Why I changed my mind about computational irreducibility with Jonathan Gorard

Despite all the advanced concepts that are mentioned, this is such an accessible video on a beautiful a most fundamental insight. How can there be only 2.6k views on this?? My mind is officially blown. I wish the best of luck for Jonathan and also the channel.

I love these videos! Please keep making them. When you discuss Wolfram Physics in terms of real life problems, you start to see how so much can be easily explained by it.

Cool insight. What struck me was quite how scale invariant this concept is. Jonathan enumerated examples from quantum mechanics at the nano-scale up to relativity at the macro-scale but always the same pattern of a computational irreducible layer, that in aggregate, presents itself to us as computationally reducible.

That was an awesome video!! Really helped clear up the picture in my mind! Thank you very much for sharing this interaction!

Awesome insight into "another" aspect of physics and the nature of reality.

Genius insight! These guys are really good, continuously pushing our understanding to the universe foward. Mark's summary at the end is precise and helpful. Thank you for presenting this!

This is so great! Very succinctly stated at the end. Thanks, Mark!

hey thanks for this great series. i STRONGLY encourage you and Jonathan to spend time on the work of Ian McGillchrist. He essentially demonstrates that computational irreducibility is an inevitable function of our brain’s structure. as such there is no other conclusion we could draw regarding the relationship between reducibility and irreducibility. we are hard wired to operate this way and navigate the balance between the two. as such you could say that neurologically speaking, it’s a foregone conclusion . i look forward to your reaction to McGillchrist and maybe even an interview with Ian, Jonathan and Wolfram :)

Just a beautiful beautiful piece!!!

Beautiful!

Best channel I have ever found....

Wow. That was very insightful.

Good!

It feels like computational irreducibility is related to discretising continuous theories like GR or Navier Stokes or Quantum theory etc. These theories that have historically given us continuous solutions to predicting how a system will evolve are ‘reducible’ but when you try to model systems computationally you have to come up with discrete algorithms that model the system appropriately and that’s where the irreducibility comes from. It’s a fundamental difference between using continuous functions to describe the evolution of a system c.f. a discrete computational approach. The issue is that you lose the ability to predict from general principles. Instead you just have to calculate quickly. You can do this quickly ahead of the phenomena you’re modelling, but you’re no longer looking for fundamental principles to describe a system, instead your looking for rules that evolve over a series of discrete steps to give you similar behaviour to the system you’re modelling. The main issue here is testability. It feels like admitting defeat to say “well the human mind is computationally bounded and so can never calculate fast enough”. If we lose testability and the ability to make predictions, what do we gain by taking such an approach? It’s almost like the continuous solutions like GR etc are something like fixed points in the evolution of the computationally irreducible discrete complex system underneath it.

Excellent analysis! Dr. John Gustafson, in his book, The End of Error, takes a similar approach to the pervasive problem of wasting compute cycles in seeking improved accuracy. His Unum will change the world when it is eventually discovered and adopted by computer architects..

It seems then that the de Broglie-Bohm version of Quantum Mechanics (QM) goes in the opposite direction of ''un-coarse-graining'' of the usual QM, if it is, as in Gorard's current way of looking at it, a coarse-grained version of a certain computationally irreducible theory.

Keep making these!!!

Another great video. So if computational reducibility in physics is just a course-graining something that is otherwise computationally irreducible, I have two questions: 1) does computational reducibility exist at all but for the simplest and most obvious of rules/scenarios and 2) does this imply that the ultimate theory of the universe cannot be determined without slogging through 10^100+ steps for all but the obvious dead-end rules?

The computational irreducibleness always exists but the reducible collections are what in essence shape our reality, that is our brains operate on knowledge and ordering of reducible phenomena that are primarily irreducible when examined. I interpret it as a restatement of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in that we cannot measure things with ultimate precision. That is why the Wolfram physics is another theory of only the discrete and cannot properly describe ultimate reality which is in essence continuous.

I haven't really studied quantum mechanics let alone quantum field theory yet, but my question would be, what this means for group theory and how quantum fields arise from that. Are these groups also bulk approximations or are they part of the microscopic hypernode rules? And if they aren't, is there at least something in our current physics model, that could give us a hint at the microscopic viewpoint, so that Wolframs theory can be falsified? Very fascinating stuff, and I think Wolfram physics is on the right path, simply because they can explain, how something could arise from nothing, which to my knowledge no other "theory of everything" can do.