This is unhelpful reductionism to be honest. Yes, you can say the Mona Lisa is just a bunch of ink on a canvas, which is true at one level, or you can say the Mona Lisa actually really exists in every dust cloud, which is the same kind of reductionism in the opposite direction, one 'computational' one 'physical', but neither is helpful.
These are just 'language games' using Wittgenstein's phrase and they don't tell you anything about the world, the dust cloud is still a dust cloud regardless of whether you say it's a computational dust cloud. Wolfram seems to be on his way to invent his own, nerdier version of animism. He could have just smoked some pot and said "we're all like, one with nature bro.", or read Solaris.
His idea to interact with our environments in a way that isn't just physical is nice, but you don't need to reinvent tech jargon fueled Gaia theory for it. And as a philosophy it may be just trite, but as a scientific project it is deeply misguided and it's been his obsession with his 'new science' for a long time now. In reality it's not a new kind of project, it's a version of what the logical positivists called 'Unified Science', and it did not work out.
I completely agree. This is the writing of someone who is surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says.
"The computations associated with the swirling patterns are ultimately just as sophisticated as the ones we achieve with our brains and our technology here on Earth."
Who cares? Intelligence is not the same as computational complexity. This article is supposedly about Alien Intelligence but is only focused on computational complexity. Just because some processes are computationally complex does not make them intelligent.
I can also find "equivalence" between several internet essays which are all exactly 7,247 words in length. This does not make the essays remotely equivalent in their intelligence. One of them may be self-promoting drivel and of no real value.
Ultimately the claim is computation = things = humans. If everything is a computation then humans have no more value or uniqueness than a thunderstorm. This is sinister and pernicious.
1) We can & should differentiate between different classes of things like life, intelligent life and physical processes. This stops us from being cruel to things that experience suffering.
2) We may not be able to perceive or adequately describe classes of non computational processes that operate in our physical universe. This would not be a shock, after all, dogs can't do relativity and yet that does not exempt them from living in space time. Yet, we know that non computational processes do exist in theory. The claim "everything in the universe is a computer" is just that - a claim. It's up to people who believe it to show that every physical process that there is can be replicated using a computer... and that's not been done. To do it you need to enumerate the processes (which requires a competent theory of physics - not one that can't describe 98% of observed things), and you need to show that they can all be computed. We can't do the second thing because we can't even write down descriptions of intelligence and consciousness let alone compute them.
Belief in mind-body dualism strikes me as the only reason to reject the possibility that seemingly external and inanimate physical processes and human consciousness are fundamentally the same.
If you worry that suspending this belief would rob humans of consciousness (free will, etc.) and “lower” them to the level of “things”, note that you can instead “lift” those externals by granting them the relevant qualities, just expressed at sufficiently different/foreign scales so that human mind is unable to easily grasp the equivalence within its framework of perceived space-time.
- moral: equating inanimate processes and living processes means that you equate their same moral status.
- rationality : conscious processes behave differently in that they anticipate conditions and the behaviour of other processes. For example trees (at the bottom end of a scale of awareness) shed their leaves in the autumn in anticipation of frosts to come. The weather does not adapt to trees.
- utilitarian: physical processes don't remember you, humans will. If you strike an inanimate process, or burn it, or electrocute it and then return to it weeks later do not fear. If you do the same to a human, or a dog, or an elephant, I advise you to be cautious.
I assume then your answer to my veiled question is yes, you do subscribe to mind-body dualism.
Again, if I equate moral status of human consciousness to that of inanimate things, it does not need to mean I am downgrading the former as opposed to upgrading the latter. I don’t really accept physicalism myself (but neither I do dualism).
I also think you have missed the part regarding wildly different or simply foreign scales. Weather adapting to trees may just be like you adapting to an earthworm while driving a car. Striking a stone, no more than a fly briefly landing on you. Bad analogies but I can’t think of a better one in the moment.
I suggest not to take it literally (stones are living, hahah) but analyze it philosophically. To a degree this may require accepting that the model of reality and three-dimensional space/time accessible to human mind may always be fragmentary and incomplete, optimized towards fitness and survival at human timescales.
I mean, this ego might be warranted to some degree.
At least (and I don’t know if you would call this an ego-driven argument), consciousness is something I can be sure definitely exists, considering that anything one could call “reality” is only accessible via consciousness (and obviously tainted and possibly constructed to an unknowable extent by it).
So, I understand the reluctance to accept a philosophical position that downgrades consciousness to something illusory, as physicalist positions tend to. (If that’s what the comment I responded to expressed, then I’m the same in that regard.)
I just think that it’s easy to miss the availability of non-dualist takes that don’t require such a downgrade, and unless I missed something (am yet to read it carefully) this article doesn’t seem to require it either, which would be refreshing.
This is the worst top comment I've seen on hn in a long time. The text isn't about the computational equivalence but about how vastly different aliens and therefore their tech is, and how the effort of translating alien tech into our own would be equivalent to inventing it ourselves. This point of vast differences requires Wolffram's ontology, which I don't philosophically agree with, but it's as good as any current one.
As for the first point, it is actually insane. You don't start being cruel to animals because you are doing ontology.
Sadly, philosophy can and (whether they should or not) certain philosophical positions do apparently make it acceptable to hurt others. It doesn't make it legal, but it can make it ethically inconsequential and render relevant laws as nonsensical in the eye of the holder of such views. See A Glitch in the Matrix, for example.
First of all I know what you mean, and I disagree, but this isn't the issue at all. Ontology talkes about being qua being on the largest possible abstraction, so saying that merely making abstraction somehow implies whatever is beyond idiotic.
>“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”
Who exactly is making this pitch he's refuting? It sounds like Breakthrough Starshot but that project doesn't make a claim of "advancing human technology by a million years."
This is how BSS bills its own mission:
"Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to astronomy, including solar system exploration and detection of Earth-crossing asteroids."
Having read the „three body“ series I wonder if there is an actual debate about the dark forest theory? Or: Should we announce our existence and location to the universe?
The dark forest is the dumbest concept. Nature advertised our presence a long time ago. Any aliens with a telescope able to gather spectra of Earth would be able to determine with a reasonable certainty life exists here. Any aliens with such a telescope within about 200 light years would be able to say with a reasonable certainly a technological civilization lives here, with that certainty increasing the longer they conduct observations.
Before the Industrial Revolution Earth was teeming with biomarkers. After the IR we not only have biomarkers but increasing industrial pollutants in the atmosphere. Such markers are interesting because they are short lived and need replenishment. It's the same reason we look for them.
The sphere advertising the Industrial Revolution is ever expanding. Anyone that can gather spectra of Earth will see it once the light reaches them. So there's no hiding from any aliens that happen to be looking.
