The Tetrad

Four Lenses That Explain Everything (Including God)

In my last post, I showed you an anomaly that broke every major behavioral theory in finance — retail investors systematically overpaying for simple binary options when strictly superior products were available at lower prices. Prospect theory couldn’t explain it. Ambiguity aversion couldn’t explain it. Rational inattention, salience, expected utility — none of them. They all failed for the same reason: they were all the same kind of theory, operating on the same substrate of payoffs and probabilities. The anomaly lived somewhere else entirely — in the computational cost of evaluating the products.

That result got me thinking about a bigger question: how do you know which kind of theory to reach for? When does the economics lens work, and when do you need the computer science lens instead? Is there a systematic way to figure that out?

Here’s a provocative claim: every field of human study — anthropology, psychology, law, art, religion, all of it — reduces, at bottom, to exactly four things: physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics.

This isn’t vulgar reductionism. I’m not saying “everything is just atoms” and leaving it there. These four are irreducible lenses on a single underlying reality. You need all four. You can’t collapse one into another. And when you apply them systematically, problems that have defeated philosophy for millennia suddenly crack open.

Let me show you what I mean.

Why These Four?

Physics: Substance

What exists? Fields. That’s it. The entire universe is a collection of quantum fields interacting with each other. What we call “particles” — electrons, quarks, photons — are just excitations of these fields, ripples in the underlying substrate. There is no such thing as a particle in the billiard-ball sense. It’s fields all the way down.

This is the stuff of reality. Everything else runs on top of it.

Mathematics: Structure

Mathematics gives us the formal relationships between things — patterns, symmetries, logical entailments — independent of what those things physically are. The Pythagorean theorem doesn’t care whether you’re measuring a field in Iowa or the trajectory of a spacecraft. The structure is the structure.

Physics is written in the language of mathematics because mathematics captures the pattern layer of reality.

Computer Science: Process

Here’s where it gets interesting. We know that quantum fields are quantized — they come in discrete chunks. What about spacetime itself? Is it continuous or discrete?

The best current guess, going back to Einstein and running through contemporary work on quantum gravity, is that spacetime is also discrete at the Planck scale. If that’s true — and it probably is — then the universe contains only finite information in any finite region.

And if finite information, then representable by computation.

This isn’t a metaphor. The universe doesn’t resemble a computation; it IS one. Stephen Wolfram’s insight was recognizing that computation is physics by other means. The dynamics of reality — how states evolve, how systems change — is fundamentally computational.

Economics: Selection

So why isn’t physics + math + computer science enough?

Because of computational irreducibility.

Wolfram showed that even simple deterministic systems — cellular automata with rules a five-year-old could follow — produce behavior that cannot be predicted without running the entire computation. There are no shortcuts. The only way to know what happens is to watch it happen.

This means you cannot derive agent behavior from quarks, even in principle. Even if you had perfect knowledge of every particle in a human brain, you could not compute what that person will do faster than just... waiting for them to do it.

So you need a level of description that talks about agents optimizing under constraints. Not because agents are magical or outside physics — they’re made of the same fields as everything else — but because you can’t compute around them.

And here’s the beautiful part: optimization under scarcity isn’t just a feature of human behavior. It’s everywhere. Thermodynamics maximizes entropy. Evolution satisfices fitness. Light takes the path of least time. Even photons are “economizing.”

Economics, properly understood, is the study of optimization under constraint. And that’s baked into the universe at every level.

The Tetrad

So we have four lenses:

• Physics (substance — what exists),

• Math (structure — formal relations),

• CS (process — discrete dynamics), and

• Economics (selection — optimization under scarcity). Stuff, pattern, process, purpose.

Stuff, pattern, process, purpose.

These four. No fewer. No more. Every other field of study is a configuration of these four lenses applied to some domain.

The Stress Test: God

If this framework actually works, it should be able to crack problems that have defeated philosophy for millennia. So let’s try the hardest one: What kind of God is compatible with modern science?

