Journal 7- Universe Can Be Explained
There is a question about the universe that has always bothered me more than almost every other question in science. Not how old it is. Not how big it is. Not even what happened at the Big Bang. The more basic question is this: why is there anything at all? Why isn't there just nothing?
I recently came across Stephen Wolfram's work on this question and went down a bit of a rabbit hole. Wolfram's idea is not an established theorem of physics. It is a much more interesting and uncomfortable proposition: perhaps the existence of a universe is not an arbitrary event at all. Perhaps it emerges from a deeper mathematical structure in a way that is, in some sense, inevitable.
The easiest way I can think about this is to imagine a giant maze.
Not the kind of maze you walk through at a fair. Imagine something unimaginably large, so large that from inside it, it looks infinite. You are standing in one room. There are several doors in front of you. You take one. You enter another room. There are more doors. Some take you somewhere new. Some eventually bring you back to somewhere you have already been. Some paths split into more paths. Some paths that looked completely different eventually merge into the same room. The important thing about this maze is that the doors are not random. There are rules governing the structure. Given where you are, certain things can happen and certain things cannot. The entire maze is really a giant network of relationships and possibilities. An underlying mathematical web of rules and outcomes exists, so to speak.
Now make the maze stranger. Imagine that the maze itself changes as you move through it. Every time a certain pattern of rooms appears, a rule transforms it into another pattern. You take another step and the structure changes again. And again. And again. You get the idea. You no longer have a static maze. You have a system that is continually rewriting itself.
That, in a very simplified way, gets us closer to what Wolfram is talking about.
We normally think of mathematics as something humans use to describe the universe. We have objects, planets, particles and forces out there in the real world, and then we write equations to describe what those things do. Wolfram's idea flips this around. He asks whether something more primitive than particles and forces could exist underneath them: a mathematical or computational structure made out of relationships and rules that continually transform those relationships. He argues, what we perceive in the form of physics, biology, chemistry and math is a higher level reality since our brains are an observer in this maze and cannot perceive the underlying computation. Why we cannot see it? Well, we ourselves are a result of that mathematical computational structure.
And "mathematical structure" here does not necessarily mean numbers floating around somewhere. It can be something much more basic. Things are connected. Certain configurations are possible. Certain transformations are allowed. A particular state can lead to another state according to some rule. You do not need a physical object for every one of these possibilities to be defined.
Think about the maze again. You can erase every physical drawing of it and still talk about its structure. You can describe how the rooms are connected, which doors lead where and what transformations are possible. The structure is the important thing. Now imagine that instead of one maze governed by one set of rules, you consider every possible maze and every possible set of rules. One structure branches into another. One set of rules produces one sequence of events. Another produces something completely different. Some histories diverge. Others eventually converge. The whole thing becomes an enormous landscape of possible computational evolution.
What if reality is something like that?
What if there is no tiny collection of particles sitting at the bottom of reality waiting to be discovered? What if particles themselves are patterns in a deeper computational structure? What if space is not the stage on which everything happens, but something that emerges from the relationships inside the system? What if time is not some invisible river flowing independently of everything else, but what the continuous evolution of that underlying structure looks like to an observer inside it?
Imagine a person who has spent their entire life in this enormous maze. They cannot see the whole structure. They can only see the rooms around them and remember where they have been. Over time, they start noticing patterns. Whenever they move through certain parts of the maze, certain things consistently happen. They begin to realise that the maze is not arbitrary. There are regularities.
Eventually, they invent mathematics to describe those regularities.
They discover geometry because the structure seems to have stable spatial relationships. They discover time because the maze keeps changing in an ordered way. They discover physics because certain relationships remain remarkably consistent. They eventually arrive at things like gravity, quantum mechanics and relativity. But here is the strange possibility Wolfram is interested in: perhaps these laws are not the deepest rules of the maze. Perhaps they are what an observer inside the maze inevitably sees when looking at the maze from their limited position.
We are accustomed to thinking that the universe comes with a set of physical laws and our job is to uncover them. But what if those laws are more like the weather? Real, measurable and extremely useful, but not fundamental in the deepest sense. A large-scale behaviour produced by something underneath. A cloud is real, but you would not say that the atmosphere is fundamentally made out of clouds. Temperature is real, but temperature is not a microscopic particle hiding somewhere inside a glass of water. These are properties that emerge when you look at a huge number of underlying interactions together.
