Can one predict what will happen? No, there’s what I call computational irreducibility: in effect the passage of time corresponds to an irreducible computation that we have to run to know how it will turn out.
But now there’s something even more: in our Physics Project things become multicomputational, with many threads of time, that can only be knitted together by an observer.
It’s a new paradigm—that actually seems to unlock things not only in fundamental physics, but also in the foundations of mathematics and computer science, and possibly in areas like biology and economics too.
You know, I talked about building up the universe by repeatedly applying a computational rule. But how is that rule picked? Well, actually, it isn’t. Because all possible rules are used. And we’re building up what I call the ruliad: the deeply abstract but unique object that is the entangled limit of all possible computational processes. Here’s a tiny fragment of it shown in terms of Turing machines: