Stephen Wolfram

I have some ideas about understanding more about that.

But that's another representation of computation.

Things that happen in the physical universe at the level of these evolving hypergraphs and so on, that's another sort of implementation layer for this abstract idea of computation.

With a bunch of effort.

I mean, it's like doing natural science.

I mean, what is happening in natural science?

You have the world that's doing all these complicated things, and then you discover Newton's laws, for example.

This is how motion works.

This is the way that this particular sort of idealization of the world, this is how we describe it in a simple computationally reducible way.

And I think it's the same thing here.

It's there are sort of computationally reducible aspects of what's happening that you can get a kind of narrative theory for, just as we've got narrative theories in physics and so on.

I think that once you understand computational irreducibility, it's neither of those things.

Because the fact is people say, for example, people will say, oh, but I have free will.

I kind of, I operate in a way that is, they have the idea that they're doing something that is sort of internal to them that they're figuring out what's happening.

But in fact,

We think there are laws of physics that ultimately determine every electrical impulse in a nerve and things like this.

So you might say, isn't it depressing that we are ultimately just determined by the rules of physics, so to speak?

It's the same thing.

It's at a higher level.

It's a shorter distance to get from semantic grammar to the way that we might construct a piece of text than it is to get from individual nerve firings to how we construct a piece of text.