Wolfram’s Consciousness in the Ruliad

Physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram seeks “to formalize issues about consciousness, and to turn questions about consciousness into what amounts to concrete questions about mathematics, computation, logic or whatever that can be formally and rigorously explored” (Wolfram, 2021b). He begins by embedding consciousness in what he calls the “ruliad” (neologism from “rules”), which he defines as “the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.” The ruliad, he says, is “a kind of ultimate limit of all abstraction and generalization,” encapsulating “not only all formal possibilities but also everything about our physical universe” (Wolfram, 2021a). The ruliad is crucial for formalizing the “rules” of consciousness, he argues, because “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” (Wolfram, 2021b).

Consciousness and the Ruliad

Consciousness, Wolfram says, is not about the general computation that brains can do. “It's about the particular feature of our brains that causes us to have a coherent thread of experience.” And this invokes the ruliad, which “has deep consequences that far transcend the details of brains or biology.” It defines (what we consider to be) the laws of physics (Wolfram, 2021b).

While consciousness involves computational sophistication, Wolfram says, “its essence is not so much about what can happen as about having ways to integrate what's happening to make it somehow coherent and to allow what we might see as ‘definite thoughts’ to be formed about it.” Surprisingly, “rather than consciousness being somehow beyond ‘generalized intelligence’ or general computational sophistication,” he instead sees consciousness “as a kind of ‘step down’—as something associated with simplified descriptions of the universe based on using only bounded amounts of computation.” In addition, “for our particular version of consciousness, the idea of sequentialization seems to be central” (Wolfram, 2021b).

Wolfram probes consciousness by asking, “Why can't one human consciousness ‘get inside’ another?” It's not just a matter of separation in physical space, he says, “It's also that the different consciousnesses—in particular by virtue of their different histories—are inevitably at different locations in rulial space. In principle they could be brought together; but this would require not just motion in physical space, but also motion in rulial space” (Wolfram, 2021a).

Quantum Mechanics and Scientific Laws

Quantum mechanics is involved in Wolfram's consciousness, but with more than its usual putative mechanisms. Considering the foundations of quantum mechanics in context of the ruliad—quantum mechanics emerges “as a result of trying to form a coherent perception of the universe”—Wolfram offers a sharp epigram to describe consciousness: “how branching brains perceive a branching universe” (Wolfram, 2021b).

To Wolfram, to grasp the core notion of consciousness goes beyond explicating consciousness per se because it “is crucial to our whole way of seeing and describing the universe—and at a very fundamental level it's what makes the universe seem to us to have the kinds of laws and behavior it does.” The richness of what we see, he says, reflects computational irreducibility, “but if we are to understand it we must find computational reducibility in it.” This is how consciousness “might fundamentally relate to the computational reducibility we need for science, and might ultimately drive our actual scientific laws” (Wolfram, 2021a).