[whatnow37373]

"Computation irreducibility"[0] is Mr. Wolfram's word for it and I believe it has some relationship to his CA physics, but I won't pretend I understand.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility

[jonahbenton]

Yes. He relates an interpretation/definition of the second law of thermodynamics- the increasing entropy thing- to his irreducibility. And builds a computational theory about the role and importance of the physics "observer" in these analyses. Computational irreducibility is basically a statement both about the intrinsic requirement for computation to arrive at the future, and also about the computational capability of the "observer"- a model, or our brains- to arrive, or not, at the future more efficiently.

I am a computational person, not a scientist, and I think science people find him to be speaking total garbage. That seems a correct assessment to me. His model of the world from physics perspective seems wrong. Nevertheless personally I find his computational lens/bias to be useful.

[kennysoona]

> I am a computational person, not a scientist, and I think science people find him to be speaking total garbage. That seems a correct assessment to me. His model of the world from physics perspective seems wrong.

I don't think it's that he is speaking garbage, he is basically talking about digital physics which is a real theory being considered and researched, not pseudoscience.

But he doesn't work with the scientific community at all, he just writes his long essays and uses his own terms and ignores anyone else doing similar work. He then gets upset when scientists don't just defer to him.

[cubefox]

Though most academic disciplines have a strong "not invented here" bias. It makes you ignore anything outside your citation bubble or from different fields with somewhat different conventions and terms. Even if the other guys are academics as well.