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying religious people are wrong. I’m not saying you can’t believe in God. People can believe in any form of deity they want — that’s their choice.

But it is a choice. And most people don’t realize they’re making it.

The Physics Lens

Start with a simple question: Do the laws of physics exist, or don’t they?

There’s no middle ground here. Either the laws are exceptionless — they hold always and everywhere — or they’re not really laws. They’re suggestions. Regularities that happen to obtain most of the time.

This creates a fork:

• If laws exist and are exceptionless, then miracles are impossible. A miracle is, by definition, an exception to physical law. If there are exceptions, there are no laws. If there are laws, there are no exceptions.

• If God intervenes — ever, even once — then what we call “laws” aren’t really laws. They’re just patterns that God has chosen to maintain, which God can break at will.

Both of these positions are logically coherent. You can believe either one. But you cannot believe both simultaneously. That’s not a matter of faith or values — it’s a straightforward logical contradiction, like believing 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 at the same time.

Most religious people think they can have both: a universe that runs on predictable physical laws (which is why science works, planes fly, medicine heals) AND a God who occasionally tweaks outcomes in response to prayer, faith, or moral behavior.

That’s not a defensible position. Not because it’s wrong — but because it’s incoherent.

The Math Lens

Let’s trace out what each choice entails.

Choice A: Laws are real.

If the laws of physics genuinely exist and are exceptionless, then:

• Science works because reality is predictable

• Miracles don’t happen (they can’t happen)

• God, if God exists, doesn’t intervene in the universe

• Prayer doesn’t change outcomes (though it might change the person praying)

• There’s no divine plan that involves ongoing adjustment

This is the position of deism, of Spinoza, of Einstein’s “God does not play dice.” It’s fully coherent. Many serious thinkers hold it.

Choice B: God intervenes.

If God intervenes in the universe — answers prayers, performs miracles, adjusts outcomes based on human behavior — then:

• The “laws” we observe aren’t really laws; they’re just patterns God maintains

• Science works only because God chooses to be consistent most of the time

• What we call physics is really just God’s habits

• This is superdeterminism: the appearance of law without actual law

This is also coherent. It’s the implicit position of most traditional religious belief.

But here’s the problem with Choice B: it has consequences most believers don’t accept.

Under superdeterminism, there’s no free will at all — not in theory, not in practice. If there are no real laws, just God’s moment-to-moment decisions about how particles behave, then you are also just God’s moment-to-moment decisions. You’re not making choices that happen to be determined; you’re a puppet. The puppet strings go all the way down.

So the believer in an interventionist God faces a trilemma:

1. Accept superdeterminism → no free will whatsoever

2. Accept that laws are real → no intervention possible

3. Claim both → logical contradiction

The Computer Science Lens: Ruliad and Hyper-Ruliad

Here’s where Wolfram’s framework becomes essential.

Wolfram defines the ruliad as “the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.” Think of it as the space of all possible computations, running simultaneously, forever.

We live inside the ruliad. Our universe follows rules within it. And computational irreducibility applies: even knowing all the rules perfectly, you cannot predict outcomes without running the computation.

This creates a problem for divine omniscience. Even a God who designed the universe, who chose the laws and initial conditions, cannot know what will happen without computing it. And computing it means waiting for it to happen.

But Wolfram also imagines something beyond: a hyper-ruliad.

“But what if we just imagine a ‘hypercomputation’ not in that class? For example, imagine a hypercomputation (analogous, for example, to an oracle for a Turing machine) that in a finite number of steps will give us the result from an infinite number of steps of a computationally irreducible process. Such a hypercomputation isn’t part of our usual ruliad. But we could still formally imagine a hyperruliad that includes it.”

This is the only coherent form of omniscience. A hyper-ruliad entity — an oracle machine in the computability theory sense — sits outsideour computational structure entirely. It can see results without computing them. It’s not bound by irreducibility because it’s not operating within the ruliad at all.

