It is interesting that while science's work seems to be the discovery of these simple rules, it nowadays claims to deny the Creator of the rules. Which makes me wonder whether Wolfram is among the deniers of a Creator or just seeming to agree with them. Since he seems to be so well read in so many fields, I think it is doubtful that he does not understand the implications of his work.
Interesting question, gore3000. Certainly Wolfram understands the implications of his work. He writes:
“The idea that there is something unique and special about humans has deep roots in Judeo-Christian tradition – and despite some dilution from science remains a standard tenet of Western thought today. Eastern religions have normally tended to take a different view, and to consider humans as just one of many elements that make up the universe as a whole.”
Related points:
“From the point of view of traditional thinking about intelligence in the universe it might seem like an extremely bizarre possibility that perhaps intelligence could exist on a very small scale, and in effect have spread throughout the universe, building as an artifact everything we see. But at least with a broad interpretation of intelligence this is at some level exactly what the Principle of Computational Equivalence suggests has actually happened. For it implies that even at the smallest scale the laws of physics will show the same computational sophistication that we normally associate with intelligence. So in some sense this supports the theological notion that there might be a kind of intelligence that permeates our universe.”
“The notion that a human mind might somehow be analogous to the whole universe was discussed by Plato and others in antiquity, and known in the Middle Ages. But it was normally assumed that this was something fairly unique to the human mind – and nothing with the generality of the Principle of Computational Equivalence was ever imagined.”
Wolfram appears to be standing in the long shadow of Georg Hegel in these remarks. Like Hegel, Wolfram manages to eradicate any separation between thinker and thought. Intelligence is “thought thinking itself.” The “computation” is everything. What is being “computed,” and who or what is doing the computing, shade off into obscurity, and then disappear altogether….
In the end, what we are left with:
“If the whole history of our universe can be obtained by following definite simple rules, then at some level this history has the same kind of character as a construct such as the digit sequence of pi. And what this suggests is that it makes no more or less sense to talk about the meaning of phenomena in our universe as it does to talk about the meaning of phenomena in the digit sequence of pi.”
Good grief -- talk about reductionism! Talk about pantheistic "meaninglessness"….