[Jason was a researcher on historical and philosophical topics for the NKS book.]

He starts by talking about what NKS says about Free Will. Wolfram isn’t claiming that free will is impossible or natural. It’s a much more limited claim than that, directed against the spontaneity position and the behaviorist position. Spontaneity: Will is uncaused. Behaviorism: There’s a simple scheme for representing what wills do. Both too easily conflate being free and being unpredictable. Wolfram’s found a wedge between determinism and predictability. Wills are more unpredictable than behaviorists think. But will’s unpredictability doesn’t mean that it’s undetermined. Unpredictability is built into the system because of the system’s complexity. One should read that section of NKS as arguing against those two positions more than as establishing a positive doctrine of free will.

As a person, Wolfram is committed to determinism. But he doesn’t think that he’s proven it or that it follows from NKS. He thinks NKS makes determinism more plausible but doesn’t prove it.

Q: [Me] If we’re computationally equivalent to Rule 110 and all other such systems, then what distinguishes intellligent systems?

A: Not their cleverness, but there are other factors.

Q: Then how can you talk about FW without talking about the factors specific to systems that have will?

A: Wolfram is making a more limited claim. He’s talking about one piece of evidence — unpredictability — that’s been used by various FW theories.

Q: Shouldn’t he be talking about subjective vs. objective?

A: Complexity is independent of whether you’re inside or outside the system.

Q: In a note, he mentions Augustine. Where’s God in this?

A: [I suspect that Jason wrote the note] Religions are heterogeneous when it comes to the FW question. He talks about Augustine because Augustine tried to put together FW and predestination. Augustine distinguishes between what’s knowable to us and to God. This lines up with what’s subject to computation; you get the same sort of seems-free-to-us vs. seems-not-free-to-God viewpoint.

Just as Wolfram has presented open problems in NKS, Jason has open problems in philosophy for us, particularly for philosophy of science.

• What it means to stick your neck out, Popper-ianly, when dealing with computability. You’re making falsifiable predictions about something that was logically derived. With NKS, you’re experimenting on what used to be the model. E.g., The Principal of Computation Equivalence claims that Class III rules are universal but it could be wrong; its falsifiable.
• The definition of randomness. It’d be good to have a definition that captures the ordinary meaning but also works in the sciences.
• Distinguish prior determinism, epistemology and …
• When you look at where a system is migrating to (an attractor or a constraint) it’s different than looking at how it evolves. Discuss amongst yourselves.
• Distinguish rules, models and theories. A rule isn’t a model because it’s abstract. Models have to correspond to something in reality. When can you make predictions? When can you just see what happens? Can you have a theory that doesn’t make predictions?

Q: [Me] What about the scope of NKS? Is it an ontology? Doesn’t it seem tied to the happenstanace that we have computers and thus is simply a way of seeing the world, especially since Wolfram rightly says that a model always leaves something out and is something of a political decision?

A: He certainly likes to make heroic generalizations. Theoretical physicists like to stick their necks out and let others show them wrong. He has an ontology that says you can get everything as an emergent property of space. That’s his intuition because he gets so much from what’s simple. He has a philosophy of pure form. How can he know? He doesn’t much care.

Q: [Me] But doesn’t this prove that McLuhan was right and we see our world through our technology?

A: Sure, but when new tech comes along, we don’t throw out the previous insights. We still incorporate what we see through telescopes. [Yeah, but revolutions do occur that re-do the fundaments.]

Q: Does he avoid using the term “emergence” because thinks simplicity and complexity are the same? Because he thinks emergence implies the properties aren’t there at the beginning?

A: He thinks “emergence” is a buzz word. And it’s present in the system from the beginning of its complexity.

Q: When you think about philosophers, which one strikes you as being Wolframian?

A: Hmm. Plato, because of his focus on forms. But Plato thought the forms had to be less detailed and specific than their instances, whereas Wolfram is all about seeing the complexity of forms. [I think he’s more like Hegel in the Logic, deriving everything from the simplest of starting points.

I left the conference after this session because I have some family stuff and because the rest is almost all too technical for me.

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