The Concept of the Ruliad (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Concept of the Ruliad (2021)

writings.stephenwolfram.com

33 pointsandsoitis19 comments

From my understanding it says that the laws of physics are merely expansion following some set of rules. Because there is no limit to the complexity that you can gain by expanding using some sort of expansion rules, and the rules of physics are emergent phenomenon of this expansion. But why does the complexity stop there? my intuition says that if the complexity is ever increasing, why does the laws of physics not evolve over time into something much more complex? Why would random expansion like this settle on a set of stable structures? I thought the whole point is that it does not?

You can have both consistent laws and highly complex emergent behavior.

For example if you take the rules of quantum mechanics and simulate sufficiently many particles, you would see the rules of thermodynamics emerge and classical physics emerge.

If you take enough of those, you atoms and molecules, and simulate sufficiently many, you would see chemical bonds and the rules of chemistry emerge.

Take sufficiently many chemistry molecules, and let your sim run for long enough, you should eventually get biological membranes and then life to emerge.

your example is intuitive and understandable. I just assumed that Wolfram was unto more 'radical' kind of expansion. Something more akin to 'seed' than 'building blocks'.

My understanding of his 'ruliad' idea is that the rules yield stable and predictable laws like QM and relativity.

His idea is basically that there is this high-dimensional graph that represents reality and if you define certain propagation rules between nodes you see the emergence of stable laws like quantum mechanics, relativity, and space itself.

> Why would random expansion like this settle on a set of stable structures?

The anthropic principle comes into play. If the laws of physics changed enough we would disappear. Of course, then you can ask why don't we see tiny changes or changes in far away regions of the universe.

I would rather expect that this rule based (grammar) theory applies to the ever lasting evolution of the consciousness/mind rather than the underlying universe.

As another commenter pointed out is weird if the physics laws just stopped evolving in this massive rule set system.

They are rediscovering old and familiar philosophy. This is not a trivial pursuit since they are doing it in a new context. The most noteworthy rediscovery here can be traced back to the Logos, which was once already rediscovered by Christian philosophers and adapted to their then new system of morality.

Rewrite rules do appear to be a new addition to the narrative of the Logos even though it has precedence elsewhere. If we wish to build upon the discoveries of ages past, adding rewrite rules to a Logos concerned with goodness, we may discover moral non-commutativity.

It is interesting to note that the Logos was originally discovered in a collectivist society. With Christianity there was the beginning of an individualist society. Originally the Logos appeared together with Pathos and Ethos as the vehicle of convictions. Today we may perhaps wish to consider Logos, Ethos and Mythos as our understanding of reality, where the individual Pathos is replaced with the collective Mythos.

If the greeks said that matter is made of atoms it doesn't mean that we rediscovered that fact. Because their atoms were not our atoms.

Thank you, nomad. Do you have anything else to say about The Good?

I started talking about it once I realized it was not obvious to everyone, but many who say they believe in free speech actually don't want to hear it.

I'm tired.

This was a curious (and I'd argue unobvious) response to my request. I think it's fair to say I'm a free speech advocate, and I do want to hear more. I appreciate that you are tired, and I'm grateful that you've offered me more of your perspective. Thank you. If you change your mind, I'll be listening. `/salute`.

That was not directed at you personally, excuse me. I wrote some more about it in a couple of posts on HN yesterday.

I am torn between wanting to read something which seems genuinely interesting and not wanting to waste time on a crackpot wall of text.

Whenever content related to Wolfram comes up there are mixed opinions about his genius - I wonder how much more impactful he could have been if he had a smooth-talking PR person filtering and shaping his output into a more digestible form.

Wolfram is always fascinating on Lex even if he goes on a bit too long (it’s Wolfram after all). He talks ruliads in his second appearance: https://youtu.be/-t1_ffaFXao

On one occasion I had the opportunity to ask Stephen Wolfram personally some questions about the Hypergraph theory. My current understanding of the Ruliad is that it is a graph of all possible graphs connected by all the possible applications of rules on a graph. Because it's infinite and weird, it also contains itself. The main hypothesis of Hypergraph theory is that our apparent physical reality must be a vertex on this graph, if only by virtue of its formal definition.

My question to him was if this kind of reasoning inevitably based itself on the same kind of reasoning used for millennia to reason about God (the dogma of faith/God is good etc.), to which I didn't get a satisfactory answer.

Discussed at the time:

The Concept of the Ruliad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29215922 - Nov 2021 (19 comments)

I look forward to have Ruliad decrypt the Hieroglyphs left to right or right to left, in all manners possible where the graphs are unified by what Bridge the Ruliad can be...

Found it much easier to hear him talk about it on ML Street Talk, 2 months ago (also on 7 months ago).

https://www.youtubetranscript.com/?v=dkpDjd2nHgo&pp=ygUWbWwg... though only /rulia/ matches, only once. Not a great transcript from YouTube it seems.

Also the recent TED talk:

How to Think Computationally about AI, The Universe and Everything https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/10/how-to-think-com...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com