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On the Nature of Time
Stephen Wolfram takes a computational view of time, defining it abstractly, and the implications from computational irreducibility.
Very much as in the derivation of the Second Law (or of fluid mechanics from molecular dynamics), the for the large-scale behavior of spacetime from the underlying causal graph of hypergraph rewriting depends on the fact that we are computationally bounded observers. But when there’s been “too much activity in the hypergraph” (which physically corresponds roughly to too much energy-momentum), one can end up with a situation in which “there are no more rewrites that can be done”—so that in effect some part of the universe can no longer progress, and “time stops” there. For example, at the “entanglement horizon” for a black hole —where branchially-oriented edges in the multiway causal graph get “trapped”—time as we know it in some sense “disintegrates”, because an observer won’t be able to “knit together” the different branches of history to “form a consistent classical thought” about what happens.)
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