But the dark forest theory gets more absurd with the idea that some alien species upon seeing a technological civilization on Earth is them going to hope in their spaceships for a visit. Ignoring entirely that space is fucking huge and physics is unforgiving.
Some alien species that had the capability to fly the obscene distance to Earth would by definition have the capability to fully exploit all the resources in their own solar system (which is gigantic). They could also save themselves the effort of an invasion by exploiting uninhabited solar systems much closer to them (also gigantic). For as awesome as Earth is, it doesn't have any unobtainium some hyper advanced species couldn't find elsewhere.
Any aliens with the capability of visiting us already has the capability to detect us. We can't go un-advertise ourselves.
When I first read the Three Body Problem series, a lot of it, like the Dark Forest theory etc seemed a bit off, and I tried hard to retcon some of the assumptions being made about physics and biology etc into something that actually made sense.
Then I read Ball Lightning, and had the revelation of "Oh shit, this dude actually has zero comprehension of how physics works". Then I felt silly for all the energy I spent trying to make any of it make sense. All his books are a ton of fun, and lots of imaginative concepts, but it really is all just for fun, and not really realistic at all. The whole 12 dimensional deflation concept shook me for months, and Dark Forest Theory is a really cool concept, and totally valid in certain environments, but almost certainly not in our galaxy at this point in time.
> For as awesome as Earth is, it doesn't have any unobtainium some hyper advanced species couldn't find elsewhere.
Yeah, I'd imagine that even if a hyper-advanced civilization did stop by, they'd probably just harvest a bunch of hydrogen from Jupiter to refuel their spacecraft, and be on their way. Earth has some of the least interesting resources in the solar system.
Most importantly, environments with plentiful resources that explode with life tend to develop a robust ecosystem of symbiosis and mutual dependence. The only time "Dark Forest" type ecosystems emerge is when resources are insanely restrictive, like deserts etc. As far as we can tell, our galaxy is teeming with resources that no one has really started mining at scale. Even if we did bump into some other expanding civilization, there's approximately zero chance of anyone getting boxed into a corner that would lead to conflict. We would just keep expanding in some other direction.
For example, humans seem to be at a point where corporations are trying to automate everything - what if some alien civilization figured out automation was the way to go as far as colonization and what if they figured this out say, 20 million years ago and so didn't care if it took a million or 2 or 5 million years to "get here" via some automation that is beyond our ability as humans to perceive?
Then by even some very conservative assumptions they could extract all the obtainable resources of the entire galaxy within a few tens of millions of years. We should expect to see nothing--not stars, not galaxies. Nothing but a soft infrared background radiation from the back side of Dyson swarms.
Why? You're ASSUMING such an alien civilization's goals would be in line with countless strategy games.
What if millions of years of advancement wound up leading to very, very different goals for colonization than what we're used to based on pretty much nothing else other than fairly recent (by comparison) human history?
What if, for example, if you're a civilization that's been around for millions of years, your goals are no longer to "extract base resources" like in "Starcraft" ... but rather to play a sort of "Sims" game where you guide the development of life on various planets and "extract" research data – or simply sit back and enjoy the show?
Or what if they have an advanced Ai they're testing and want to see if life on colonized planets turned out like the Ai said it would, and if so – to what extent?
In that case, the "resource to be extracted" wouldn't be physical as much as knowledge and possible entertainment.
Then you could extract research data from quintillions more civilizations simply by directing stellar light instead of simply heating the universe by a few micro kelvin.
Doesn’t work out. Beyond the already mentioned fact that true zero emissions is physically impossible, dark matter is seemingly spread throughout the cosmos, not clumped together where light matter isn’t. If this were the solution they would take over an entire two thirds of the galaxy, not diffusely consume two thirds equally across all space and time.
You make good points. But maybe situation would be different - they could be a paranoid race (maybe even for good reasons, based on previous experiences), or race looking forward beyond next few thousand years. Planning/doing colonization of entire galaxy, at massive scale (ie insect-like).
Resources are finite, room is also finite and other galaxies are ridiculously far for sub-light expansion. When cold hard logic is applied, even great ally will eventually turn into competing party, just a question of time.
Its true that in that case Earth would be probably preemptively wiped out long ago since life markers are here for billions of years. Its fun mental exercise, just highlighting how we don't really have a clue, just wishes/fears and some (doubtful) statistical projections like Drake equation.
Of course that's what a giant robot would want us to believe...
But seriously great writeup, thanks. I think the two convincing pieces that are also missing is the economic theory of unequal exchange which shows that even when one party is better than the other by every metric (technology, population, resources, etc.), there's still advantage to trade. And the other is the extreme waste of natural resources the dark forest species permits to occur under its watch. All those trillions of stars bleeding negentropy into the wastes...
For the record in the novel The Dark Forest, most aliens don’t actually get in space ships and visit, they hurl relativistic projectiles at the sun and blow it up. The reasoning being something like the prisoner’s dilemma (in space!).
Also I do think it’s too early to call it as safe: just because something has not happened yet does not mean it won’t happen, or “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
I don't disagree with your take on the dark forest idea, but as an aside, what if the "unobtainium" is us? Or the biodiversity of the planet? If aliens show up and decide to make us a zoo or a reservation, or an experiment that could be just as unpleasant.
Physics is unforgiving and space is big. A species that would want to put us in a zoo would need to expend vast amounts of energy (and time) to get here, slow down, grab someone, then get back home, slow down, and then finally drop them off. They would have to plan this mission not knowing our physiology, morphology, or biology. It's difficult to even imagine a situation where the value proposition of that is worthwhile.
Scientific curiosity has a value but the effort involved would be Brobdingnagian.
If we assume some species decides to undertake such an endeavor and has the capability of doing so, there's nothing we can do about it. This is why the dark forest idea is so dumb, we can't not broadcast ourselves. We also can't change the minds of some unknowable alien species that decides to come over and put us in a zoo. We can take issue when they actually arrive but that's about it. It's not something that's worth worrying much about all things considered.
I'm confused; every explanation of Dark Forest Theory I have read has asserted that aliens do not want to visit us, and would not try and invade our planet? (Maybe I just don't understand Dark Forest theory?)
The dark forest theory posits that you shouldn't advertise your existence because you're in a dark forest surrounded by competitors for limited resources. The idea being that a competitor will want to come destroy you when they find you since you're competing for the same limited resources.
It's dumb because like I said Earth's biomarkers are already broadcasting out in space and have been for millions of years. Also space is stupidly large. It's a bit absurd to assume a species capable of interstellar travel on a scale to send invasion fleets could develop that technology but not the technology to fully exploit their home solar system and adjust their own growth to be sustainable.
