Beyond physics: applying the Wolfram model in biology, chemistry, mathematics with Jonathan Gorard
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- čas přidán 8. 03. 2024
- In this final excerpt from our conversation in October 2022, Jonathan Gorard explains how ideas from Wolfram Physics can be applied in fields beyond physics, including biology, chemistry and mathematics.
He describes the concept of compositionality, and digs deeper into why the hypergraph is able to model so much of our universe.
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Jonathan Gorard
• Jonathan Gorard at The Wolfram Physics Project www.wolframphysics.org/people...
• Jonathan Gorard on Twitter / getjonwithit
• The Centre for Applied Compositionality www.appliedcompositionality.com/
• The Wolfram Physics Project www.wolframphysics.org/
Concepts mentioned by Jonathan:
• General Relativity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General...
• Quantum Mechanics en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum...
• Causal graphs www.wolframphysics.org/techni...
• Space-like separation phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelv...
• Multiway system mathworld.wolfram.com/Multiwa...
• Phase space en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_s...
• Schrödinger equation en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödi...
• Hilbert space en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert...
• Kronecker product en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroneck...
• Multicomputation writings.stephenwolfram.com/2...
• Compositionality en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princip...
• Applied category theory en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied...
• Symmetric monoidal category en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetr...
• Partial differential equations en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial...
• Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo...
• Universal Turing machine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers...
• Computational universality en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_...
• Cellular automaton en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellula...
• Ontology en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
People mentioned by Jonathan:
• Rudolph Carnap en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_...
• Vienna Circle en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_...
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The Last Theory lasttheory.com/ is hosted by Mark Jeffery markjeffery.com/ founder of Open Web Mind www.openwebmind.com/
Prefer to listen to the audio? Search for The Last Theory in your podcast player, or listen at lasttheory.com/podcast/057-be...
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Already curious to see where this project will be in 5 years. Exciting it is!
Yes, thanks Stephan. It does seem to have unlimited potential!
Yep! Been trying to tell people that this stuff is applicable, today right now, and that I've been applying its concepts for the past three years in my own life and its led to incredible incites and creations.
There's like three or four different perspectives you can take when approaching the physics model...their not completely separate, but its more like they extract a certain quality of the model and use it as the main fulcrum in creating a system or modeling a system.
For instance the idea of eliding space or time, is not unique to just space and time, its a symmetric property of the wolfram models construction (combinatorial structure) and you can "elide" any aspect of a system.
A great example i use when making comments and talking to people about this project, is that...this comment "exists" eternally to you right now...similiar to a mini-ruliad...where all of its words just "exist" all at once. However our brains can only, by virtue of being human, read each word one at a time...going through each word in sequence and this is how we process the information. But you can imagine that...if our brains worked more like an ant colony...where each ant is doing some logic operation on a word at the same time, then they would be able to read this comment, as if it were like looking at an image or painting on a wall...like how our eyes actually view the world around us.
It's a strange thing, that our eyes can take in so much detail instantly...but when we read a book we lumber through each word step by step...why do we process the two things differently? I believe that there is a application there, that can allow us read thousands of times faster, by exploiting this ability to multi-compute the words on the page.
Even stranger still, is that in order to write the comment on this page, that you read...i have to write it one word at a time, through time. But what if the process of writing could also be elided in the same way? That if i only i could write this comment near instantly, if i was able to perform logic operations in parallel like the ants, except using that parallelism to express my thoughts. It would basically be precursor telepathy.
The second one is a lot more radical than the first, but they both are deriving from the same line of logic, which is why i think both are possible. and ts only the tip of the iceberg.
That's just one of the four (or more) ways i've found you can exploit the properties of the wolfram model to model things. Another way is thinking about systems as if they were all turing universal machines, trying to interface with each other which makes them all sorta like black boxes...so this route takes advantage of the principle of computational equivelence side of things...where every system in some sense "has the answer" to any question you could ask it. And your job is to "tell the turing machine" how to get answers that you care about inside the turing machine, and it must be thought about as if you are that other turing machine. In this way, all systems are just transformation procedures being done...almost like your doing rotations (but more generally just transformations) to the ruliad object because one of those rotations is going to have a direct path to the answer your looking for (similiar to criticality or finding phase transition points where different scales align). These transformations are themselves rules. So rules = transformations = symmetries is basically what that boils down to.
