This is the most amazing and comprehensive explanation of human knowledge and communication I have heard in one paper.

Stephen I’m very grateful that you not only built mathematica, wolfram alpha, the physics project which are all incredible valuable to society. But I’m especially grateful you care so much about these things that are important but not urgent and sharing them with the world. I hope your health span extends well into the future and you have the motivation to continue these amazing blog posts, videos, and research. Thank you.

Stephen , amazing! You have no idea how good this sounds with blade runner-ish Ambience music playing in the other tab!!! Almost like a techno prayer! Love what you doing! Best of luck in 2024!

Thank you Stephen Wolfram, you are helping me to keep my mind open!🌈 And Hello All of you amazing people, watching this stream!💚💚💚

I know you never read the comments but stil... thank you, Stephen.

This was a mind blowing lecture from a beautiful mind.

Amazing lecture. Stephan is truly a brilliant man, pushing the boundaries of our understanding of the world. 🌎 ✨ 💫

I really like the emerging, metaphysical part of the path that Stephan's world of thought may be moving towards. Many of his thoughts are based on the formation of his thinking in the western traditional way of semantic consideration. They lead to the explicit way of his description of ontology, I think they are moving increasingly towards the ancient, the thousand-fold thought out conceptual approach of Vedic knowledge. They approach the questions of our existence and the wonders of being as such that we as biologically bound entities can only just imagine.

That was Fantastic, now i will listen again 😃

I read this essay and was blown away by how well it was expressed. I did not understand every aspect of what was being said, but the overarching sentiments were fascinating. There were so many complex connections and a carefully crafted synthesis of scientific discoveries that aimed to frame a narrative of why the world as we experience it might be the way it is from a broader scientific perspective. And all the implications that can be derived as a result of that. I find it interesting that there were almost no complex mathematical or physics formulas used to form a presentation on this theory, which for someone like Stephen to do is remarkable - being a master of both, making this sort of knowledge accessible (at least conceptually) to the average person like myself. I feel smart just listening and contemplating this stuff, lol! This is like a perfect merging of science and philosophy. Awesome! A couple of questions would be: 1. What theories do we have that explain what causes this sense of persistence in time? 2. Can the Ruliad ever be fully computed? 3. What would it mean if new mathematical rules emerged into the Ruliad? 4. Should there be ethical considerations when exploring computational possibilities? Like atomic science, are some things better not known so they could not be exploited? 5. Should our understanding of the Ruliad be objective-based or simply explorative? 6. Can meaning in the Ruliad ever be derived beyond the observer? 7. A rule generally implies restricted parameters; are there limits to what we can compute as observers?

Another powerful, yet easy to understand representation.

Awesomeness! Thank you for all the hard work.

Thank you Stephen. I'm curious, I appreciate it. Excellent presentation.

To my limited nowledge, Buddhist monks and Vipassana meditators are training in their daily meditations in observing the breath, one's own thoughts of the mind, and its sensations. It is quite an experience. One may find out that there is someone, an observer that notices the existence of a body and a mind that has thoughts and voices. Namaste!

Much appreciated!!

Thank you for your being and ability to strapulate information!

1:36:27 The parallels to Vedanta philosophy are astounding

We create a "reality" that fits within our brain and fits within a whole series of "obvious to us" assumptions, that is to say, our limited (and probably incorrect) perceptions of our world. Some of these flawed observations become our "physical laws" as a bit of a crutch to allow us to try to understand the universe badly. Incredible insight.

Thank you mr. Wolfram

I'm an observer and I've been running a computation for 20yrs. I have a pattern that when rotated can be seen as either structure or wave.

Very interesting.

Stephen Thanks a lot for this gift to human knowledge, I think I started to understand the basics of it as this is most clear explanation of the observer theory. Our old physics is wrong

Just amazing, all the best.

This was dense, but spot on. Thank you

Glad to be of help, btw. You are one of the favorites

Excellent talk! Would love to hear how Stephan evaluates or will recommend to us to think about the Mary's black and white room experiment with the Observer theory.

"slices of reducibility" is the perfect explanation of the existential notion of the human condition. Now, we understand that this is a universal condition of being, no matter how advanced. If you can know it all, you can't exist as an entity.

Bravo!

great essay! seems to me that a deep implicit message is floating around: the remark on the position of us as boundedness, collectiviness, beliefs of existential continuity, with assumptions necesity, reduction and connection trend,

Bravo, ty SW

i equate what he is doing to finding the mathematical explanation to "unification". excellent work Mr Wolfram

😊 cool stuff.

Every perception is to some extent memory. Every memory is to some extent imagination. Narratives are the outcome. Every choice we make generates a corresponding timeline of experience. Is the resulting narrative a limit or a creative guideline? No wrong answer - only another choice.