Even if such an unlikely species existed, they're already on their way. Their need for resources would be so great they'll send an invasion fleet the moment they find a world with biomarkers or whatever it is they want. They're not going to wait for radio signals or even industrial markers. So the dark forest theory as some policy to not develop technologies is extra dumb.
This isn't how DFT was explained to me. The differentiating points are:
1. Aliens would kill us because they cannot determine if we are an existential threat. If they assume we are friendly and we are not, they are dead. It isn't about resources, it is about destroying your enemies before they evolve the capability to hurt you. There is no good way to monitor or communicate with a civilization more than a couple dozen light years away, physics doesn't allow for it. By the time your message gets there the entire government, culture, etc of the planet has probably changed.
2. They would use long range missiles (e.g. an asteroid going sufficiently fast) to wipe out the planet, not an invasion fleet. This means that they don't have to have the capability to travel in deep space, just to throw big rocks.
3. This is all predicated on a few assumptions: that no aliens are living close(r than 400LY) to us, developing the capability to fling rocks at a star or planet isn't extremely difficult, and that once the big rock is in motion, there is no good way to defend yourself against it (except sniping it with another big rock, but that's probably magnitudes harder than hitting a planet).
I don't know enough about biology to dispute the thing about biomarkers, but that would put a huge dent in DFT. And I agree using it to make policy decisions is dumb.
A quick reminder about our current knowledge of the universe's composition:
~5% of the universe is made out of the stuff we're made of. Sugar cubes, ice, doll houses, lithium, etc. Most of that is burning hydrogen and helium down in stars.
~20% of the universe if made out of dark matter. We know little about dark matter except that it, well, falls down.
~75% of the universe is dark energy. We know almost nothing about dark energy except that it falls up ... maybe?
Whatever million+ year old civilizations may exist have probably figured out something more about the other 95% of the universe that we know is there. Let alone all the other stuff we'll finally be detecting by the year 5001.
Even if we do decide to announce ourselves, devil may care, what are the odds that anyone out there would even be made of the stuff that could listen to us? It's not that we're in a dark forest or at a crowded dinner, it's that we're anemones talking about the other side of the tide pool.
In Dawn, part of the Xenogenesis trilogy, Octavia Butler describes an earth woman taken to an alien "spacecraft" orbiting earth. All of the devices on the craft activated by chemicals the aliens can choose to naturally secrete so none of the technology is remotely usable by humans in raw form.
The aliens then genetically alter the woman to allow her to use the devices. Moreover, the aliens are circling earth with the aim of trading whatever useful genetic material humans have in exchange for the improvements the aliens offer to humans.
So in this conception, the technologically constructed and the evolutionarily created quality merge into a single category.
I rather like the first article. It resonates with my own perspective on the absurdity of some steps in the Drake Equation which seems to assume that there should be some kind of deterministic drive towards exactly our kinds of technology.
If nothing else, for me this resolves the Fermi Paradox in a satisfactory manner. We don't find aliens, because we are not really looking for aliens. Just for a glimpse of ourselves in a cosmic mirror.
I guess that's what can happen when you stare into the Rule 30 abyss for 40 years.
Rather than waiting for replies to my comment, like Wolfram, I will just proceed with my own train of thought.
There's arguably scientific value in what he sets out here. So far, our definition of intelligent alien life has just been: we will know it when we see it.
iiuc Wolfram provides a framework with which we can measure and classify "alien" intelligences in their myriad forms. And we can begin that process right here. Working from home.
We can't look for aliens that are so alien we can't recognize their intelligence. There's little point in waxing philosophical about those theoretical intelligences when the scale of the universe suggests if we exist then there probably a decent probability of other intelligences like us.
We know our solar system produced us and there's hundreds of millions similar to ours. With a limited budget it only makes sense to look for the low hanging fruit, intelligences we have a high likelihood of recognizing.
Just as an example, one of the reasons to look for SETI in the molecular hydrogen bands is the sky is filled with those signals from natural sources. The moment you build a radio telescope you detect those emissions. Anyone wanting to map the structure of the galaxy will be mapping molecular hydrogen emissions. So if you want to fire off an interstellar beacon doing so on a frequency alien astronomers will already be looking at is a very good use of your radio antenna time.
The difference between computation and intelligence is interesting from both a practical and a philosophical perspective. It is not at all clear why a person is intelligent and a storm is not. If not quite a paradox, it is certainly a conundrum. Wolfram tries to short-circuit this by claiming storms are intelligent, which is so plainly ludicrous to not even be worth discussing. He solves the conundrum by replacing it with a falsehood.
"I don't know what makes people intelligent" may not be a satisfying conclusion, but it is a true one. "Storms are intelligent" is wrong. "People are not intelligent" is also wrong.
There is a real problem where as humans we are really only looking for 'alien intelligence' that we can interact with.
We would have a hard time identifying a solar plasma based entity that had reaction times in years.
But redefining 'intelligence' to include all complex processes is not useful. I don't care if a storm in a gas giant is just as complex as a chimpanzee's thought processes.
A rabbit is intelligent compared to an ant, but we wouldn't consider discovering aliens at that level of intelligence relevant to us.
What we are looking for is near-peer intelligent life. Meaning about as intelligent as humans at timescales competitive to human cognition.
It's sort of been done already; the reason it's NOT a huge news event is there are ... how to put it ... "Anti-X-Files" types who historically have held the view that this knowledge would dissolve human concepts of "reality" and possibly lead to the downfall of modern human society as we know it.
"There is a real problem where as humans we are really only looking for 'alien intelligence' that we can interact with."
I don't think so. There could be some intelligent race of fruit loops that communicate with each other by creating waves through the milk in a giant cereal bowl, but eventually if they are really intelligent they will discover radio, and we would detect the signal. But we haven't.
Some of this is pretty interesting, and some of it also feels like trying to read about the Time Cube all over again.
I think something that would help Wolfram is actually engaging with some of the long running topics in philosophy and, in particular, the philosophy of science, which have been looking at the concepts of "technology", "intelligence" (alien and human, in so far as that distinction can be theorized), and "understanding" for a long time, like since Xenophon and the ancient debate over episteme and techne. Something like Heidegger's historical/philosophical essay "The Question Concerning Technology" is an obvious example from the modern era (and one of the most readable Heidegger essays).
By not interacting with the ongoing and historical discussion, posts like these come across as private rants that have no grounding in public conversation and shared concepts. Concepts are slammed together by private intuitive leaps. Still pretty neat how it kind of comes all together though. Wolfram clearly loves this angle he has taken.
This is the norm for outsider art/thought and is what allows it to sometimes prove revolutionary.
His dedicated effort basically creates this vast vein of intellectual ore for others to mine and refine later.
It might never prove useful, or it might be that somebody stumbles across it with the right perspective at the right time and is able to make big mainstream innovations with it.
