Mind Expanding 4 Jun 2023: 🧮computational irreducibility and the bounded observer 🧬quantum biology🏖️longevity land💡something we haven't tried⏳overcoming political presentism

Turtles all the way down

Mind Expanding is my ~fortnightly¹ curation for Memia subscribers of links to deeper dives and bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter. Thanks for reading!

Links in today’s post:

• 🧮Physics, computational irreducibility and the bounded observer Stephen Wolfram's theory of computational irreducibility and the universe

• 🧬Quantum biology the promise and applications of quantum biology.

• 🤖Robotics > Demographics Balaji casts shade on Zeihan

• 🏖️Longevity Land “popup city” Zuzalu, the start of the longevity nation?

• 🧠Obligatory AI section roundup of links exploring various aspects of AI.

• 💡Something we haven’t tried economic strategies for averting ecological catastrophe.

• 🌿A new business case for nature the value and benefits of nature-based solutions for climate resilience.

• ⏳Overcoming political presentism a meta-analysis of institutions for future generations around the world.

• 📚Reading list three new book additions on longevity, the economics of nature and a manual for human survival.

ICYMI

A busier week than usual for me on the wires…

• Kaila Colbin and I had a blast chatting about generative AI, future augmented humanity and even pan-galactic superintelligence (…!) last week, watch the recording here:

• I was interviewed on RNZ’s The Detail discussing the use of generative AI in Aotearoa New Zealand politics: This election year, we need to brace ourselves for AI.

  

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🧮Physics, computational irreducibility and the bounded observer

Delving deeper into polymath computer scientist Stephen Wolfram’s Ruliad:

“the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible, i.e., the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.

The ruliad can be considered as the ultimate abstraction and generalization involving any aspects of the physical universe. In particular, while a computational system or mathematical theory requires certain choices to be made, there are no choices or outside inputs in a ruliad because it already contains everything.”

(Previously discussed in Memia 2020.11 - The Universe, Open Sourced).

Underpinning the Ruliad concept is Wolfram's theory of computational irreducibility, which states that there are certain systems whose behaviour is so complex that it can only be understood by actually running the system and observing its behaviour over time.

According to Wolfram, many natural systems (indeed, the whole Universe) are computationally irreducible. (For example, the weather: no matter how much data we have about the current state of the atmosphere, he asserts that we cannot use that data to predict the weather with perfect accuracy.)

Recently he went deeper in his latest 4-hour conversation with marathon podcaster Lex Fridman:

In which (around 3hr35min in) he argues that the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which describes why order progresses to disorder as time moves forward, but never the other way around) is actually a story of computational (ir)reducibility: what we can easily describe at the beginning requires a lot of computational effort at the end.

He also refers to being a computationally bounded observer: meaning we are not able to fully understand a complex system because we cannot compute all of the possible states of the system.

David Valdman

summarises:

“The 3 great theories of 20th century physics.. are the interplay between computational irreducibility and the computational boundedness of observers.. All are derivable but not just from mathematics.. they require that the observer [is] bounded“

(But who observes the observer…? Turtles all the way down?)

via @dan_talmon

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🧬Quantum biology

Clarice D. Aiello heads the Quantum Biology Tech (QuBiT) Lab at University of California. She writes about the promise of Quantum Biology in The Conversation: