Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Subtitled: Welcome back to the ether. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, where to start without going further back? Well, some comments on the `packaging': very pretty. Lots of trees are going to die for this monumental ode to the problem at the heart of science and unfortunately their deaths are not going to advance the state of knowledge at all. Yes, the quality of the book is impeccable and the typeface, general layout and profuse use of illustrations make it a bargain for the price. One must realize that approximately 1/3 of the book are the additional notes that Wolfram has decided to include to demonstrate how his thesis can be applied to "everything" that has been done in science. But more on that later... Wolfram has managed to neatly epitomize all that is wrong with science right now. It is unfortunate he appears not to have heard about Robert Rosen in his flurry of referencing and decade of `researching' since otherwise he might have decided to move on to something actually useful. Or perhaps if he had read Perlovsky or Solomonoff he might have come to some different, and again, useful conclusions. Wolfram, amongst the very numerous self-references, advances two main ideas that he sees embodying "the new science". The first is the idea that simple programs can have very complex outputs - the concept of the complexity of the output of something like Rule 30 cellular automatons baffling all attempts at compression. The second is his "new" theory of computational equivalence. Well, there is some news from those sad `hacks' on the sidelines: the first "idea" is nothing new and, in fact, is simply a logical extension of the framework chosen for the analysis and the "theorem" is perhaps the best illustration of what philosophers refer to as the "gem": tautology. That is, Wolfram's glorious theorem results from his choice of axioms and should not be at all surprising unless one is either too stupid to realize this or else is bent on a program of solipsism. The universe is not mechanistic. If it were then Wolfram's theory must be taken as an axiom. The first idea, that simple programs can produce results just as complex as very complicated programs, is a logical extension of what we already know about mechanistic frameworks. All of this can easily be demonstrated in a number of ways but perhaps a quick look at the "problem" of induction in formal systems best illustrates why. Solomonoff's work on Kolmogorov/Chaitin complexity points out that "for practical [computable] induction it is necessary to use computable approximations" (comment added by me). That is, real induction, as practiced by living organisms, is non-computable. AIP, Algorithmic Probability, readily admits that true induction cannot be computable for the moment that one imposes any syntactical-only solution one has already constrained the ability to perform induction. This is the real problem in a mechanistic universe: you are stuck with deduction and a very limited version at that. Now the AIP folks have done lots of work here using rather complex programs to try to escape the problem, like Wittgenstein's fly in the bottle. So it should be no surprise that at the other end of the extreme, a very small program, one should find great richness in output since one is attempting to impose fewer constraints from the start. But there is news from the outside world that Wolfram should have checked before launching this sad footnote: it won't work. I suggest Perlovsky if one wishes to understand why. In fact, the AI people realized this limitation a while ago and have feverishly been trying to find ways of "stepping outside" of the mechanistic framework. The crux of this is the simple fact that you need to be non-computable if you want to join the ranks of the living. That is, entailment (causality) is impoverished in a mechanistic framework: how do you ever stop asking "what entails X" without invoking magic? Go and find a copy of Rosen's "Life Itself" and really learn something new. And this is evident throughout Wolfram's book. We have the ether coming back (he proposes some type of nodal network as the fundamental building block for the universe) and a complete lack of discussion of any of the major problems facing science, particularly physics, such as what is life, why inertial mass equals gravitational mass and why we have so few genomes when mechanistic theory says we should. Even consciousness does not get discussed anywhere in his section on the nature of analysis and perception other than the ugly word "representation" slipping in. A cellular automaton representing to what (go read your Tallis)? One feels we have beaten this horse enough already to even believe it can still be presented by anyone with any serious pretensions to discussing the topic. This is the worse part of the whole enterprise. There is no new science here, only the same problems with some new band-aids. One hopes we will finally begin to suspect why we are not making more advances and come back to what is crucial: the choice of the framework limits the solution set of the problem. It is time for some new frameworks, not absurd extensions to the existing set. Don't bother with buying this book, there will be some bargain-basement copies available in a short time.