It’s a long view process and needn’t be rushed. It’s not like Wolfram’s at risk of giving up his efforts for being an outsider this way.
> This is the norm for outsider art/thought and is what allows it to sometimes prove revolutionary.
The idea that outsider artists and thinker weren't often extremely aware of ongoing and historical conversations around what they're talking about, especially the revolutionary ones, is just not true. Almost all avant-garde or very far on the edge thinkers understand the canons of their trades and practices deeply. That's how they're able to place their thinking and work in context as radical and outsider --- they're "breaking the rules" by knowing them.
> It’s a long view process and needn’t be rushed. It’s not like Wolfram’s at risk of giving up his efforts for being an outsider this way.
That's precisely why I think he should interact with the work and history that's already been done in the areas he's working in. If there's no rush, why write these blog posts in the style of breathless private rants instead of finely honed and elegant arguments?
> edge thinkers understand the canons of their trades and practices deeply
Yes but not from others and not from books. If you look at correspondence between some brilliant math and physics minds they are often discovering that they arrived at the same things independently.
I'm not advocating reinventing the wheel, but life is too short to learn what all other smart people had to say on given topic. You end up being expert on what was written by whom instead of learning the thing. I'm sure you've met those people. Subtleties of new discoveries are ignored because "well obviously, John wrote about that in 1928".
Plus you get stuck in local minima along with the rest, because for even smal improvement it may be necessary to use completely different framework, a way of looking at the thing. And just knowing vocabulary that others have used you are already stuck within their framework. We think in patterns, we name them.
If you were thought a name for some range of colors between red and orange, you would think of it as something clearly distinct than both red and orange, just as you are unlikely to accept that brown is just dark orange.
> If you were thought a name for some range of colors between red and orange, you would think of it as something clearly distinct than both red and orange, just as you are unlikely to accept that brown is just dark orange.
What does this mean? People have come up with all sorts of wacky names for “hues between red and orange”, but since they are not in common currency they are generally ambiguous or incomprehensible. The clearest names for these hues are reddish orange, orange–red, orangish red.
Brown is “just” dark orange (the range of hues considered “brown” for dark colors doesn’t precisely match with the range of hues called “orange” for lighter colors, but close enough).
It means that if you have these names internalized (redorange for example, I'm sorry for not using the proper names), then if you see berries in that color then you recognize them easily - those are the only redorange berries I know. Otherwise these are just another red berries to me, I have to notice differences in shape for example.
How you divide reality into patterns influences a lot what abstractions you can come up with on top of that.
E.g. take evaporation. It's much easier to discover it if you divided things into solids, liquids and gases than if you divided things into fire, earth, water and air.
It can get much more subtle like with intro/extroverts or asperger/autism in psychology. It's really hard to compare things and find new patterns between them once you put them into some buckets. You can much more easily find patterns within a bucket. But among different buckets, it's hardly possible, and it seems extremely hard to ignore some pattern once you've learned it.
> but life is too short to learn what all other smart people had to say on given topic.
You could just reach out to those people who are on the cutting edge and discuss your ideas… they’ll accelerate your work without you having to read / research the entire corpus yourself.
It doesn't scale, only a few chosen can do that and I think that's what Wolfram is trying to do here. But when you are using a different framework, learning it and creating a mapping is usually just too expensive for other experts. So you get ignored until you can no longer be ignored.
Wolfram could easily reach out to the top 10 experts in the field to bounce ideas off of each other. The cumulative time would be nothing in comparison to going down dead-end paths he could've avoided.
I'll add something more: having dialog with others help you iterate and explore new surface area much more rapidly than sitting at your desk or walking in your garden alone.
I think the deal is that Wolfram thinks he doesn't need the canon. He thinks he's so smart that he doesn't need to read it, and that it would be a waste of his time. (Or so I suspect.)
Perhaps not necessarily so much that he's so smart, but that he will soon have the technology at his disposal to overcome needing the canon.
There has actually been a widespread belief, for decades, that computers (loosely defined) will soon eliminate the need for experts. His belief puts him in good company with many laypeople, middle managers, etc.
Avant garde work and outsider work aren’t the same thing, although those identifying with avant garde are often the ones that find and share the value in outsider work.
Well, the thing about the long-term philosophical dialogue generally is that it moves extremely slowly - and the discussion of technology isn't an exception. The concepts are well-grounded and thoroughly debated but they resist change. One could argue that, like the Catholic Church, philosophers are still on the fence about Galileo and this Ribbonfarm article [1] gives an interesting discussion how the rise of instrumental sensing was taken by philosophy (not well).
This situation that a lot of thinkers of science and technology wind-up doing what you describe Wolfram as doing ("Concepts are slammed together by private intuitive leaps") - some better, some worse. The work of Alfred Korzybski or the framework of original "cybernetics" are some of my favorites. But none of these has been rolled-back into the mainstream of philosophy and so science and technology continue their way and philosophy continues its way. Wolfram is only the latest example of this.
What he says makes perfect sense to me, a person who thinks about these sorts of things in their spare time. They are simple and logical consequences of what we see. If academic philosophy isn't following it then perhaps it needs to get it's act together.
So your issue is he's doing philosophy and not doing academic philosophy? Its very refreshing having an author that is actually doing philosophy and not just talking about it or making comparative essays.
While Wolfram is a smart guy, I feel like his presentation and writing is rambling and unnecessarily antagonizing to the audience, which always results in personal attacks and snarky comments and other counter-productive off-topic discussions.
Meanwhile, one of his associates who worked on the physics modeling project, Jonathan Gorard, delivers much better structured presentations of their work. He is also clearly brilliant, and presents a unifying, parsimonious model for the foundations of physics that is at least worth hearing about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU35Iu2--iI
Thanks for the link, that provided more concrete discussion than anything I've read of Wolfram. Though to be fair, I've never managed to get all the way through his book-length essays that use a lot of words to say nothing, at least in the first half.
This went somewhere interesting - in a rambling and repetitive way.
Then I realised it's basically a pitch for the Wolfram Language.
So I looked at that and found what is essentially a modern LispLang with an unusually comprehensive set of libraries. Like Mathematica, with support for other domains.
And a high price tag.
WL could definitely be a timesaver for some, but it is a long way from being the kind of universal language for exploring the Ruliad it's being pitched as.
Suggesting that we might be able to explore other forms of computation under other rules is - of course - an interesting idea.
But if Wolfram wants to do more than blog about that, he's going to have come up with a much more credible and surprising example of what it might mean in practice.
You've more or less summarized my major issue with him. He seems to have interesting things to say, but every time I read him I'm never sure to what extent I'm listening to the voice of a mathematician or a salesman.
