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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

I wrote up more or less the same idea ten years ago, but in what I think is a more accessible presentation:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-a...

I have read and appreciated your writings going back to the comp.lang.lisp days, but a blog post that starts with “if you haven’t read the previous post, please do before reading the rest of this one” is not what I would consider accessible. …and that previous post then asks the reader to first read a paper or watch a video before proceeding. While a decade later than what you wrote, Wolfram’s article is much more self contained and complete.

Thank you so much for this.

Whenever people criticize Wolfram the comeback is often, he’s just trying to discuss big ideas that mainstream science won’t talk about. Of course that’s not the reason for the criticism at all and I think your work here shows that it’s totally fine to speculate and get a little philosophical. The results can be interesting and thought provoking.

There’s a difference between big ideas and grandiosity. It also shows big ideas can stay scientifically grounded and don’t require making up corny terminology (Ruliad? lol).

More than that, "ruliad" is complete vacuous, too. "All possible rules applied to all possible states infinitely many times", like, every possible theory, including the right one is in it, ok... thanks for defining this useless object.

It is possible to make quantitative statements that I think capture many of the intuitions you assert. Here was one attempt:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...

That particular proposal was mathematically wrong for reasons I still find physically perplexing (it turns out that for some events quantum theory allows for stronger memory records - defined via classial mutual information - of entropy decreasing events!). A simple example is in here: https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1726 (I am second author).

Very interesting! Thanks for the pointers! I'll need to take some time to digest these.

It's sort of funny that where the title alludes to the arrow of time, opening with a quote asserting "all measurements are in principle reversible", it pretty quickly gets to a different arrow of time - that of comprehension:

> "If you haven't read the previous post ... this won't make any sense"

Could you have demonstrated, perhaps accidentally, an alternative organising principle allowing temporal ordering to emerge in a computationally oriented ontology? Can the future only "make sense" if it temporally follows the past?

Only half kidding!

That's actually a great question, and one I've been wrestling with for years. Why do we perceive time as a sort of continuous monotonic flow? And I think it can be explained in terms of perception and comprehension, which I have a gut feel can be formalized as a kind of preferred basis selection. But rendering that intuition into words (and math) has turned out to be quite challenging, which I why I haven't written about it yet. Maybe in the future :-)

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