Stephen Wolfram

One possibility is that you can't make a computational infrastructure in a turning machine sense, that you really have to be dealing with precise real numbers.

You're dealing with partial differential equations, which have precise real numbers at arbitrarily closely separated points.

You have a continuum for everything.

Could be that that's what happens, that there's sort of a continuum for everything and precise real numbers for everything.

And then the things I'm thinking about are wrong.

And, you know, that's the risk you take if you're, you know, if you're trying to sort of do things about nature is you might just be wrong.

It's not, it's for me personally, it's kind of a strange thing because I've spent a lot of my life building technology where you can do something that nobody cares about, but you can't be sort of wrong in that sense, in the sense you build your technology and it does what it does.

Yeah.

But I think this question of what the sort of underlying computational infrastructure of the universe might be, it's sort of inevitable it's going to be fairly abstract.

Because if you're going to get all these things like there are three dimensions of space, there are electrons, there are muons, there are quarks, there are this.

If the model for the universe is simple, you don't get to have a line of code for each of those things.

You don't get to have the muon case, the tau lepton case, and so on.

Those all have to be emergent somehow.

Right.

From something deeper.

Right.

So that means it's sort of inevitable that it's a little hard to talk about what the sort of underlying structuralist structure actually is.

Do you think that's a hopeless pursuit?

Well, here's what I think.

I think that, I mean, I'm right in the middle of this right now.