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Is Wolfram's Physics Project falsifiable?

Posted 2 years ago

At the Wolfram Physics Project Q&A site, there is a question asking whether the model/framework is falsifiable. The answer is:

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Any particular rule could be proved wrong by disagreeing with observations, for example predicting particles that do not exist. But the overall framework of our models is something more general, and not as directly amenable to experimental falsification. Asking how to falsify our framework is similar to asking how one would prove that calculus could not be a model for physics. An obvious answer would be another model successfully providing a fundamental theory of physics, and being proved incompatible.

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My question is: How could a model be proven to be incompatible with Wolfram's model? Is it because there could be a model involving hypercomputational processes? But if that is the case, couldn't the assumptions of the model be relaxed to allow hypercomputation?

POSTED BY: Nodu Agga
Posted 2 years ago

I appreciate the philosophical nature of your question. I suppose the Q&A segment refers to the difference between generating models within a framework and making predictions (or hypotheses) based on those models. There is a creative or 'generative' aspect to computation that Wolfram's model exemplifies, particularly in NKS. But in order to make sense of these creations (or discoveries, if one prefers), it is necessary to interpret them, which invokes metaphysical assumptions of one kind or another. So only the interpretations of the models are falsifiable; the models themselves simply are.

POSTED BY: Dante Michael
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