Wolfram What Ultimately Is There?... And Other Foundational Questions

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-57955-102-5
Verlag: Wolfram Media
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 432 Seiten

What is time?
What is consciousness?
Why does the universe exist?

Decades of foundational work in science and technology have led Stephen Wolfram to tackle some of humanity's oldest philosophical questions-and to argue that it is now possible to arrive at answers long thought beyond the reach of meaningful progress.

These lively and engaging essays cover topics from timeless philosophical questions to artificial intelligence and the future of the human condition. Along the way, Wolfram makes a host of complex ideas understandable while challenging readers to rethink long-held assumptions.

The book takes a fresh look at foundational concepts such as time, motion, free will, the nature of minds, mathematical truth-and what ultimately is there-all from new perspectives opened by recent advances in basic science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wolfram, Stephen

Leseproben

What Ultimately Is There? Metaphysics and the Ruliad

Moving Metaphysics from Philosophy to Science

“What ultimately is there?” has always been seen as a fundamental—if thorny—question for philosophy, or perhaps theology. But despite a couple of millennia of discussion, I think it’s fair to say that only modest progress has been made with it. But maybe, just maybe, this is the moment where that’s going to change—and on the basis of surprising new ideas and new results from our latest efforts in science, it’s finally going to be possible to make real progress, and in the end to build what amounts to a formal, scientific approach to metaphysics.

It all centers around the ultimate foundational construct that I call the ruliad—and how observers like us, embedded within it, must perceive it. And it’s a story of how—for observers like us—fundamental concepts like space, time, mathematics, laws of nature, and indeed, objective reality, must inevitably emerge.

Traditional philosophical thinking about metaphysical questions has often become polarized into strongly opposing views. But one of the remarkable things we’ll see here is that with what we learn from science we’ll often be able to bring together these opposing views—typically in rather unexpected ways.

I should emphasize that my goal here is to summarize what we can now say about metaphysics on the basis of our recent progress in science. It’ll be very valuable to connect this to historical positions and historical thinking in philosophy and theology—but that’s not something I’m going to attempt to do here. I should also say that I’m going to concentrate on the major intellectual arc of what one can think of as a new scientific approach to metaphysics; the technical details of the science I’ve mostly already discussed elsewhere.

The Foundations of Physics

We’re going to begin our journey by talking about the traditional objective of physics: to find abstract theories that describe what we observe and measure in the physical world. From the history of physics we’ve come to expect that such theories will always end up being at best successive approximations. But the new possibility raised by our Physics Project is that we may now finally have reached the end: a truly fundamental theory of physics, that provides a complete description of the lowest-level “machine code” of our universe.

Already in antiquity the question arose of whether the universe is ultimately a continuum or is made of discrete atomic elements. By the end of the nineteenth century it was finally established that matter, at least, consists of discrete elements. And soon it became clear that light could be thought of in the same way. But what about space? Ever since Euclid, it had been assumed that space was a continuum. And efforts in the early twentieth century to see whether it, like matter, might be discrete did not work out.

But a century later, building on new, computationally inspired ideas, our Physics Project starts from the concept that space is not just a simple continuum. Instead, it’s a complicated discrete structure that in fact represents every aspect of our universe—both what we normally think of as space, and everything in it. There are many ways one can imagine describing this structure. A convenient one is to say that it consists of a very large number of discrete intrinsically identical “atoms of space”—that one can think of as being like disembodied geometrical points—whose only property (other than being distinct) is how they’re abstractly related to other atoms of space. In other words, we imagine describing the whole structure of the universe in terms of the pattern of relations between the atoms of space. And it’s convenient to represent this as a hypergraph whose nodes are atoms of space, and whose hyperedges define the relations between them. (If relations are only between pairs of nodes, this becomes an ordinary graph.)

An important piece of intuition that comes from our practical experience with computers is that it’s possible to represent everything we deal with in terms of bits. But when we also want to represent the structure of space it’s better to think not in terms of bits in some predetermined arrangement, but instead in terms of the lower level and more flexible “data structure” defined by a hypergraph.

So how can the universe as we normally perceive it emerge from this? It’s very much analogous to what happens with matter. For example, even though something like water consists of discrete molecules, the aggregate effect of them is to produce seemingly continuous fluid behavior. But then—still made up of the same underlying molecules—we can have discrete eddies in the fluid, analogous in the case of space to particles like electrons (or, for that matter, black holes).

Time and Spacetime

If there’s a hypergraph that’s the ultimate “data structure” of the universe, what are the algorithms that get applied to it? Just as we imagine the data structure to consist of discrete elements, so also we imagine that changes to it occur by discrete events. And for now we can imagine that there’s some fixed rule that determines these elementary events. For example, the rule might be that whenever a piece of the hypergraph has some specified form, it should be replaced by a piece of hypergraph with some other specified form.

We can think of the application of such a rule as corresponding to the computation of the “next state” of the universe from the previous one. And if the rule is repeatedly applied, it will generate a whole sequence of updated states of the universe. And we can then identify the progression of these states as corresponding to the progression of time in the universe.

It’s notable that in this setup space and time are, at least at the outset, different kinds of things. Space is associated with the structure of the hypergraph, yet time is associated with computation on it.

Still, just as the hypergraph defines relations between atoms of space, we can imagine a causal graph that defines “causal relations” between events. Any particular event can be thought of as taking some collection of atoms of space as “inputs”, and producing some other collection of atoms of space as “outputs”. But this then implies a causal relation between events: any event that uses as input an atom of space that was generated as output by another event can be thought of as “causally dependent” on that other event.

And the whole pattern of these causal relations ultimately defines a causal graph for all events in the universe—that in a sense encodes the structure of the universe in both space and time.

But given such a causal graph, can we reconstruct a series of hypergraphs from it? We can think of such hypergraphs as representing successive “instantaneous states of space”. And—just like in relativity—it turns out that there isn’t a unique possible such sequence of states. Instead, there are many different sequences, all consistent with the underlying causal graph—and corresponding in traditional physics terms to different relativistic reference frames.

In effect, therefore, we can think of the causal graph as being the “true representation” of information about the universe. Any particular “reconstructed” sequence of hypergraphs inevitably involves arbitrary choices.

When we introduced the causal graph, we talked about building it by starting from a particular hypergraph, and then looking at the effect of applying rules to it. But the point is that it turns out there’s a lot of choice in both the hypergraph and how we apply the rules, but (as a result of the phenomenon of causal invariance) essentially all choices will lead us to the same causal graph.

We might have imagined that given a fundamental theory of physics we should be able to ask what the universe in some sense “statically is”. But what we’re discovering is that we should instead be talking about the processes that happen in the universe—as represented by the causal graph.

We can identify the passage of time as the progression of events in the causal graph. But why is there even something like space? Ultimately it turns out to be a reflection of the “entanglement” of different sequences of events in the causal graph—and its structure is in effect a map of the relations between these sequences of events (a structure which can conveniently be represented by a hypergraph).

Imagine starting from one event in the causal graph, then tracing a sequence of events that depend on it. We can think of the successive events as occurring progressively later in time. But what about two events that are both immediate successors of a given event? What is their relationship? The key idea is that even though these “sibling” events occur “at the same time”, they are still separated—in what we can think of as space.

But how then is “space as a whole” formed? Ultimately it’s something very dynamic. And indeed it’s the continual occurrence of events in the universe that “knits together” the structure of space. Without such “activity”, there would be nothing we could coherently consider as “space”.

At the level of atoms of space there is nothing permanent in the universe; in every elementary event, atoms of space are destroyed, and new ones created. But somehow at an aggregate level there is a certain stability to what emerges. It’s again a...