Perhaps space and time could be something like that. Perhaps the laws of physics are what the maze looks like from inside. Now upon further inquiring, if the universe is this gigantic computational maze, where did the maze come from?
Normally, that question seems unavoidable. If there is a particular set of laws, someone or something must have selected them. Why gravity with this strength? Why three dimensions of space? Why these particular rules and not another set?
You could imagine a cosmic programmer deciding all of it. But then the obvious question is, who programmed the programmer? What rules produced the thing that chose the rules? You have simply moved the mystery one level up. Wolfram's approach tries to avoid that problem by taking a much stranger starting point. Instead of asking why one particular set of rules exists, consider the possibility of all possible rules and all possible computational structures. You do not need to imagine a cosmic engineer choosing one maze. The entire space of possibilities is there.
And if that sounds like it should produce absolute chaos, that is where the structure of the maze becomes important again.Different paths can lead to the same place. Different computational histories can converge. A huge underlying system can contain enormous complexity while still producing stable large-scale regularities. From inside it, a limited observer can experience something that looks remarkably orderly. This was the deepest idea in Wolfram's argument. Reality could be incredibly complicated underneath and still appear simple to us because we are part of the system and have limited computational ability. We cannot inspect every microscopic detail of the maze. We experience a tiny, coherent slice of it.
And that slice is what we call reality.
This is also where the question "Why does the universe exist?" takes a strange turn. Perhaps the answer is not that someone made it. Perhaps the answer is that, at the deepest level, there is a mathematical structure whose existence does not need the kind of external cause we normally associate with physical objects. This is difficult because we are so used to thinking that everything which exists must have been produced by something else. A house has a builder. A program has a programmer. A machine has a manufacturer. The intuition is deeply ingrained.
But abstract structures do not obviously work that way. If you think about it. Nobody has to physically manufacture the relationship between the numbers two and four. 2 + 4 would give you 6. It is an abstract truthful computational rule. Nobody needs to press a button to make the logical consequences of a mathematical system come into existence.
Once the structure and its rules are defined, certain relationships follow. And is this how the universe emerged? And in turn us? Makes you wonder.
Author's Note: If you made it this far, then you are probably as curious about these questions as I am. I had originally intended to end the article here, but the further I went down this rabbit hole, the harder it became to ignore one final connection. Arthur Schopenhauer, the great German Philosopher, argued that beneath the world as we consciously experience it lies something deeper, which he called the Will. For him, the Will was the underlying striving that expresses itself through nature and through us. Wolfram, approaching the problem from an entirely different direction, suggests that beneath the behaviour we observe there may be an underlying computational structure, a set of relationships and rules whose consequences can become impossible for an observer inside the system to fully predict. What if these are, in some sense, two descriptions of the same thing? Schopenhauer gave the hidden structure a philosophical name, Will. Wolfram is trying to describe a possible mathematical structure underneath the behaviour we see. If that connection is real, then perhaps what we experience as random behaviour is not actually random at all. Perhaps our actions only look random because the computation producing them is too complex for us to follow in advance. A bee flying through a garden may appear to choose flowers randomly, but there is a chain of causes behind every movement. The same could be true of us. Our thoughts, decisions and actions may be the visible expression of an underlying structure that we experience only from the inside. And this is what makes artificial intelligence particularly interesting to me. We build the architecture, define the training process and know the rules of the system, yet the behaviour that emerges can still surprise us. And its not me suggesting this notion about AI and its unpredictable outcomes. OpenAI and other makers of AI themselves have published research suggesting the AI models at this point seem like a black box. And perhaps, this seemingly random output, is not just a problem with AI. Perhaps it is a more general property of being an observer inside a computational universe. We can know the rules and still fail to predict the outcome. If that is true, then Schopenhauer may have been pointing toward something that modern computational science is only now beginning to put into mathematical language. The Will may not be some mystical force separate from nature. Perhaps what he experienced philosophically as the Will was his way of describing the hidden structure that produces behaviour, a structure that, to beings living inside it, can appear spontaneous, unpredictable and even free. I have no idea whether that connection is ultimately correct, and I certainly would not claim that Wolfram has proved Schopenhauer right. But the possibility is fascinating.
Further Reading:
https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p752--the-phenomenon-of-free-will/
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-universe-exist-some-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation
https://openai.com/index/extracting-concepts-from-gpt-4/