I think to put it simply, it's not about observers, it's about information exchange. Observers aren't really anything special, we're just systems of particles exchanging information with other systems and individual particles - just like any other system of particles. So your theory probably needs to deal more with what it means for two particles to exchange information such that they can react to each other in some way.

Perhaps Dr Stephen Wolfram is right about nature also having computational laws much more complex than a simple mathematical equation, I guess it can be called the 5th state of matter, alive matter, or biology. I wish him the best!

Thanks

Does a state of superposition require existence of superobserver?

Excellent presentation! I really enjoyed, and couldn't agree more. I loved that last couple sentences of the essay, and I would add to it, that, it's not just that science has been unable to live true to ideal of objectivity, but there actually is no such thing as pure objective truth in the living world. I made a talk a couple weeks ago which I titled "gestalt ecology", dealing with the same question of the role of the observer, albeit at a much lower intellectual level than this material. Very good

I have to listen to this talk again. My guess as I listened to this excellent presentation is that a neural network is a good model for an observer. It also seems to be that he has finally found a way to democratise programming in natural languages.

This is ridiculously interesting.

Trace -> Map -> Pattern Match -> React

Formal communication of any meaning is great, we will have it as soon as we solve mechanistic interpretability.

For us philosophers this theory has such great explanatory power. But I can understand why the scientists are slow to even consider it. I have come to believe that it will be the next paradigm.

SUPERB 👌 I really enjoyed this explanation. Observer Theory is fascinating. Stephen Im curious if E8 could be the ruliad and the 4D render of E8 being the observerse? How far am I off? 😅

Is the bit around 59:55 - 1:00:40 related to the free energy principle? edit: and is it just me, or does it seem Wolfram's work is going to impact our understanding in the same way Newton's did? It seems to be mind-blowingly on point, from quite a few vantages.

Can this be drawn in a simple way?

Starts at 20:03

The way I kind of interpret this lecture is that all concepts have their own boundaries in rulial space. A mind, or an observer, is basically an entity that can go from one boundary of rulial space, let's call it an island, and communicate the information acquired from that island to another mind sampling the same slice of rulial space as the observer and the physical world acs as a medium for information to be transferred. So I guess the next question is: How can we transmit bits of information from our slice of rulial space to another mind in another slice 🤔?

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"Who observes what?" This 'does' the split-mind from a whole that cannot be otherwise signified or represented; being infinite/unbounded? Though willingly limited as means to focus through and with. Assumptions are logically extended. Any definition runs input to our result. The word of definition given sets the measure and kind of the fruits. Logical consistency within a frame of reference can be wrong or inverted if the premise exceeds its bounds. I cannot observe reality that creates all that I am by knowing me - not "about me" but directly - without a second or compare. This quality of knowing is a perfect resonance - not a computational selectivity. But I perceive as I conceive & believe/accept my own reality to be (in terms of the world such a self gives and takes from). Guided & aligned perception is qualitatively selective rather than quantitatively biased.

2x speed wolfram generalizing observers i bet this will play into defining complexity

WHAT IS AN OSSERVER? In very simple terms, an observer is something or some body that thinks input, processes it, and gives output. It equivalences the input and the output by doing a computational process. A transducer can convert sound energy to electrical energy, but it is not an observer in the full sense because it has no memory, decision-making, and explicit rules that it follows. A piston that measures the pressure of gas molecules is also a pseudo observer. Here is my opinion: A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation that consists of a tape divided into cells, a head that can read and write symbols on the tape, and a finite set of rules that determine how the head moves and changes the tape. A cellular automaton is a discrete model of computation that consists of a grid of cells, each of which can have one of a finite number of states, and a set of rules that determine how the states of the cells change based on their neighbors. Both Turing machines and cellular automata can be considered as observers in some sense since they can perform computations and store information on their tapes or grids. However, they are not very sophisticated observers since they have limited memory, communication, and feedback capabilities. They also do not have any explicit goals or purposes that guide their observation, and they do not have any awareness or understanding of what they are observing.[in comparison with human observers like us]. There are some special cases of Turing machines and cellular automata that exhibit more complex behaviour and can be seen as more advanced observers. For example, a universal Turing machine is a Turing machine that can simulate any other Turing machine, given its description and input. The said Turing machine may encode any physical phenomena, e.g, sound waves, water, or gas molecules. The gas or water molecules individually follow Newton's laws of motion but the universal turing machine converte these movements to the movement of fluides that follow the laws of fluid mechanics. A universal cellular automaton is a cellular automaton that can simulate any other cellular automaton or even a Turing machine, given its configuration and rules. These rules code encode Newton's laws of motion. These models can be seen as observers that can explore the space of possible computations and algorithms[as encoded by their cells and rewrite rules on the cells] and that can potentially learn from their own experience. For this purpose, we need to provide a feedback loop. Such models can be seen as observers that can adapt to changing situations and optimize their performance, and that can potentially communicate and cooperate with other observers. So, in summary, a Turing machine or cellular automaton can be considered as an observer only in a very basic sense since they can only perform simple computations and store limited information. To be a more complete observer, they would need to have additional features that allow them to simulate, learn, communicate, and optimize. These are some of the features that make us human observers, and that may also apply to other kinds of observers, such as animals, artificial intelligence, or even the universe itself.

