The Wolfram Physics project is exciting on its own merits, but in addition to being a candidate theory of everything, it seems like it could also help explain the hard problem of consciousness, which would make us two for three!
But first, let’s back up a little.
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist at UC, Irvine and known for two related theories:
- Multimodal User Interface (MUI) theory, which holds that our perception of objective reality is a user interface created by our consciousness to help us interact with the real world
- Conscious Realism, which holds that consciousness is the most fundamental aspect of reality and that everything we perceive as the physical world is emergent
It’s conscious realism in particular that has an intriguing similarity with the Wolfram Physics Project (WPP).1 As a refresher, the fundamental building block of WPP is a “a collection of abstract relations between abstract elements”; basically, a set of rules that operates on a current state to generate a new state. The WPP announcement uses this example rule to illustrate the principle:
{{x, y}, {x, z}} → {{x, z}, {x, w}, {y, w}, {z, w}}
Well, this seems very similar to the Conscious Realism model for conscious agents:
The channel P transmits messages from the world W, leading to conscious experiences X. The channel D transmits messages from X, leading to actions G. The channel A transmits messages from G that are received as new states of W. The counter N is an integer that keeps track of the number of messages that are passed on each channel.
But if we unwrap the World (\(W\)) in \(N\), this looks \(W_n → W_{n+1}\), where the complexity of the conscious experience (\(X\)), free-will decision making (\(D\)), and action (\(G\)) is collapsed into the black-box operator “→”.
Presumably, an actual mathematician could perform a slightly more rigorous equivalence proof, but if Hoffman’s conscious agent model is a WPP-compatible ruleset, then starting only with Hoffman’s Hypothesis 1, “the world W consists entirely of conscious agents”, we’d have a solution to the hard problem of consciousness2 from which both general relativity and quantum physics would emerge.
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AFAIK, there’s not actually a name for Wolfram’s approach to a theory of everything, just a name for the overall project, so I use WPP for both. ↩
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Granted, it’s a somewhat tautological solution that contends qualia are all that exist, but if we can start with just that and derive all of physics, I think we should be satisfied. ↩