Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (NKS) was published in May 10 years ago. Wolfram has a post in which he discusses what's come of those ideas so far: what kinds of work has been done (pure, applied, NKS "way of thinking) in various fields: computer science, math, physics, etc. From his post, [note the Latour litany]:
Hair patterns in mice. Shapes of human molars. Collective butterfly motion. Evolution of soil thicknesses. Interactions of trading strategies. Clustering of red blood cells in capillaries. Patterns of worm appendages. Shapes of galaxies. Effects of fires on ecosystems. Structure of stromatolites. Patterns of leaf stomata operation. Spatial spread of influenza in hospitals. Pedestrian traffic flow. Skin cancer development. Size distributions of companies. Microscopic origins of friction. And many, many more.
One of the key lessons of NKS is that even when a phenomenon appears complex, there may still be a simple underlying model for it. And to me one of the most interesting features of the applied NKS literature is that over the course of the decade typical successful models have been getting simpler and simpler—presumably as people get more confident in using the methods and ideas of NKS.
I find his notion of computational irreducibility particularly suggestive. If literary works are computationally irreducible in that sense, then interpretation can never, in principle, capture the meaning of a literary work. At best, it can only approximate this or that aspect of the meaning. (Actually I suspect it's weaker than that, but...)
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