Eric Hawthorne wrote:
>
> Any comments? Can anyone point me to similar speculations?
>
> Thanks, Eric
>
>
>
>
> A collection of thoughts (very much a work in early progress)
> provoked by chapters 9 and 12 of "A New Kind of Science"
> by Stephen Wolfram.
>
... rest deleted ...
I truly like the idea of identifying Wolfram's "fundamental CA" with
the network of possible differences. If you look at the idea behind
the Schmidhuber ensemble, which is later expanded in my "Why Occam's
Razor" paper, you will see the set of all descriptions as being the
fundamental "plenitude" (we tend to use the Multiverse to refer to
solutions of Schroedinger's equation :).
That one gets a sequence of transitions between these descriptions is
simply the TIME postulate descibed in my Occam's Razor paper, which I
learnt recently is closely related to the Kantian notion of Prior -
propositions which must be true of themselves, yet not tautological
(for example "I think, therefore I am").
That these transitions must follow a simple (rather than complex) rule
is simply the argument I present in "Why Occam's Razor". Even if the
rule is complex, it is most likely indistinguishable from a simple
rule.
However, going beyond this position seems a bit of a flight of
fancy. For instance, I couldn't undertand why the CAs should be 2D. As
far as I can tell, any dimensionality is a possibility...
Cheers
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Received on Mon Nov 11 2002 - 20:15:05 PST