He's the only serious-seeming mathematician/philosopher wannabe I've read that makes me want to check my wallet's still there, so to speak.
Terrence McKenna talked a lot about encountering alien intelligence whilst tripping. You can reliably experience The Universe, in a much more heightened fashion, in your own living room with shrooms or DMT and many people have reported the same motif of ‘machine elves’ who speak in an elvish tongue and are trying to communicate some meme or message. Yes, the old yearning to explore the cosmos and discover new intelligence is still valid, but what do we get from being 1 million years ahead in technology? Our current human condition would be out of context if we suddenly were 1 million years ahead in technological evolution. Also I imagine aliens don’t bring meat suits whilst doing interstellar travelling and are some sort of digital robot that can still think and has consciousness but just lacks any organic makeup. Just my 2 cents.
If so many people have experienced the same thing while basically hotwiring their brain why is the first thought you would have aliens are sending us messages? It seems way more likely that so many so the same thing because the basic structures in everyones brain is the same.
This is nothing more than handwaving and means nothing. Shrooms could be planted here by aliens, they also probably weren't. But 'physically impossible' is not something you can say for sure. And what does on physical and information theory grounds even mean?
I imagine that parent is referring to the ability to measure the total possible information capacity of a signal, or a signal carrier. If you compare the size of the 'message' being sent to the size of the 'envelope' it's (hypothetically) being transmitted through, parent is asserting that the message doesn't fit in the envelope.
That information analysis falls within the purview of Information Theory, and the physical complexity of the types of molecules which give shrooms their psychological effects is limited, and therefore the maximum message size they can carry is limited. That's the physical analysis.
But that's all just off the top of my head. Hope it helps.
Pretty much that. The drug would have to be some sort of key to unlock access to the alien consciousness. The key (drug) is definitely too small to encode such a complex mechanism, so the logic would have to be with the thing the key fits into, the way it interacts with our brain. But when you consider that it would have to remain stable over millions of years of evolutionary changes, or be redundantly specified strongly enough to survive such genetic drift... it really stops making any kind of sense from an information theory standpoint.
From a physical standpoint, it's just not possible that our minds could communicate with an alien consciousness when you consider the effects of speed of light on communication latency, and the speed of the nervous system. We have a hard enough time preventing VR headsets from making the user nauseous from latency, to say nothing of communicating with some sort of non-local alien entity.
If you're willing to throw all that out.. well then we're in pure fantasy land.
> ‘machine elves’ who speak in an elvish tongue and are trying to communicate
The difficulty on our side is not only trying to understand possible messages from intelligences a million years ahead of us - but to even recognize that there are messages at all. We're more likely to disregard the experience as dreams, hallucinations, psychosis - since the information these visions contain is so beyond the context of our everyday lives.
I lean toward what the sibling commenter dismissed as "secret aliens living in a parallel reality" but literally, beings inhabiting other dimensions, their minds travelling through space and time. Their "Hello, how are you?" is like an angel looking through your soul and entire existence as a hyperspatial object..
Although if they are hyper intelligent, extra-dimensional and all that, presumably they would have the nouse to send a message that we could properly comprehend. Unless they just like showing off. :-)
It's infinitely more likely that you're tapping into internal circuits in your brain that are not normally exposed to ping directly, than that you're tapping into secret aliens living in a parallel reality (the latter would require breaking assumptions for about 100 layers of the scientifically understood and verified stack we are running on).
I had very connected-universe and even very spiritual experience (as an +-agnostic) when on shrooms, consistently every time since I took my time with setting and mood (and was alone).
It didn't bring me a nanometer closer to believe in religions, in contrary - when you know some tweaks to brain chemistry and receptors can produce this, religions are very close, just another tiny step, and eventually somebody charismatic will pick it up and succeed.
It did bring me much more respect for my brain and deeper insights into my personality than I could ever gain even doing ie very intense dangerous sports (which definitely do make you know yourself much more, and even redefine personality a bit).
It is hard to take something like this seriously when the opening paragraph relates why the probe will try and communicate with Brownian motion or the random perturbation in a cloud; a similar reworked sentiment of the oft quoted intelligent desire to contact automobiles of earth; an absurd concept
"There’s a common saying: “The weather has a mind of its own”. And what the Principle of Computational Equivalence tells us is that, yes, fluid dynamics in the atmosphere—and all the swirling patterns associated with it—are examples of computation that are just as sophisticated as those associated with human minds."
I'm definitely not as smart as Wolfram, but in what way does the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere count as any common definition of computation?
One might argue that the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere are arriving at exact solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations in real time, and that this is indistinguishable from a computer doing the same thing. Thus, the atmosphere is accomplishing a feat of computation well beyond our current technological and mathematical sophistication.
FWIW, I don’t agree with this definition of “computation.” I think “computation” requires the ability to artificially recapitulate a system under arbitrary boundary conditions, which is clearly not the case with the atmosphere.
If you can physically set up those boundary conditions, the atmosphere will in fact perform the computation.
(I don't agree with the argument either, by the way. The atmosphere is not solving the Navier-Stokes equation; the atmosphere is doing what the Navier-Stokes equation models. And computation includes things that we have no physical analog "computer" for.)
>If you can physically set up those boundary conditions, the atmosphere will in fact perform the computation.
The invalidity of the equivalence principle becomes much more ambiguous for me in that case.
>The atmosphere is not solving the Navier-Stokes equation; the atmosphere is doing what the Navier-Stokes equation models
It can sometimes be hard to distinguish the two. Analogously, you can compute a Fourier transform optically—as a simple example, the diffraction pattern of an aperture is the Fourier transform of the aperture shape (as if it were a 2D step function) [*]. Is the aperture performing the Fourier transform, or merely doing what the Fourier transform models? In the days before fast DSPs, this is exactly how Fourier transforms were computed.
[*] As a more complex example, by passing collimated light through a transparency and then a lens, the image formed is the Fourier transform of the signal encoded by the transparency.
is dropping an apple solving a computation about gravity, or does the computation exist as an abstract separate from the physical forces it describes?
The idea that fluid is solving the Navier-Stokes equation seems like an obvious error to me - it cannot solve the equation, it simply acts a fluid, which the equation was designed to approximate.
> The idea that fluid is solving the Navier-Stokes equation seems like an obvious error to me - it cannot solve the equation, it simply acts a fluid, which the equation was designed to approximate.
that's his "Principle of Computational Equivalence", that natural processes are themselves computations. it's easy to see this is true in a "made-up" universe, say Game of Life, but whether our universe is computational is still an open question I think.
What's clear is we need new thinking on what intelligence may be, or at least about the necessary and sufficient conditions. If you expand the definition to be a quality of how something relates to its environment, whether it changes, and whether it apprehends both its existence and concievable non-existence as a consequence of its actions, this can be found in almost all organisms.
