The Concept of the Ruliad §
Highlights §
- I call it the ruliad. Think of it as the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways. It’s yet another surprising construct that’s arisen from our Physics Project. (View Highlight)
- the ruliad is a strange and profoundly abstract thing. But it’s something very universal—a kind of ultimate limit of all abstraction and generalization. And it encapsulates not only all formal possibilities but also everything about our physical universe—and everything we experience can be thought of as sampling that part of the ruliad that corresponds to our particular way of perceiving and interpreting the universe. (View Highlight)
- the ruliad is something in a sense infinitely more complicated. Its concept is to use not just all rules of a given form, but all possible rules. And to apply these rules to all possible initial conditions. And to run the rules for an infinite number of steps. (View Highlight)
- he full ruliad is in effect a representation of all possible computations. And what gives it structure is the equivalences that exist between states generated by different computations. In a sense, there are two forces at work: the “forward” effect of the progress of computation, and the “sideways” effect of equivalences that entangle different computations. (View Highlight)
- It all has to do with the fact that we are bounded observers, embedded within the ruliad. We never get to see the full ruliad; we just sample tiny parts of it, parsing them according to our particular methods of perception and analysis. And the crucial point is that for coherent observers like us, there are certain robust features that we will inevitably see in the ruliad. And these features turn out to include fundamental laws of our physics, in particular general relativity and quantum mechanics. (View Highlight)
- One can imagine an observer very different from us (say some kind of alien intelligence) who would sample different aspects of the ruliad, and deduce different laws. But one of the surprising core discoveries of our Physics Project is that even an observer with quite basic features like us will experience laws of physics that precisely correspond to ones we know. (View Highlight)