Atman is Brahman.

Are split brain patients one or two observers? The brain is not completely split in those patients, I know, but still there appears to be a separation of processing sensory information as well as disagreement about some actions between each side. In other words, can observers be divided? If so, could they be merged?

36:36 mission of science

From this presentation, I actually think that a good model for the observer's mind is either a neural network or a cellular automaton[the mind takes an external phenomenon represented by several pixels and computes or applies automata like rules and arrives at a final stage with an output. This output is an attractor or label or classifier.... Philosophically, this suggests that even pistons in the example of gas molecules are observers like us. The principle of computational equivalence then says that we are basically the same, we are not special at all.

The medium is the message - Marshall McLuhan

What if _everything_ is then an observer? I.e. the panpsychism-like concepts. And then, from that, that the "reality" is created by everything participatorily, and "physics" itself emerges (or emerged, "long ago") as spontaneously-formed agreement on the mutual dynamics between such an infinite field of observers, just like any other process of spontaneous order-formation?

The AI and LLM are they observers too? Just like how individual radio telescopes can work together through interferometry to create a more detailed image than any single telescope could alone, combining observations from different "observers" like AI and humans can provide a richer, more nuanced understanding of complex concepts or phenomena. The idea that the distinct observational capabilities of AI and humans can enrich our collective understanding and problem-solving abilities contrasts with the notion of merging AI and human intelligence to keep pace with technological advancements. This perspective celebrates the unique contributions each observer brings to the table, suggesting that the interplay between different forms of intelligence can foster innovation and resilience, rather than homogenization being the sole path forward.

We don't just think there is only one "me". We also think we have only one eye. This is what Aristotle called a "common sense", the ability of the mind to integrate a single "world view" from multiple sensory inputs in the "fusion center" of our mind.

I don't necessarily believe that the ruliad and the psychosphere are a one to one function. Or that the ruliad necessarily accounts for what is possible to happen in reality.

I have an association with the Law of Requisite Variety by Ashby.

20:00 start

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I love this... A very fancy way of taking about generalisations, but the metaphor of a mind being like a computer is butting up against its limits. Communication in reality seems to function reconstructively not via discrete packages. Agreement is learned, mediated and moderated, but it is rooted in shared experience. The arbitrariness of asserting observer's as a transcendental, Individualised objects actually creates the categorical problems. and is implicitly based on an ideological acceptance of individualism and egocentrism. We also have some reification of statistical accounting of reality but the ground reality is still there despite not being referred to and masked by an abstraction. Discreteness is not necessarily suggested by the ground reality that we experience. The assertions of assumption of stability and unity of self is bogus- We learn via processes. but you talk as if we are a collection of states. "We assume" is followed by a rehashed list of Protestant transcendental individualistic tropes. Have you thought that equivalencing is actually a function of time? and that the historicising effect of observing an illusion and what is really going on is merely a transition from statistical reification to connecting/aligning our 'process' with phenomena? I would love to listen to you fitting observer theory to fields. Please please please!

I’m not educated enough for this discussion, and I might looking at this from the wrong angle, but the existence of mathematical axioms seem to imply some static structure in the ruliad. Or are those axioms a sampling/high level view of a particular application/pattern of a sequence of rules? If someone replies please keep the language to a college dropout level 😅

The idea that an observer can effect reality, quantum or not, is very close to a belief in Simulation Theory (which I is think is a quasi-religious position). It implies that reality is spontaneously spun out as we become aware of it.

We’re all made from the unique object that emerges at the entangled limit of all possible computations.

Stepen: your theory works for music… like the theory Stephen Wolfram tells about the universe. If I am understanding him well, this comes through that the beginning was simple,then mainly what he calls computations (acually systematic changes, the guy is a mathematician you know) are taking place again and again. This many computations makes us human observes think that a chaoz emerges from the original order, quod non. So my music starts from a simple base, and the changes make it different but we still here music because my structure is less complicated than the universe. Thx to Stephen! ://kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rrFxi650qN7UnH0.htmlsi=Xzq5uGz7LDeLgOqP

It's everything everywhere all at once

The hard problem is yet to be even tackled.

