My Hobby: Hunting for Our Universe

Reading how Wolfram muses  http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/my_hobby_hunting_for_our_unive.html#more  is always exciting since musing is controlled (manipulated) by Muses.  My hobby is hunting for ideas, and  Wolfram’s blog is a fruitful and promising field for exciting inspirations. I am particularly intrigued how he handles concepts so dear to physicists, e.g., space and time.

“There's not just our own physical universe to think about, but the whole universe of possible universes.” Says Wolfram. Suppose that the rules underlying these universes are simple one might be able to   search the universe of all possible rules, and find our own physical universe.

Wolfram: “Physicists often like to think that they're dealing with the most fundamental kinds of questions in science. But actually, what I realized back in 1981 or so is that there's a whole layer underneath.”   So what is this layer underneath?  A network of interacting programs in which space and time do not apply. Such a network does not exist in a space. “There is not a ‘space’ there but a bunch of points.” Which are actually connections.   The programs exchange pieces of the network. “And in general each possible sequence of rule applications might correspond to a "different branch of time".”

“. . these networks with almost nothing "built in" somehow generate behavior that corresponds to gravitation in physics.” In other words, space and time do not exist as such, they emerge  and so do the laws of physics.

“Another thing that seems alien is the idea that our whole universe and its complete history could be generated just by starting with some particular small network, then applying definite rules.”

What a pleasant heresy! Indeed Wolfram implies that many physicists dislike his combinatorial approach of a “causal network.”  Dislike? They probably hate it and Wolfram consoles himself by : “They haven't quite reached the level of abstractness that I'm at.”  For me Wolfram is on a “colliding course” with biology. He approaches us biologists!   I call his causal network  Wisdom of the Body (WOB). A set of interacting processes each with its own time, which I call biological, as opposed to the chronological time of physics.  Its  properties where discussed in this thread.

Why hunt for universes when you have me. A finite and  bounded universe, infinitely complex. Why not search for the “causal network” underlying me? which might be the secret of life.