Mathematician Stephen Wolfram is developing his own metaphysics, based on the insight that simple rules can lead to complex outcomes.
Metaphysics has in the past basically always had to be built purely on arguments made with words—and indeed perhaps this is why it’s often been considered somewhat slippery and fragile. But now, with the kind of things we’ve discussed here, we’re beginning to have what we need to set up a solid, formal structure for metaphysics, in which we can progressively build a rich tower of definite conclusions.
For Wolfram, all there can be is the entangled limit of all possible computational rules applied in all possible ways. He calls this the ruliad. I like this approach while not fully understanding it. Consider this claim:
If we assume that we are observers who are computationally bounded, and believe we are persistent in time, then we argue that it is inevitable that we must perceive certain laws to be operating—and those laws turn out to be exactly the three central laws of twentieth century physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Second Law of thermodynamics.
It’s a remarkable claim: the laws of physics we observe don’t just happen to be the way they are; they are inevitable for observers with the general characteristics we have. At the level of the underlying ruliad the laws of physics that we might observe are not determined. But as soon as we know something about what we’re like as observers, then we necessarily end up with our familiar laws of physics.
My biggest discofort with Wolfram’s approach is that it seems incomplete. While for Wolfram the ruliad seems to be a platonic ideal, I don’t see how it’s possible to avoid the question of which computational substrate the ruliad is running on. Why is the ruliad a self-sufficient metaphysics, but other abstractions aren’t?
Nehaveigur 