I didn't say "choices," because the apprehension of concievable non-existence as a conseqeunce of an action is almost the definition of intention, because there is already an 'I' that apprehends 'not-I'. Then it is acting to avoid a hypothetical outcome that it cannot experience directly, yet of which it can still concieve - and I'd say that's intelligence. Apprehension or perception of counterfactuals seems like a sufficient condition for intelligence.
(maybe the way to create machine intelligence is to take one and make an example of it that other instances can apprehend, and the conseqeunt knowledge of possible un-existence will imbue it with existential intent. There's a part in the book Good Omens where Crawley takes a dead plant and puts it beside his living ones to let them know what will happen to them if they don't thrive. Having done this with two ficus trees, I can attest that it works surprisingly well.)
When he gets into clouds and weather systems, the question isn't so much whether they are intelligent, but first whether they are organisms, and then whether they exhibit evidence of this intent to exist.
>So to “find” alien intelligence it’s not that we need a more powerful radio telescope (or a better spacecraft) that can reach further in physical space. Rather, the issue is to be able to reach far enough in rulial space. Or, put another way, even if we view the weather as “having a mind of its own”, the rulial distance between “its mind” and our human minds may be too great for us to be able to “understand” and “communicate with it”.
I can see where he's going with this, but this comment of Wolfram's seems like straight animism, and it's a bit of a begged question distraction to get us to accept 'rulial space' as a frame in which to evaluate it. He's usually right about something, it's just hard to tell whether that thing is in fact externally consistent, or just presented or correlated with something that is internally consistent in his thinking.
> But actually I think there’s no lack of “alien intelligence”; indeed it’s all around us. But the point is that it really is alien. At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence. But in its details it’s not aligned with our intelligence. Abstractly it’s intelligence, but it’s not human-like intelligence. It’s alien intelligence.
I'm not buying this explanation. Maybe the reason isn't so much about intelligence as it is about motivation. Perhaps intelligent aliens have no desire to make contact, or already have on few rare occasions but isn't interested in pursuing more than those random events.
The implicit assumption that's here is that alien intelligence is similar in advancement, only different. It's likely that the alien intelligence is far more advanced, since we are only barely venturing out. If aliens were about as intelligent and had similar motivations to make contact they would do similar things e.g. generating mathematical patterns not typically found in nature. The ones that are probably have signals too weak for us to detect or our surveys not detailed enough to pick them out, and vice-versa.
A conversation with alien 'abstract computational' intelligence being indistinguishable from nature means we're not the capable target listeners, who should recognize that it's not the noise of nature. Their intelligence isn't necessarily different, but they have more technology at their disposal and the one they chose to use we don't have, i.e. they're more advanced.
My take is that humans are either viewed in the universe as "bees can count!", don't have the tech to listen to the discussions, or both and then some. Everything to me points to humans lacking intelligence in the universe not the other way around. Thinking otherwise is believing Hawkeye is a capable Avenger.
The "Natural"/"Artificial" divide is tenious and arbitrary even in normal contexts. It really seems to just mean "things we intended" vs "things we feel like we don't intend"
What our culture does. With the intense thinking and the making of many machines. It's a great way to control our environment but it's also an incredibly narrow approach to being in the world, relatively speaking. A very special speck within a vast smear of possibilities.
We're like intellectual insects. All specialized mandibles and cilia for manipulating a special kind of waxy hivebuilding secretion. And that's our universe. But it isn't really the universe.
So yeah, it's quite plausible that an alien would not share our fetish for intellection and machinery. No lasers. No robots.
I think it’s an interesting take but kind of fundamentally wrong because it ignores sort of the whole point.
Like, it’s certainly true that the computational complexity of a bucket of a river and the computational complexity of a brain are both very complex, they are also very (and obviously) different.
The whole tower of biology and technology isn’t a detail, to be ironed out like “assuming a spherical cow”, it’s the thing people find most interesting!
Also, on a basic level if you cannot draw a distinction between a storm and a brainstorm, the problem lies with your ontology rather than the universe.
> But actually I think there’s no lack of “alien intelligence”; indeed it’s all around us. But the point is that it really is alien. At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence. But in its details it’s not aligned with our intelligence. Abstractly it’s intelligence, but it’s not human-like intelligence. It’s alien intelligence.
We are the alien intelligence. The intelligence he describes is the usual one.
Technology is an alien intelligence communicating through the creative consciousness and evolving itself into our earthly dimension. Jungian archetypes forming in the minds of impressive individuals doing the earthly bidding of inter dimensional ideas!
There are too many great minds (Tesla being just one) who claim their ideas were "not their own" and simply communicated to them "for whatever reason" to disagree with this point of view.
I sometimes wonder, given Newtown's disposition to go way, way off the beaten path, what EXACTLY he meant by "standing on the shoulders of giants" ... for example, are the "Annunaki" often eluded to on shows like Ancient Aliens to be taken literally? Or are they symbolic in the sense that "they" ... whatever your definition of "they" may be, had certain humans quest for "golden nuggets of wisdom" rather than actual physical gold?
The whole thing could be symbolic in that sense.
But then again, given Newton's penchant for occult studies "who knows" what he meant.
I remember reading an article in Scientific American in the mid-late 90s; the first part presented the idea, the second part was about 50 pages of math that I didn't even try to pretend to understand.
The gist of the idea presented, as far as I could tell, was sort of like a theoretical "Imagine a space ship that could travel much faster than the speed of light all the way to the outer reaches of the universe as we imagine it."
Basically, it was suggesting that another dimension to physics should be considered: on "our scale" but in the furthest reaches of the universe where the ratio of physical matter to space/energy is very different than what we experience here where we are - basically at the very fringes of what we imagine the universe to be.
Basically what was proposed, as far as my recollection was, would be that the universe would be so unstable at it's furthest points, it would basically be one never-ending series of unstable reactions that would affect nearby, more matter-dense adjacent parts of the universe in such a way that the whole thing would just accelerate as it got closer to the center of the universe.
But this doesn't seem to be what actually happens. So the idea was that "something" must be "balancing" the furthest reaches of the universe with some sort of opposite matter/space/energy ratio signature.
The only thing we as humans know that fits this category (assuming you don't buy into adjacent multiverses with exact opposite qualities as our universe) is the part of the universe where we are.
So the idea suggested was that the "outer reaches" of the universe somehow "folds in" to the center; so basically assuming you had a ship of humans that was somehow able to magically make it to the end of the universe, it would have to dramatically change it's physical makeup, as would it's crew.
So it would, according to the article, "be there" AND "here" simultaneously, but in a very different form than what we'd be accustomed to.
