WOLFRAM’S INSIGHTS
I have a special place in my heart for @stephen_wolfram. I think he’s the most underappreciated intellectual of our age. And he works hard and endlessly for our collective benefit.
For those of you not yet aware of Stephen’s achievements:
1. He’s created extraordinary software for math and science: The Computerized Algebra System, Wolfram Programming Language, Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and more.
2. He’s disambiguated mathematics and computation and developed a set of ‘principles or rules’ that explain the capacities of math(description), computation(operations), simulation(consequences).
3. And he’s created an interesting alternative to evolutionary simulations by what we might call exhaustive search for survival using simple causal rules.
4. And while it’s still controversial, he’s used this exhaustive evolutionary model of computation to demonstrate that the universe will emerge as it has because it’s the only universe that would survive evolutionary competition.
Now, we saw peak interest in Mandelbrot’s fractals because ‘they were pretty’. But mandelbrot was demonstrating that computers could achieve when humans never could, by sheer work performed in time. But we haven’t internalized Mandalbrot’s insights – particularly in monetary policy, economics, and finance. (or AI)
But we haven’t seen the same popular interest in Wolfram’s work because there isn’t a ‘hook’ like the artistic renderings of Fractals. Similarly, we’re now overwhelmed by the first two generations of AI: Bayesian Accounting (image, speech, and patern recognition), and now, speech prediction.
As someone who also had to create science and vocabulary of Operationalism (the behavioral sciences equivalent of what Stephen’s accomplished in Mathematics, Physics, and Computation), I empathize with the difficulty of both the innovation, but more importantly, explaining, distributing, and popularizing it.
My only lament when listening to Stephen is that he’s still struggling to describe his insights from OUTSIDE of the framework that he’s developed them within. But he’s not alone. We see this problem in every discipline because we lack the skills for describing any phenomena across the very scales Stephen is disambiguating. Philosophers failing tragically, and it’s worse in psychology, sociology, economics, law, politics, and world systems (the market between group evolutionary strategies).
We have lost the art of cross-disciplinary comprehension, and in doing so, lost the benefit of cross-disciplinary pattern recognition. So, at least until now, we’ve failed to produce a universally commensurable paradigm, vocabulary, grammar, and logic sufficient to satisfy EO Wilson’s prediction of the unification of the formal(logical), physical(before), behavioral(during), and evolutionary(after) sciences.
And while his insights are spreading, they aren’t spreading where it matters most to common people: in the behavioral sciences.
And if they did they’d face the same resistance Darwinian thought still does. I’ll state that more pejoratively, as the academy is open to mathematics where it suits them and closed to mathematics where it doesn’t. And worse, the academy is closed to innovation where innovation from mathematics(statistics), to computation(operations), to simulation(consequences).
And when I say the academy I’m not even sure that’s the case – it’s likely administration as much as behavioral pseudoscience within the disciplines themselves.
If we are still revolting against the Darwinian explanation of behavior, what does that mean for Wolfram’s formalization of the Darwinian structure of the universe – or my work that applies a similar method to the formal and behavioral sciences?
So Wolfram’s work is a profound innovation, but what if we’re entering a new dark age because we fear that the Darwinian universe doesn’t care about our wishes and wants – we are still bound by its laws.
Pay attention to things that are hard to understand.