What can the study of computation teach us about the nature of reality? This project, from a team led by Carlos Zapata-Carratala at Wolfram Foundation, launches a new research program in computational metaphysics—a field that uses computational tools to explore deep questions about causality, time, observation, and consciousness. Rather than debating these ideas abstractly, the team will build formal models and simulations that make them operational and testable.

This structured interdisciplinary project integrates philosophy, theoretical physics, and computer science to explore the fundamental nature of reality and its implications for causality, consciousness, objectivity, and experience.

Using concepts from the Wolfram Physics Project, the team will model observers as computationally bounded systems whose limitations shape their perceived reality. Within this framework, physical laws and meaning arise from how observers extract regularities from vast computational complexity. Reality is modeled as a multicomputation—a branching network of possible evolutionary paths—while time itself is understood as the irreducible process of computation. The concept of the ruliad—the space of all possible computational universes—provides a formal setting in which our physical reality appears as one sample shaped by the constraints of observation.

Project activities center on four core objectives: 

• Formalization, where computer scientists and philosophers will collaborate and attempt to translate/operationalize metaphysical concepts such as causality, identity, and time into a precise computational language; 
• Model development, where computer scientists will attempt to build and test open-source simulation tools that instantiate these concepts; 
• Interdisciplinary integration through joint seminars; 
• Dissemination through publications and public engagement.

Expected outputs include 6-8 open-source computational tools, 3-5 peer-reviewed papers, over 20 recorded seminars, and a final synthesis report from an international conference. Ultimately, this project aims to establish the conceptual and practical infrastructure for a new, more rigorous, and collaborative approach to understanding the structure of reality.