Actually nothing of us even on arbitrarily short time scales is made out of the same stuff, it is continually changing, the pattern being the only thing sort of conserved, it isn't so mysterious, all you have to imagine is something like a whirlpool at some drain or something like that where the water is continually running through the persistent pattern of the whirlpool, even electrons and other fundamental particles have the same character in some sense, there is no permanence of the constitution of any of it, only its form in most cases.

This seems very much related to Shackell`s Finite Semiotics - same ontological base in the finiteness of cognition, just a lot of cosmological and quantum implications on top

The persistence of the observer amounts to a persistence of the internalized world of the observer, and thus we assume a persistence of the world itself. This is an additional assumption.

In summary, the perspective of the person can affect the experience of that person and the observable universe.

How to have a theory of consciousness without having a theory of consciousness. 👏🏼

Video starts at 20:00

Wow !how can you sleep?what a amazing mind .super smart.

The discrete pattern within continuous time.

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Time separate from the rotating patter, time the source of energy.

Stephen, Rule 30. To the left of the golden angle is our observable apparently organised reality, and to the right is what humans currently interpret as "quantum". There is no quantum, just our inability to observe through simple calculations within the Ruliad. Lets talk.

Resonance AT macroscopic scale vs resonance în quantum mechanics, this corespondance i don t no if there is made. Like corespondence between quantum mechanics and clasical mechanics throw little planck constant. Quantum resonance îs important în act of observation.

Finite mind? That's where it all breaks down. Computational irreducibility shows that there is more to the world that can be computed As Rudy Tucker wrote. Computable or not it kept raining.

What a catching considerations (!). There are so many sentences to dwell upon! Unbelievably rich and vibrating with intellectual triggers . Just to promote the simplest of ideas: Where are you as an observer in, say, physical space?... On what level, bodies, molecules, atoms, particles, universe, multiverse, what ? On what frequency? (A) 'Sender' or/and (a) 'reciever'? What kind of observations is 'now' to perceive, mathematical, physical, biological, computational, cultural etc ? In love's eye? Yet, imagine, a diversity of observers, (also) differently tuned... And now , a comedy of situations and characters, a funny controversy and Einstein as an Oracle of Commonsense in typical manner :). And immediately all kinds of Nobel Prize Probability Fellows, causing what is called a cognitive dissonance by the Patriarch and 'it all' goes on somehow...

Consciousness does not know if it's in the past present of future, it seems to put up a barrier, yet it receives feedback from all 3.

I wonder what this means for the expanse of man's consciousness. I wonder if mankind went extinct, and a new species emerged on our planet, would they even see the moon and stars the same? Definitely not.......

thank you. this is new einstein level stuff

Being bourne and death, 2 ends of the same timeline. The fraction in between is eternal. Time.

If we can reason Pi and fractals then it's obvious we are limited as observers.

Temperature or strong magnetic field destroy entangelment of electrons în superconductivity. There can be superluminic quantum conections between microspaces, 1 dimensional conections, fotons with 4 microspaces conected are The simplest structure foced to limited velocity. Oservers foced instantly local projection of quantum enthengeled structures, gravity create instant 1 dimensional conection between quantum structures. Like radio posts, are infinit numerabil histories overlapsed, observers only resonate with one.This îs a litle of my vision.

It can be shown, Zeno never finishes that famous path of nested halves. And .999... is not exactly equal to 1. A few years ago I conceptualized what I call the Observer Calculus that relies on mathematical witnesses, on intervals or across geometric scales. Every change in position of some particle in a cloud, continuously intervals of measurement and divisions between the particle and other particles, and beyond, in continuous real-time. N-body problem. An ever familiar cat-in-the-box ... every time you check to evaluate, change has occurred. Endless divisions already existing in constant change, as if they always had existed there... The cool shadows of their flags waving in the dry heat an ever moving, yet unsetting sun.

i just think he has completely misunderstood the nature of consciousness, how the brain is a physical symmetry that creates a wave form equivalent to a particle, not much, but enough to allow us to reflect back on ourselves, and say 'we exist'

I can see no reason not to believe you. It's like listening to a guru say, "I am that I am." The Ruliad my not correspond to all of our limitations, perceived or not, yet it remains to be seen whether the afterlife will be ruled by it or not.

Very interesting.... but 20(!) minutes of nothing at the start?

46:00

Have you ever looked under a canopy of a tree?? There may be many lessons to learn from under a tree

How is this not a discussion of Gnostic religion, using the language of mathematics?

I couldn’t see a logic within his arguments. Not sure if that reflects poorly on me or on him.

This fits beautifully with the truth, that we are threefold beings, physical, spiritual, and unutterable. This will finally be proven when we consider the fact that this temporal telestial home will soon be shed for our terrestrial home in the center of our galaxy, where there is no darkness, and then finally the celestial realm where nothing and everything are one.