Stephen Wolfram told me the universe's source code

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I just sat with Stephen Wolfram for 90 minutes and my brain is still recovering.

The man has been "living the AI dream for 40 years" — and he dropped frameworks that completely reframe where AI is going.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW (BRAND NEW):

Three things that hit hardest:



Mining the Computational Universe

Neural nets and biological evolution use the exact same trick: they don't engineer solutions. they mine them. Wolfram calls it "mining the computational universe for lumps of irreducibility."  Evolution doesn't design an eye from scratch. It finds random computational rocks (mutations) that happen to fit together into something useful. Neural nets do the same — they stumble into configurations that work.

(we opened with this, blew my mind)

The Toothpick Theory of Consciousness

We're like a toothpick through a sandwich. The ruliad (all possible computations) is everything — every universe, every law of physics. We're just a tiny sliver piercing through it. Our entire experience of reality is what that toothpick touches. If we were as big as the whole ruliad, we'd stop existing as individuals — we'd dissolve back into everything.

(I was the one that used the "toothpick" analogy... I hope he liked it)

The Universe Branches AND Merges

Quantum mechanics makes sense once you realize history doesn't just split — branches merge back together too. Physicists got stuck because they only thought about branching. In a discrete universe, different branches can overlap precisely (in a continuous one, the probability of exact overlap is zero).

I'm still processing all this to be honest... I'll post my thoughts later.