I really like this trifecta because when i go to think about what rules i need to make a system that im interested in, i imagine myself rotating this object...visualizing this more geometric, rotating around analog as a change in reference frame and therefor a different perspective or approach to the system...It's like a literatal way to think about how to move around in ruliad space.
Interesting. You've been doing some serious thinking here! I agree, I find that now that I've been thinking for a while in terms of computational models, it's very difficult to go back to thinking of the universe in terms of continuous equations.
@@lasttheory Ya man, i love it, and i think about and try to exercise this stuff in practice every day.
Actually there's something you should check out too : John was on a livestream a few days ago (ActInf MathStream 009.1 ~ Jonathan Gorard: A computational perspective on observation and cognition) and I think you and everyone else who's interested in the wolfram model, would really really like it. He discusses topic, about the interface between observers and the systems they are messing with in a bit more formal way than I expressed here. It's a must-watch short lecture.
@@NightmareCourtPictures I'll definitely watch that: I'm really interested in what Jonathan has to say about observers. Thanks for letting me know!
Amazing talk very interesting....
eyes take in information at the speed of light. translating information from the writen word. requires putting them in sequence. which takes more time.
Reality and our models for it, are intimately connected through us. We choose what parts of reality to call important, and we model it through that lens, so it should be no surprise that it works well for our needs.
Yes, that's interesting, thanks Melinda. What you're saying comes close to Stephen Wolfram's idea that how we view the world depends on our position in rulial space.
Great video 👏 appreciate flashing names and technical terms at the bottom, very helpful 👍
Thanks Hank!
Great stuff!
Will there be more videos with Jonathan?
I'll be reaching out to Jonathan to invite him for another interview. I have so many more questions I want to ask him!
@@lasttheoryNow that he wants to get in the public light, there's no more excuses 😉
@@harriehausenman8623 I'm sure Jonathan will be up for more of this, it's just a question of attracting his attention... he's a busy guy!
It seems that modelling the universe as a graph is like a shot in the dark. The fact that it happens to hit is highly significant. This just might be right!
Yes, that’s a good way of putting it, a shot in the dark. There a reasons to think that it might be a shot worth taking, such as that computation is so comprehensive a paradigm that it would be surprising if our continuous equations of physics _couldn’t_ be modelled computationally. But yes, I agree, the fact that it hits in some suggestive ways makes it extremely promising. Thanks Neale!
Keep it up Jonathan!
One of my big concerns is that points in space may be related in multiple ways....gravitationally, electrically, etc. How can a single edge between nodes represent this?
Good question. How it works gravitationally is the easiest one to answer. The hypergraph _is_ space, so the structure of the hypergraph _is_ the structure of space, so if the hypergraph is curved then space is curved. And as Jonathan Gorard has shown, the hypergraph _is_ curved in exactly the way Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts space-time to be curved. Since the curvature of space-time explains gravity, that’s that one covered.
The electrical and nuclear forces are, I suspect, much more difficult to explain in the Wolfram model. We don’t yet have an explanation for an electrically charged particle, such as an electron, let alone an explanation for the electrical attraction/repulsion of one such particle to/from another, as far as I know. I’d like to dig deeper into this with Jonathan.
Thanks for the question Neale!
@@lasttheory Thanks. Looking forward to seeing how this work evolves.
Rewriting rule = renormalization group flow.
Nice. But in the end of the previous episode you promised to tackle the question why some people don't like Stephen Wolfram. ))
Yes, thanks for remembering, Vlad! I generally alternate my solo videos with these ones from Jonathan. Rest assured, my next one will be the promised one about Stephen Wolfram!
2:51 I never noticed that before about the irreversibility of entangled particles. Is that compositionality if they are combined one state system and if either particle though carrying different spins can't be distinguished from one another? They separate parts, but whole and identical.. It's kind of an odd nomenclature the more I think about it.
Thanks, Kristopher. I don't pretend to fully understand this, but yes, I think it's true that it makes sense to consider entangled particles as a _single_ particle. The whole concept of discrete particles, though obviously powerful in understanding light, atoms, etc., will, I hope, eventually emerge from the hypergraph, and then maybe we'll be able to think of entangled particles as more unary than binary.
Hello Jonathan,
I'm not very familiar with Wolfram's model and you say it's applicable.
Please tell me something about the predictive power of this model and could you give and example where it surpasses the "standard" physics?
Thanks for the question, Mark here replying (I'm the one who's interviewing Jonathan in these videos).
