Stephen Wolfram

We don't get to do that because it just ran for 14.6 billion years or whatever.

And we can't rerun it, so to speak.

So we have to hope that there are pockets of computational reducibility sufficient to be able to say, yes, I can recognize those are electrons there.

And I think that it's a feature of computational irreducibility.

It's sort of a mathematical feature that there are always an infinite collection of pockets of reducibility.

Yeah.

The question of whether they land in the right place and whether we can sort of build a theory based on them is unclear.

But to this point about whether we as observers in the universe built out of the same stuff as the universe can figure out the universe, so to speak, that relies on these pockets of reducibility.

Without the pockets of reducibility, it won't work, can't work.

But I think this question about how observers operate, it's one of the features of science over the last hundred years particularly, has been that every time we get more realistic about observers, we learn a bit more about science.

So for example, relativity was all about observers don't get to say what's simultaneous with what.

They have to just wait for the light signal to arrive to decide what's simultaneous.

Or, for example, in thermodynamics, observers don't get to say the position of every single molecule in a gas.

They can only see the kind of large-scale features, and that's why the second law of thermodynamics, law of entropy increase, and so on, works.

If you could see every individual molecule, you wouldn't conclude something about thermodynamics.

You would conclude, oh, these molecules are just all doing these particular things.

You wouldn't be able to see this aggregate fact.

So I strongly expect that, in fact, in the theories that I have, that one has to be more realistic about the computation and other aspects of observers in order to actually make a correspondence between what we experience.

In fact, my little team and I have a little theory right now about how quantum mechanics may work, which is a

very wonderfully bizarre idea about how the sort of thread of human consciousness relates to what we observe in the universe.