Stephen Wolfram

Yeah, I think it's the ultimate version of the sort of identification of the technosignature question.

The ultimate version of that is, was our universe a piece of technology, so to speak?

And how on earth would we know?

Because, but I mean, it'll be, it's, I mean, you know, in the kind of crazy science fiction thing you could imagine, you could say, oh, somebody's going to have, you know, there's going to be a signature there.

It's going to be, you know, made by so-and-so.

But there's no way we could understand that, so to speak, and it's not clear what that would mean.

Because the universe simply, you know, if we find a rule for the universe, we're simply saying that rule represents what our universe does.

We're not saying that that rule is something running on a big computer and making our universe.

It's just saying that represents what our universe does in the same sense that laws of classical mechanics, differential equations, whatever they are, represent what mechanical systems do.

It's not that the mechanical systems are somehow running solutions to those differential equations.

those differential equations just representing the behavior of those systems.

Well, that's an interesting question.

I think the substrate on which the universe is operating is not a substrate that we have access to.

I mean, the only substrate we have is that same substrate that the universe is operating in.

So if the universe is a bunch of hypergraphs being rewritten, then we get to attach ourselves to those same hypergraphs being rewritten.

And if you ask the question, is the code clean?

Can we write nice, elegant code with efficient algorithms and so on?

Well, that's an interesting question.

That's this question of how much computational reducibility there is in the system.

So one of the things that is sort of one of my slightly sci-fi thoughts about the future, so to speak, is right now if you poll typical people who say, do you think it's important to find the fundamental theory of physics?