The first thing to say in answer to your question is that like all recent theories of physics, the first goal is to reproduce current theories, in a way that explains those theories more fully than before. The Wolfram model has succeeded here: take a look at Jonathan's accounts of the derivations of general relativity czcams.com/video/1tjhE0U-mgc/video.html and quantum mechanics czcams.com/video/YZhCYLZanEE/video.html to see how these theories fall out of the model.
As for surpassing "standard" physics, though the model has, in my mind, surpassed existing theories in explanatory power, it hasn't produced any novel predictions yet. For an overview of where such predictions might come from, see my conversation with Jonathan _Where's the evidence for Wolfram Physics?_ czcams.com/video/XLtxXkugd5w/video.html
Hope that helps!
Have you gotten Jonathan to talk about time? A series, B series, something else?
No, we haven't gone deep into time, but I'm hoping to get Jonathan back for another conversation, where I'll certainly ask him about this, particularly the collapse of multiple paths through the multiway graph into a single timeline. Thanks for the comments!
This is JUST '" dust bunnies"', how do you derive an entropy? {what gives it a paratime(time like order) metric} ...
How to derive entropy is an interesting question. One simple way to define it in a computational system is in terms of the number of possible states of the system: the larger the number of possible states, the higher the entropy. I need to dig into this deeper!
@@lasttheory when an artist starts a painting on a blank canvas, all states are possible. Each stroke narrows the choice further until by the final stroke, at which time there are many fewer possibilities. This would be somewhat of a reversal of the typical view that the universe is heading towards more entropy, and would be closer to Julian Barbour’s view of the universe, that it is actually growing in complexity and reducing in entropy.
Didn't realize before that this is stuff from 2022
Yes, sorry, I could have made that clearer in the show notes. It has taken me a _long_ time to edit this conversation! But I'm hoping I'll have some new stuff from Jonathan for you soon...
my man J.G. was COOKING here
Oh, yes, he was.
Not bad. The direction he's driving at is correct.
This is actually so fucking exciting. I astound myself at what a nerd I am sometines....
Yep, hypergraphs can do that to you!
There's been a Wolfram/Weinstein discussion, wonder what the future holds for a possible Gorard/Weinstein discussion event? Would be interesting.
Oh, yes, I would love to see that! Stephen Wolfram is often quite loose, as is Eric Weinstein, and I suspect that Jonathan Gorard would sharpen Weinstein up, just as he sharpens Wolfram up. Thanks Merle!
I'd assume his model avoids all scales horizon paradoxes that 3 degrees of motion/separation really fails all feilds of study on..
But does it start only once the early detection to scale of definable actors & particles ? Is this what he means is simple as we just need to know what critical extreme and maybe Lattus blemishes to know everything it can ever become or will ever be..
He's not counting the floor of reductionism where whatever perculating permutations of emerging energetic actors are coming out of as the simple landscape is he?
I know here we are lost outside of knowing it's infinite sums of freedom/ invisible complexity timelessness without linear direction just some whatever perfect nature to life giving energetic floor of everything.
Anytime millions of American 3rd grade health class kids predicted by asking where the code of life measure was before it was ever discovered and in direct contrast to darwin and his absolute opposition to that notion, it's worthy to note it was a proper orientation and direction of classical American christian decendants to be that way.
To crack open nature, then re orientate bottom up is very American but probably not liked abroad ..
But it has with stood 90 years of funding humanism direct opposition and still stands the test within the common population or they would abandon it lol
What is this?: 3:00 "processes and how they compose, not just in sequence, which is what traditional computation is about, but in parallel, which is what multi computation is about"
Rewrtiting systems that can work in parallel existed for almost a century and CS undergraduates have been taking courses in parallel computing for a long time as well. So could you please tell me what exactly is supposed to be novel about multiway computation? It's the 21st century. Has Gorard been skipping classes?
Yes, of course, computers have been around for a while now, and the idea of parallel computation too. What Jonathan Gorard and Stephen Wolfram are exploring is the application of multiway rewriting systems to science. They've succeeded in reproducing general relativity and the core of quantum mechanics. That to me is exciting and new!
@@lasttheoryThanks for your response. From what I can see his GR paper is pretty long. Have you studied his paper? The input seems to contian some extra assumptions, while the output does not seem to be the complete version of GR. Do you know by any chance, what the true extent of his contribution in GR is? You'd have to take his output minus the input to pinpoint the actual contribution. Also, minus the previous work of others of course.
