Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [November 1, 2024]

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: As a computer scientist and now physics student, I would love to ask you what makes you think that our universe is an automata, and how does it run if the medium is itself? - Does the universe have a halting probability or the ruliad? - Aren't we just describing our perception of the universe instead of the actual universe? - What would Kant say about the ruliad? - What is your view on atoms being able of cognition and self-awareness in the human brain by just assembling themselves? - The ruliad contains its own encoding function and it is instantiated. The simpler the function, the better. - Can we look at free will as probability distributions in the ruliad? What happens in the ruliad during overlap of two free wills? - What "runs" the ruliad? Computers run computer programs. Mathematicians do thinking and write on paper to prove theories. In every case I can think of, for information to be "processed," there has to be some sort of processor intelligence doing the work. What is it the equivalent for the ruliad? If there isn't an intelligence running it, why does it follow rules? - ​​What if the observer is a computational system? - Maybe each species of observer conflates all their threads into a different identity mapping of the ruliad. Each species' encoding function is a distinct identity mapping, speciation's blueprint. - Perhaps we should replace school grades with "extent to which you have captured the ruliad." - Could you explain what infinity is?