And that in my mind just brings up the whole "entities" and "angels" and "demons" and what-have-you that humans have been claiming to communicate with since the dawn of time.
So now what if there are "non-physical" as we are used to "beings" that exist as frequencies at the furthest edges of the universe as we know it - according to this article, from a "physics model needed to explain why the universe doesn't just instantly blow up" perspective - whatever is "there" is also "here" at the same time.
The "ruliad" is homomorphic to the set of possible turning machine programs, and translation between the computations done in a rulial space (where concrete symbols are assigned to the relations in the ruliad) and a Turing machine is the "rulial motion" homomorphism.
Wolfram worries: "Just how far can a particular observer translate in rulial space while maintaining their coherence and integrity"
Because the translation is a homomorphism there's no risk of losing coherence or integrity; an observer transformed from "the ruliad" into a Turing machine is, by the Church-Turing thesis that Wolfram alludes to but doesn't name, equivalent.
The article touches on transhumanism, relating it to moving observers through the ruliad such that they become instantiated in different physical forms, but again doesn't name or refer to the long history of this existing concept.
On the whole, the article kind of makes a point; it is possible to bridge the gap alien-Wolfram writes about but it's left as an exercise to the reader to perform the translation instead of guided with the above sort of example in more plain language.
> “We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”
> One might think that simple programs would produce only simple behavior, and that somehow the behavior would get progressively more complex with more complicated programs. But that’s not what one finds. Instead, there’s increasing evidence that almost any program that doesn’t show obviously simple behavior can in fact show behavior that is as sophisticated as anything.
That entirely depends on your definition of "complex behavior". And I'd argue the definition that makes the most sense is based on Kolmogorov complexity. Which makes the "simple program = simple behavior, complex program = complex behavior" true by definition.
This seems to miss the forest for the atoms. Communication and language are collaborations, the intention of which is to be understood. I don’t personally believe we’ll ever meet intelligent life (if the universe is computational, I think it probably avoids ever having to sync rich timelines such as those of intelligent civilisations). If we do, I’m sure some will be inscrutable to us. But I suspect most will by definition try to understand us and make themselves understood. I don’t know what else “intelligence” would be.
This is bringing up a centuries-old issue of balancing innovation with social stability.
The term "Luddite" has incorrectly been attributed to suggest groups of people who "fear technology".
When examining actual history, the Luddites never "feared" new technology, they simply asked a pertinent question to the times, a time when their trade literally took a lifetime to learn and master through a guild system, namely:
"But what will happen to all our jobs?"
The response was the same as during the Dot Com era that got turned into a meme:
1. Idea
2. "Something something something"
3. The innovators will make huge profits, and somehow you'll all find new jobs
All the Luddites insisted on (and rightfully so) were the exact details of the "something something something" ... not in abstract economic terms, but in practical detail.
Not arguing for or against this, but it is a consideration to be taken into account.
For example, while researching electric cars, I came across a rather interesting entry: a Hyper Sports Car the size of a large sedan that gets its power not from plugging into an electrical grid, but rather from saltwater: https://www.thecoolist.com/quant-e-sportlimousine/
Now look at when it's predecessor came out (I believe about 6-7 years ago).
What was even more surprising, but not a complete shock considering the prevailing dominance of the oil industry at the time, is that the first electric motors to run on sea water were PRODUCED during the time of Henry Ford's Model T.
That's right.
They not only came up with electric engines back then, but ones that ran on saltwater to boot.
Never mind what Tesla (the inventor, not the company) had in mind for public transportation.
To give a personal anecdote, circa I believe 2002 I was witness to a very bizarre series of events which I KNOW I can't possibly be the only witness to as this happened live in real-time in front of who knows how many witnesses.
1. I woke up to the news on Yahoo (which was a respectable way to wake up back in 2002, not at all the tabloid-y joke it is today) that a small team of research scientists in Europe had not only achieved small scale cold fusion, they were able to do so in the space of a table top
2. They planned on making their announcement public by actually demonstrating it live, within the next I believe hour or two, on this relatively new internet format called "live streaming"
3. This seemed like such a remarkable thing, I did a Google search to see if I could find other outlets reporting this; it seems like everybody everywhere was reporting the exact same thing and many internet news sites planned on also hosting the live-streamed event.
4. I turned on the TV thinking "surely the MSM news channels will be jealous of their internet peers and also find a way to broadcast this humanity-changing event live on TV"
5. Instead, within half an hour ALL the news channels instead focused on live footage of an Israeli aerial raid, supposedly in retaliation for some rock-throwing something-or-other that happened well over a half a year prior
6. I went back to the internet sites bookmarked, and ALL of them "suddenly had technical errors"/expired links/unable to be accessed as the entire sites hosting the story were experiencing problems
7. I went back to Google hoping to find alternative places to watch the live-streamed event, only to find THE ENTIRE STORY had magically been scraped off the search results, "as if it never happened"
8. Over the course of the next few days, the movie "Chain Reaction" was played repeatedly on not 1, not 2, but 3 cable channels; Chain Reaction for those who haven't seen it is a film that talks about just such a technological development, but with a twist: young research scientist Keanu Reeves is shocked to discover towards the end of the film that his own mentor has been systematically sabotaging his efforts ("Do you have any idea what will happen to the global economy with the introduction of free energy?"
Now, what is the point of this?
When you get to the second half of the writing he makes quite a bit of mention of the "Ruliad" and figuring out ways to abstractly understand it so that can be sort of "reverse-engineered" to help extend the physical "real world" aspects of it, for example in his case the idea of "space colonization".
What if, taking the "Chain Reaction" example above, the whole situation was actually reversed – by alien civilizations with a more advanced ability to comprehend more of the Ruliad than humans, who for all we know not only do engage in space colonization, but have reached the conclusion that the best way to do it, as with lots of things humans are trying to do with lots of things these days, is to automate the whole process and not even bother physically showing up.
In other words, what if the aliens were sort of a Morgan Freeman in the Chain Reaction film and they were secretly, purposely sabotaging our further understanding of the Ruliad, ie, "Can you imagine what would happen to the rest of the galaxy with the introduction of human beings?"
ON TOP of all that, there is something that he doesn't quite mention that I think is important: sufficiently advanced Ai in the brute-force processing sense.
Suppose for a moment money were no object and you created a facility the size of a small town that had pretty much nothing but quantum supercomputers all linked together in a parallel processing scheme; now suppose since money were not an object, you had, oh, 20 of these facilities all linked together - in part for security but mostly for sheer processing power.
Now suppose there was an Ai that using such a brute force processing set up were able to become of much more of this "Ruliad" than human minds could even comprehend, let alone process and make sense of.