@@mrhypergraph Good questions. Yes, Jonathan makes some assumptions - specifically: 1. causal invariance; 2. asymptotic dimension preservation; 3. weak ergodicity - but these are pretty general assumptions, nothing too specific. And yes, what Jonathan has derived is Einstein's equations in the absence and in the presence of mass/energy, which is not _all_ of what we know about General Relativity, but it's a good start. See my video with Jonathan _How to derive general relativity from Wolfram Physics_ czcams.com/video/1tjhE0U-mgc/video.html for more on this.
In terms of Jonathan's contribution, it's not to General Relativity - he's just deriving what we already know - but to the _derivation_ of General Relativity from the Wolfram model. In a way, what he's doing is helping _explain_ General Relativity. And if this explanation is right, then we'll eventually be able to predict things that are _not_ predicted by General Relativity, such as fluctuations in the dimensionality of space away from three. See my video with Jonathan _Where's the evidence for Wolfram Physics?_ czcams.com/video/XLtxXkugd5w/video.html for more on _this._
Thanks for the exchange of comments!
@@lasttheory Thanks, I looked into it. It seems that the assumption of weak ergodicity is equivalent to assuming special relativity to be true locally, without knowing a set of rewriting rules that will make it true. The assumption of asymptotic dimension preservation is equivalent to assuming that the hypergraph is trying to preserve its dimension and its flatness, again without knowing a set of rewriting rules that will make it true. So in reality, despite repeated grand claims, he has not reproduced most of GR the way it should have been reproduced and his only real contribution would only be the insight that both, dimension preservation and minimization of spacetime curvature could both be caused by the same unknown process. A unification of the two, of sorts. And this only counts if no one else figured this out before, which I don't know about.
@@mrhypergraph That's great that you've looked into this further. I think these assumptions Jonathan has made are quite weak, weak being good, in that he's not making any especially extravagant assumptions. And the fact that he's making no other assumptions about the set of rewriting rules is also good, in that his conclusions hold regardless of which specific rules you choose. Still, yes, this is far from proof of the validity of the Wolfram model. As Jonathan puts it, if he _hadn't_ been able to derive Einstein's equations from the hypergraph, _that_ would have been a serious problem for the model! If you're looking for evidence that Jonathan should receive accolades for his proof, then sure, you won't find any, but no one's suggesting that he _should_ receive accolades for it. However, I do see it as one of the indications that the Wolfram model may have something to it. Thanks for your thoughts!
I found A New Kind Of Science to be a highly repetitive empty suit. Maybe this will be better.
Thanks Andrew. Yes, I know what you mean about _A New Kind of Science._ Wolfram's ideas have come a long way since then: _A project to find the Fundamental Theory of Physics_ is far more concrete. Since then, Jonathan Gorard's papers have tied it all to real physics in a rigorous way.
this guy looks like me
Do yourself a favor. Read A. Garciadiego, Bertrand Russell and the Origins of the Set-theoretic 'paradoxes.'
Also, here's a little problem in Einstein's book Relativity. When the light occurs in the train experiment, Einstein says that point M' "naturally coincides" with point M. What is his definition of the "natural" coincidence of points?
Finally, read M. Kimura, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.
a unified theory should incompas all observable fact in a unified way. my theory does that. with no contradiction.
In other words at the level of tiny everything is connected to everything around it. Then we invent a language to make this fact more obscure to the point of the nonsensical.
Hi Gregory, Sorry if the language seems obscure! It does to me, too, sometimes, since I come from a physics and computational background. To mathematicians like Jonathan, though, the language is more familiar. I've been doing my best in my solo videos to explain all the concepts in the simplest possible terms. They do map to important (and comprehensible) ideas!
I followed the language without any trouble however what you say can be put in even more accurate and simple every day terms. Psychology, virology, medicine all do the same thing and after 50 yers of it enough is enough. An example in virology "isolate"" doesn't have the same meaning as it normally does. for example a common virus like a flu virus isn't isolated, using the term in it's normal way. It's misleading and I suspect elitist. Despite all that I enjoyed your presentation. All the best.@@lasttheory
I've got a maths background, trying to explain statistical analysis to people is virtually impossible. Hoswever what physists have done in talking about QM is bazaar. It seems they have created a whole new industry. What with "consciousness causing the wave function to collapse", it's unforgiveable lol. @@lasttheory
Another brainiac found. Will keep an eye on.
Yes, Jonathan's brilliant, for sure, and these ideas are well worth keeping an eye on!