And i don't see how the term "information" has much descriptive power when discussing nature at its most fundamental level. That may be a way to model it, or describe the physics of it, but that's just an abstraction of whatever that fundamental building block is.
His networks don't require space to exist, they are space. When we think of spacetime, we think of a manifold, and he's saying that what looks like a manifold at a macro level is really just a discrete network at a micro level, and this sort of data structure is more suitable for explaining non-local phenomena, because locality is an effect, not a property, of the model. But for that to work, he has to derive all the current laws from his new model, and he is far from doing that, even though it is a quite fantastic thought experiment.
I think the confusion comes from the fact that at a fundamental level, we do not have the capability to know anything but models and abstractions derived from sense data, and no one is claiming their theories are more than models.
So if Wolfram is correct, then there exists at the lowest level of nature a network, upon which everything else follows. Wolfram is trying to describe reality, something that exists, analogous to the existence of the atom? Do we agree this far?
If these Wolfram-nodes of our networked-reality do indeed exist, how are they connected in unique patterns if there is no "space" between them?
If his theory is not meant to predict something that actually exists, as in the prediction of the atom, well then, i'll bow out of this conversation because it's well and truly beyond my conception of what science is about.
It isn't as if there is an actual line connecting two dots across space.
It's just, there's a set of "points" (there doesn't need to be any things about these "points" other than that they are distinct. You could think of them as urelements I guess.), and another set of "edges", which are each a set of two elements from the first set.
A pair of "points" are "connected" by an "edge" iff the set comprised of those two "points" is in the second set.
This doesn't need a notion of space to work, unless you need like, an idea of space to have collections of things. So unless "the collection of odd numbers" needs an idea of space, then graphs don't need space.
The existence of the atom, however, is not what is being predicted. A theory should predict the sensor readings of particular instruments during particular experiments. Those sensor readings are what is real; "The Atom" is the abstraction.
The very idea that "things exist" is an abstraction. A thing exists if we can model it, and that model corresponds with reality.
Over time, physicists have come to take models very seriously (thanks in part to Einstein's 1905 papers). That is, when our model says that electrons act like particles and waves, we assume that electrons really are these odd things that are somewhere in between a particle and a wave.
So, if it turns out that Wolfram's ideas have merit, and there really is an underlying spacetime network which can be used to model and derive all of the known equations of physics (and likely some unknown equations), then at that point we would have to take very seriously the existence of such a network. We would be forced to think of a seemingly continuous spacetime as a special facet or feature of this underlying network, in the same way that we now think of space as a special feature of the more general spacetime.
Yes, but "model" is the key word. If it provides a set of rules which predict the way thing that exist in the world behave, then it models something (or set of things) that exits in the real world.