This is mathematically well-defined. Oracle Turing machines are real objects in computability theory. A God who exists in the hyper-ruliad could genuinely know everything that will ever happen in our universe.

But — and this is crucial — such a God still cannot intervene. The moment God reaches into the ruliad and changes something, the laws fail. We’re back to superdeterminism.

(For more on the ruliad, see Wolfram’s original essay: The Concept of the Ruliad)

The Economics Lens

Finally: revealed preference.

If an interventionist God existed and wanted us to know it, evidence would be trivially cheap to provide. Part the Red Sea every alternate Tuesday. Levitate a giraffe at random, in full view of cameras. Make a horse that speaks.

These aren’t hard. For an omnipotent being, they’re costless. And they would be utterly decisive — no ambiguity, no room for interpretation.

The absence of such evidence is telling. When evidence is costless to provide and maximally valuable to the recipient, failure to provide it is evidence. Not proof of absence, but strong evidence.

Revealed preference: whatever God exists, that God either cannot or chooses not to provide clear evidence. An interventionist God who cares about human belief would intervene visibly. The God we observe (or fail to observe) doesn’t.

The Honest Positions

After running the tetrad, here are the coherent positions you can hold:

If you believe physical laws exist:

• A Designer God who chose the laws and/or initial conditions, then stepped back

• A Hyper-ruliad oracle who can see without computing, but doesn’t intervene

• Spinoza’s God — identical with nature itself (though whether this counts as “God” is semantic)

• No God — the laws just are what they are.

If you believe God intervenes:

• What we call “physical laws” are just God’s habits, maintained by choice

• Science works only because God is consistent, not because reality is law-governed

• You must accept superdeterminism and its consequences (including no free will)

• Miracles are possible because there were never any real laws to violate.

Both columns are logically coherent. You can hold any position within either column.

What you cannot do is mix columns. You cannot believe in genuine physical laws AND an interventionist God. You cannot believe science works because reality is predictable AND believe that God sometimes changes outcomes in response to prayer.

That’s not a claim about which position is true. It’s a claim about which combinations are logically possible.

What doesn’t survive:

• “I believe in science AND I believe God answers prayers” — incoherent

• “Physical laws are real AND miracles happen” — contradiction

• “The universe is deterministic AND God has a plan that involves ongoing adjustment” — pick one

This isn’t atheism. It isn’t theism. It’s just logic.

The universe might have been designed — fine-tuned, selected from all possible configurations by an intelligence outside our computational structure. But if laws are real, that designer isn’t listening now. It set the initial conditions and walked away, or simply observes from the hyper-ruliad.

Alternatively, there might be no real laws at all — just a God who micromanages every particle, maintaining patterns we mistake for physics. That’s coherent too. But then don’t pretend science tells you anything about how reality must behave. It only tells you how God has chosen to behave so far.

Pick one. That’s all the tetrad asks.

The Kicker

The tetrad didn’t tell you what to believe about God. It told you what you can’t believe simultaneously.

That’s what frameworks do when they work. They don’t answer questions for you — they clarify which answers are compatible with which other answers. They show you the trade-offs you’re actually making, whether you realize it or not.

Theology is actually the hardest test case, because it’s where people are most emotionally invested and least willing to follow logic where it leads. If the framework handles God — if it can cleanly separate the coherent positions from the incoherent ones — it can handle anything.

Next time: what happens when we point the tetrad at anthropology, psychology, law, and linguistics. Spoiler: “cognitive biases” aren’t bugs, cultures aren’t arbitrary, and the rule of law is really the rule of algorithm.

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This post draws on ideas from my book, The Science of Free Will, which explores how determinism, computational irreducibility, and physics intersect with questions about agency, consciousness, and meaning.

For those who want to go deeper into the ruliad and its implications, Wolfram just published “What Ultimately Is There? Metaphysics and the Ruliad“ — a remarkable attempt to put metaphysics on scientific foundations.