Stephen Wolfram

And our existence as observers, the way we are, is sort of a contingent thing about the universe, and it's more inevitable that the whole universe, the whole set of all possibilities exists.

But this question about is it real or is it an illusion?

All we know is our experience.

And so the fact that, well, our experience is this absolutely microscopic piece of sample of the Rulliad, and there's this point about we might sample more and more of the Rulliad, we might learn more and more about...

Different areas of physics, like quantum mechanics, for example, the fact that it was discovered, I think, is closely related to the fact that electronic amplifiers were invented that allowed you to take a small effect and amplify it up, which hadn't been possible before.

Microscopes have been invented that magnify things and so on, but having a very small effect and being able to magnify it was sort of a new thing that allowed one to see a different sort of aspect of the universe and let one discover this kind of thing.

So, you know, we can expect that in the Rulliad, there are an infinite collection of new things we can discover.

There's in fact computational irreducibility kind of guarantees that there will be an infinite collection of kind of, you know, pockets of reducibility that can be discovered.

The problem with these worlds is that- We can't talk to them.

Yes.

And the thing is,

What I've kind of spent a lot of time doing is just studying computational systems, seeing what they do, what I now call ruleology, kind of just the study of rules and what they do.

You can kind of easily jump somewhere else in the rulead and start seeing what do these rules do.

And what you – they do what they do, and there's no human connection, so to speak.

That's what I've spent some part of my life doing.

Are you at the risk of losing your mind?

Sort of my favorite science discovery

is this fact that these very simple programs can produce very complicated behavior.

And that fact is kind of, in a sense, a whispering of something out in the computational universe that we didn't really know was there before.

I mean, it's like,