He's clearly brilliant and I read his posts, but usually I have to grit my teeth at least a couple of times due to his self-aggrandizing. But there was almost none of that in this one.
Great stuff.
But then his lingo started to creep in. Computational irreducibility, linking to how he invented the concept. Rurial space. Geez man, does everything really have to be a promotion of the cult-like New Kind of Science stuff? Full of links to his own unrelated blog posts? It's sad.
I'd really have liked to like the article, he clearly put a lot of effort into it. But I had to stop reading. You can't tell for sure where real explainations end and where his unproven claims start about "knowing" that the universe is just computational and everything just based on some rule from a cellular automaton.
And I've gotten conditioned to never start a sentence with "OK, so". It's now giving me the jiffies.
> As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output ... has been... [78 million words] And, yes, I’ll train a bot from all of that.
for non-Wolfram fans - take cover there is a potentially infinite future supply!
[0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-... (paragraph 2)
I can’t comprehend how ChatGPT can keep such incredible internal state and I’m hoping Wolfram might have some ideas in this post. For instance try the prompt that turns it into a linux terminal and it can closely “hallucinate” approximately the correct changes in state to the host after the commands but long long after the command occurred in the dialogue. To me this shows it extends beyond human language.
Take a second to think about how much time it must have taken to write this, to prepare all of these examples.
This post gave me another way to look at something I already partially understood pieces of. It helps me understand how chatgpt can have these moments of greatness.
If you think of this like a long lecture you can get a lot out of it. It reminds me of a feynman lecture.