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that practically everything we see must just reflect detailed accidents in the his-
tory of biological evolution. But what the mollusc shell example suggests is that
that may not be so. And that somehow one can think of organisms as uniformly
sampling a space of possible programs. So that just knowing abstractly about
the space of programs will tell one about biology
And, of course, reflecting his disciplinary origins, Wolfram also sees the NKS
as offering a “truly fundamental theory of physics.” Space, time and causal-
ity are merely appearances, themselves emerging from a discrete network
of points—and the ultimate task of physics is then to find out what rule the
system is running. “It's going to be fascinating—and perhaps humbling—to
see just where our universe is. The hundredth rule? Or the millionth? Or the
quintillionth? But I'm increasingly optimistic that this is all really going to
work. And that eventually out there in the computational universe we'll find
our universe. With all of our physics. And that will certainly be an exciting
moment for science” (27).
We can thus see Wolfram's work as a further variant on the theme that
Ashby set out in 1952 in his considerations of the time to reach equilibrium of
multihomeostat assemblages, but differing from the other variants in interest-
ing and important ways. Unlike Alexander and Kauffman, Wolfram has gener-
alized and ontologized the problematic, turning it into an account of how the
world is, as well as respecifying it in the domains mentioned above and more.
Beyond that, from our point of view, Wolfram's distinctive contribution has
been to focus on systems that do not settle down into equilibrium, that per-
form in unpredictable ways, and to suggest that that is the world's ontological
condition. His NKS thus offers us a further enrichment of our ontological
imaginations. Systems like the rule 30 CA genuinely become ; the only way to
find out what they will do next is run the rule on their present configuration
and find out. As ontological theater, they help us to imagine the world that
way; they add becoming to our models of what Beer's “exceedingly complex
sy stems” might be like. If we think of the world as built from CA-like entities,
we have a richer grasp of the cybernetic ontology.
It remains only to comment on the social basis of Wolfram's work. We have
seen already that after a meteoric but otherwise conventional career in aca-
demic research Wolfram (like Kauffman) veered off into business, and that
this business enabled him to sustain his unusual hobby (like Ashby)—pro-
viding both a living and research tools. There is the usual improvised oddity
here, evident in the biographies of all our cyberneticians. What I should add
is that having launched NKS with his 2002 topic, Wolfram has since sought to
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