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> I call it the ruliad. Think of it as the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.

Quote from his link to ruliad.

I think maybe what he is talking about is equivalent to what we usually call “mathematics”.

Since mathematics actually only instantiates computable things.

(It can represent uncomputable things as abstractions, but only at a level that is actually computable. I.e. everything we know about uncomputable reals, or higher order infinities, is a computable statement. So those concept representations are as computationally rule defined as anything else.)



> I think maybe what he is talking about is equivalent to what we usually called “mathematics”.

And as we all know, “mathematics” was invented in its entirety by Stephen Wolfram, so sayeth Wolfram Alpha’s new science history DLC.

The FTC has required that I disclose that this endorsement is paid for by the Wolfram Supervillain Support Program.


As far as I remember, the ruliad is digital - so it can only approximate with more and more precision analog things like circles.

His basic idea is that we are made of and live inside of mathematics but we can only observe the part of it we call physics:

https://www.wolframscience.com/metamathematics/


Once you apply arbitrary rules, you get algebras, so natural numbers, integers, rational numbers, algebraic numbers, continuous fractions, geometry, topology, ...

The view that the physics we experience is a subset of mathematics is obviously not proven, but not original or controversial.

Wolfram has a lot of good ideas. Many of which already existed, but he obscures, renames or ignores that.

He is a genuinely brilliant individual, and if he clearly demarcated what he did that was genuinely original, I think he would both get more respect, and be likelier to not distract himself from doing better work with his own grandiose abstractions.

A lot of great work starts out by solving something small but highly original, and following up every loose end, so that you end up somewhere interesting that neither you or anyone else might have expected. Maybe somewhere profound.

Starting out with grandiose publicly disclosed project definitions creates enormous pressure to confabulate.




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