Comment by xwkd

I'm not even able to hold a candle to Wolfram intellectually- the guy is a universe away from me in that regard. But: Given a cursory look at his wiki page and Cosma Shalizi's review of his 2002 book on cellular automata [1], I feel fairly comfortable saying that it seems like he fell in the logician's trap of assuming that everything is computable [2]:

>There’s a whole way of thinking about the world using the idea of computation. And it’s very powerful, and fundamental. Maybe even more fundamental than physics can ever be.

>Yes, there is undecidability in mathematics, as we’ve known since Gödel’s theorem. But the mathematics that mathematicians usually work on is basically set up not to run into it. But just being “plucked from the computational universe”, my cellular automata don’t get to avoid it.

I definitely wouldn't call him a crackpot, but he does seem to be spinning in a philosophical rut.

I like his way of thinking (and I would, because I write code for a living), but I can't shake the feeling that his physics hypotheses are flawed and are destined to bear no fruit.

But I guess we'll see, won't we?

[1] http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ [2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/how-we-got-here-...