Stephen Wolfram

And most of it is, well, the air is still going to be here and nothing much is going to be different about it.

And that's a kind of reducible fact about what is ultimately at an underlying level of computationally irreducible process.

Yes, I think so.

I mean, life in the way that we experience it, that, I mean, you know, one might, you know, depending on what we mean by life, so to speak, the experience that we have of sort of consistent things happening in the world, the idea of space, for example, where there's, you know, we can just say you're here, you move there.

It's kind of the same thing.

It's still you in that different place, even though you're made of different atoms of space and so on.

This idea that there's sort of this level of predictability of what's going on, that's us finding a slice of reducibility in what is underneath this computationally irreducible kind of system.

And I think that's sort of the thing which is actually...

My favorite discovery of the last few years is the realization that it is sort of the interaction between the sort of underlying computational irreducibility and our nature as kind of observers who sort of have to key into computational reducibility, that fact,

leads to the main laws of physics that we discovered in the 20th century.

So this is, we talk about this in more detail, but this is, to me, it's kind of our nature as observers, the fact that we are computationally bounded observers, we don't get to follow all those little pieces of computational irreducibility to stuff

What is out there in the world into our minds requires that we are looking at things that are reducible, we are compressing, we're extracting just some essence, some kind of symbolic essence of what's the detail of what's going on in the world.

That, together with one other condition that at first seems sort of trivial, but isn't, which is that we believe we are persistent in time.

Yes, some sort of causality.

Here's the thing.

At every moment, according to our theory, we're made of different atoms of space.

At every moment, sort of the microscopic detail of what the universe is made of is being rewritten.

And in fact, the very fact that there's coherence between different parts of space is a consequence of the fact that there are all these little processes going on that kind of knit together the structure of space.

It's kind of like if you wanted to have a fluid with a bunch of molecules in it, if those molecules weren't interacting, you wouldn't have this fluid that would pour and do all these kinds of things.

It would just be sort of a free-floating collection of molecules.