What’s the backstory of what I’m calling the multicomputational paradigm? For me, the realization that one can formulate such a broad and general new paradigm is something that’s emerged only over the past year or so. But given what we now know it’s possible to go back and see a quite tangled web of indications and precursors of it stretching back decades and perhaps more than a century.
We’ve talked about the nature of the multicomputational paradigm, and about its application in physics. But where else can it be applied?
In the applications we’ve discussed so far, the multicomputational paradigm enters basically in a descriptive way, providing raw material from which models can be made. In distributed computing, the paradigm also plays a very powerful prescriptive role, suggesting new ways to do computations, and new kinds of computations to do.
In the mathematical paradigm one expects to immediately “read off” from a model what happens at a particular time. In the computational paradigm one might have to run an Irreducible Computation, but then one can still “read off” what happens after a certain time. But in the multicomputational paradigm, it’s more complicated—because now there are multiple threads of time, with no intrinsic way to line up “what happens when” across different threads.
The multicomputational paradigm is something that’s emerging from our Physics Project, and from thinking about fundamental physics. But one of the most powerful things about having a general paradigm for theoretical science is that it implies a certain unity across different areas of science—and by providing a common framework it allows results and intuitions developed in one area to be transferred to others.
What would it take to make a global theory of evolutionary biology? At a “local level” there’s natural selection. And there are plenty of “chemical-reaction-equation-like” (and even “reaction-diffusion-equation-like”) models for relations between the “concentrations” of small numbers of species. And, yes, there are global “developmental constraints”, that I for example have studied quite extensively with the computational paradigm. But somehow the multicomputational paradigm seems to have the potential to make global “structural” statements about things