/lit/ - Literature

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. All Wolfram has is a computer so everything looks like a computation. This whole notion that the universe is a computer is philosophically dubious. It's similar to Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis, claiming that the universe is (rather than is just described by) a mathematical structure. In both cases there is no a shred of empirical evidence for them. How could it? Just what would that evidence resemble? The cause for this sort of reification is seeing those tools that lend clarity to the analysis of physical systems "blur into" the systems themselves within the observer's mind. Essentially, because computers and math are the best and most accurate tools for understanding physics, they seem to "disappear into" the phenomena they describe though a kind of association, because the only way that truth about those systems is communicated is through those methods.

This is plain to see in Wolfram's notion of "rulial space", which is a pure figment and a heaping load of extra theoretical assumption on top of existing physics.