Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #124
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Channel: Lex Fridman
Views: 325,696
Rating: 4.9175754 out of 5
Keywords: stephen wolfram, artificial intelligence, agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex fridman, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, lex jre, mit ai
Id: -t1_ffaFXao
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 263min 38sec (15818 seconds)
Published: Tue Sep 15 2020
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interesting interview but its funny how much more humility people that created C and C++ and neural networks and GANS have than him
After this interview found myself in a all types of fantastic Wikipedia rabbit holes
What an absolutely amazing talk!
I have a question: When applying rules 'whenever' they can fire anywhere in the hypergraph, is there not the possibility that two patterns would intersect, and the rules therefore contend for supremacy? Maybe there is some underlying principle that patterns SHOULD NOT intersect, which would solve it, or maybe we flip a coin as to which rule wins?
Wolfram is going to win a Nobel Prize. As layperson who enjoys following science and cosmology I've been following Wolfram since his first blog post at the beginning of the pandemic.
Been really hoping to get a good deep dive with him on a podcast with a host who could ask some great questions.
Really enjoyed this discussion.
I fell asleep listening to this.... when I woke up, I learned about mathematical proofs as a path across a landscape... and things clicked. I'm going to listen to this one a few times.
I have zero idea what a non-deterministic Turing machine is, or is good for... I expect many days worth of Googling.
Of the parts I did hear, it all had a VERY strong "ring of truth" to it. Many of the parts of my mapper brain clicked with all the new connections being made in the background.
Lex... keep up the amazing work. I can't thank you enough.
It was a good talk, I was listening to it on a walk in teh woods. I'd still find myself drifting in the conversation. Had to take a break to regroup mentally
Can a square peg fit into a round hole? If quantized, it can.
Sounds like a new kind of math. ‘Causal invariance’ sounds like a variation of a ‘rule’ or ‘principle’. Sounds like a variation of classical physics. What is your opinion of the Tao? What of cosmic inflation, quantum uncertainties, gravity waves, and ripples which lead father than edges? Have you worked on climate models? The Wolfram language seems versatile. Interesting podcast.
I haven't had the chance to listen all the way through yet, but some pieces of this remind me of what I get out of reading Richard Rorty.
There's another video of wolfram from daily dot where he's talking about how human goals and purposes are not automatable. Goals and purposes happen to be a kind of axiomatic foundation of Rorty's approach.
Rorty also suggests a kind of equivalence of description. A physicist can give a description of light and a poet can give a very different description. A million people may give a million different descriptions of light. A person will apply the label "Truth" to whatever description happens to be most useful in helping them advance toward their particular goals, whatever they may be. It is useful for me to consider there to be an enormous number of possible goals a person or community may have, goals related to physical needs, emotional needs, social desires, etc etc etc.
In this approach, new human goals and projects and desires arise nigh endlessly and so the need for new creative descriptions is nigh endless as well.
Inspired by my reading of Rorty, I have been experimenting with what it's like to try to cultivate a worldview that is more like an ongoing thought experiment, as opposed to a world view that is made up of a series of propositions or truth claims. In this way I have to experience how things play out instead of soleley relying on predicting or reasoning, which obviously are very important but it does seem that it is difficult to account for the limitations of our ability to reason out terribly complex things.
What's it like if I hold this idea for a while? What's it like if I hold that other idea for a while? Does this idea help move me or the community toward the particular goals I think are most important? Have I experienced the usefulness or am I only predicting or reasoning about the usefulness? If I'm predicting, how do I know I'm not playing at predicting something that may not be predictable? And so forth forever about everything (or as much as is doable).
At the end of this Lex interview, wolfram speculated "The statement 'the universe exists' is essentially undecidable to any entity that is embedded in the universe". This is an idea that I would like to see applied more often to ufo questions or questions of mystical experience or questions of the divine or questions of some deeper significance. Are ghosts real? Are ufos real? Are NDEs real? One approach to these types of questions I think is to see what it's like to consider that we don't know what 'real' is. Another way to say it is: It is useful for me and my particular portfolio of goals to consider that we don't know what reality is. It is usefult to me to consider that we don't have any complete and thorough and ultimate description of the universe. And so what do we really even mean by asking is this Real? If it's useful for your particular goals, even emotional goals, to think it is 'real,' then that is one thing. For someone else with differnt particular goals or need, it may be more useful to think it is not 'real.' it is often useful for us to think we know what real means, but there can be usefulness in also exploring what it's like to not know what it means.
I also like how at the very end W. suggests a sort of equivalence of meaningfulness. I find that idea to be very beautiful.