GEB was similar in a cycle prior. It's cool to dream but the limits of accepted knowledge requires the hard work of assembling data, evidence, and reasoning.

It's arguably ~2500 years old, dating back to the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number" and had a very large and complex system of musical rituals.

The modern manifestation is mostly the intellectual product of Konrad Zuse, who wrote "digital physics" in 1969.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

Wolfram, Tegmark, Bostrom, etc. are mostly downstream of Zuse.

> Konrad Zuse

That...? Ah, yes, that Konrad Zuse.

Wolfram came to our evolutionary biology department to preach that book about 20 years ago. We all got our heads into cellular automata for a while, but in the end they just don't have the claimed profound explanatory power in real biological systems.

You can read it for free at https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ if you’re interested.