.

Well, you're in a certain place in physical space, you're in a certain place in real space.

And if you are sufficiently spread out, you are no longer coherent.

And you no longer have, I mean, in our perception of what it means to exist and to have experience, it doesn't happen that way.

Okay, so the thing which is not obvious is that you are taking a slice of all this complexity.

Just like we have all of these molecules bouncing around in the room, but all we notice is the flow of the air or the pressure of the air.