Sara Walker: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, for me, one of the people who revealed the expressive power of computation, aside from Alan Turing, is Stephen Wolfram through all the explorations of cellular automata type of objects that he did in a New Kind of Science and afterwards. What do you get from that? The computational worlds that are revealed through even something as simple as cellular automata. It seems like that’s a really nice way to explore languages that are far outside our human languages and do so rigorously and understand how those kinds of complex systems can interact with each other, can emerge, all that kind of stuff. I don’t think that they’re outside our human languages. I think they define the boundary of the space of human languages. They allow us to explore things within that space, which is also fantastic. But I think there is a set of ideas that takes, and Stephen Wolfram has worked on this quite a lot and contributed very significantly to it. I really like some of the stuff that Stephen’s doing with his physics project, but don’t agree with a lot of the foundations of it. But I think the space is really fun that he’s exploring. There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object. It only happens in some of them. I think one of the reasons that we feel like the universe is computational is because it’s so easy for us as things that have the theory of computation in our minds. Actually, in some sense it might be related to the functioning of our minds and how we build languages to describe the world and sets of relations to describe the world. But it’s easy for us to go out into the world and build computers and then we mistake our ability to do that with assuming that the world is computational. I’ll give you a really simple example. This one came from John Conway. I one time had a conversation with him, which was really delightful. He was really fun. But he was pointing out that if you string lights in a barn, you can program them to have your favorite one dimensional CA and you might even be able to make them do a be capable of universal computation. Is universal computation a feature of the string lights? Well, no.…

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