Stephen Wolfram

So this question of what is an observer, what's the general idea of an observer, is actually one of my next projects, which got somewhat derailed by the current sort of AI mania, but... Is there a connection there, or do you think the observer is primarily a physics phenomena?

Is it related to the whole AI thing?

Yes.

Yes, it is related.

So one question is, what is a general observer?

So, you know, we know, we have an idea what is a general computational system.

We think about Turing machines, we think about other models of computation.

There's a question, what is a general model of an observer?

And there's kind of observers like us, which is kind of the observers we're interested in.

We could imagine an alien observer that deals with computational irreducibility and it has a mind that's utterly different from ours and completely incoherent with what we're like.

But the fact is that if we are talking about observers like us, that one of the key things is this idea of kind of taking all the detail of the world and being able to stuff it into a mind, being able to take all the detail and kind of extract out of it a smaller set of kind of degrees of freedom, a smaller number of elements that will sort of fit in our minds.

And I think this question, so I've been interested in trying to characterize what is the general observer.

And the general observer is, I think, in part, there are many, let me give an example of a, you know, you have a gas, it's got a bunch of molecules bouncing around.

And the thing you're measuring about the gas is its pressure.

And the only thing you as an observer care about is pressure.

And that means you have a piston on the side of this box, and the piston is being pushed by the gas.

And there are many, many different ways that molecules can hit that piston.

But all that matters is the kind of aggregate of all those molecular impacts, because that's what determines pressure.

So there's a huge number of different configurations of the gas, which are all equivalent.

So I think one key aspect of observers is this equivalencing of many different configurations of a system saying, all I care about is this aggregate feature.