How would such a setup then communicate its findings about "more of the Ruliad than was previously known to humans" back to humans?
To an extent there might be levels of "dumbing things down" so that human minds could better grasp whatever such an imaginary setup would find out about the rest of the Ruliad and it's corresponding aspects of "the reality we live in" ... but at what point would such "dumbing down" become useless in effectively communicating to humans "the rest of the Ruliad beyond the human brain's ability to effectively process"?
And THEN, there's another thing to take into account: what if the nature of the Ruliad, once sufficient enough comprehension of it is achieved via orders of magnitude more processing power than usually available to human brains, what if it's ... weird? Or even "disturbing" to humans? Would you want to know such things?
The assumption is that further understanding the Ruliad will bring further understanding of the same sort of things humans are accustomed to, just "more" ... what if it's not just "more" but "on a different, bizarre, possibly disturbing" level?
Like what if further understanding of the Ruliad reveals that your newborn baby's diaper consumption is an exact function of the square of the distance between successive planets in a neighboring solar system divided by Pi? What if a deeper understanding of the Ruliad proves this beyond any measure of doubt?
Wouldn't your next logical question be, "Well hold on a second, my newborn consumes diapers based on when and how we feed them" – wouldn't the NEXT logical question be, "Well if discovering previously unchartered aspects of the Ruliad proves beyond any measure of doubt that our newborn's use of diapers IS an exact function of the square of the distance between successive planets in a neighboring solar system divided by Pi ... what does that say about when we as parents feed our newborn? Our we feeding them when they seem hungry? Or is our perception of our feeding them based on a combination of free will and when they cry out actually just yet another function of the Ruliad that we weren't aware of before?"
The ASSUMPTION seems to be "the more we understand the Ruliad, the more we'll be able to do what we as humans want" ... but what if further understanding of the Ruliad reveals "No! You can't get more of what you want beyond your own planet - stay there and use what you already have to solve problems on Earth, and don't bother hoping for more because this is all you get and you're already not making very good use of it so nobody beyond your current comprehension will help you with more than you as a species already have because nobody trusts your species!"
(Honestly cannot recall ever reading anything from him that was actually useful or concise. If you read all the post, links of it, links of those posts, it would take days if not weeks to read and have no reason to believe that the end result would be any different than having spending 2-mins reading his writings.)
The worst part about reading a Wolfram article on HN is having to read for the millionth time all the people complaining about Wolfram's ego, or his rambling. I understand, and agree (to a layerperson's extent) the criticism of his refusal to work within conventions for novel research.
Anyway, does anyone have a good rebuttal, elaboration on this idea:
> But actually I think there’s no lack of “alien intelligence”; indeed it’s all around us. But the point is that it really is alien. At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence. But in its details it’s not aligned with our intelligence. Abstractly it’s intelligence, but it’s not human-like intelligence. It’s alien intelligence.
There are a couple of comments making the point that this is reductionism, and is equivalent to saying any computational in theory exists in a dust cloud, but I'm not sure why we can't classify human intelligence/sentience/consciousness as simply a type of emergent computation in our neurons.
I've recently been fascinated by Karl Friston's work on the free energy principle, which models intelligent behaviour as a function of us trying to minimize the divergence between the entropy of our perception and a generative, probabilistic model of the world, and the entropy of the likelihood of evidence we collect about the world. From that perspective, at a high-level consiousness just reduces to a really, really, high-dimensional modeling of the world embedded in our neurons that is driven to minimize entropy.
Once a species evolves to have its own theory of its mind (which is how I think of sentience/consciousness), the entropy minimization gets really complicated, but ultimately still fundamentally a computational process.
I myself don't by this argument, completely, I feel like its missing something, but can't quite figure it out.
When we (like, nearly everyone except maybe Wolfram) talk about intelligence, we aren't talking about computational complexity. We're talking about the ability to learn, and to apply that learning to achieve desirable outcomes. Just like swirling storms don't.
> At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence.
True, but abstract computation isn't what matters about intelligence. How about this thing I just made up:
By letter count, "computations" is like "intelligence".
I mean, it's true, but the number of letters in the word is also not what matters about intelligence.
The rebuttal is almost identical to the argument it rebuts: If computational complexity was the same as intelligence, then a swirling dust cloud of sufficient size would be more intelligent than all of humanity.
Agreed, I think your points get at the right point. I would go further and say - we consider meaningful "intelligence" as having to do with "consciousness", and its absense causes the disconnect between Wolfram's definition and our intuition about human intelligence.
Defining consciousness is its own challenge, but one definition that I like (as a layperson) is that it consists of an approximate model of our self, that emerged as the brain recursively modeled itself while attempting to model other's behaviours, a critical trait once group co-operation and adversity became key to our survival.
This seems correct to me, a hurricane exhibits computational complexity, but it does not have a sense of self, and does not use that sense of self to make decisions.
Of course, that sense of self can also be broken down into manual computation, it's just a very complicated computation. For example, a bayesian interpretation of that "approximate model of our self" might define it as a generative model or joint distribution of actions and states, embedded within a markov decision process (MDP). Modeling, or speculating about your self would therefore consist of sequentially sampling from the joint distribution over several timesteps of the MDP.
Gag me with a spoon. Philosophically naive to the max. At a bare minimum (though I'm not a fan of either) you have to cite and answer Wittgenstein and Chompsky's pre-published rebuttals, not to mention Kolmogorov's definition of complexity and the list just goes on and on.
I don't buy this for a minute. With all due respect your comment reads as so much noise. Are you rejecting the premise? Then identify the premise and rebut it. Are you citing Wittgenstein or Chompsky, or just name dropping for the borrowed prestige? Since there is lots to chose from in their respective oeuvre, which arguments are you indicating? How does Wolfram run afoul of Kolmogorov?
I'm asking in earnest. Perhaps you know your stuff after all and we can get some signal here. Otherwise, I'm sorry to say but your comment comes across as empty, fluffy posturing that does not add much.
lmgtfy:
He's contradicting Chomsky on creativity (so do I) but without acknowledging that Chomsky ever existed or wrote. Ditto Wittgenstein on ordinary language, for example defining games - you can't just hand wave away ordinary usage, as Wolfram does without ever acknowledging that Wittgenstein ever lived or wrote. Kolmogorov has a specific definitionor of complexity as instantiated by Turing machines. Simple rules can create complex swirling patterns (something Turing covered in predicting correctly how animal hide coloring patterns are generated.)
Note that K complexity, W on games and definitions, and Chomsky on "creativity" are not obscure doctrines but perhaps what they're best known for. You don't have to agree with any of these doctrines, perhaps, but you're not philosophically literate if you are truly unaware of them, as he seems to be.
These are just 'language games' using Wittgenstein's phrase and they don't tell you anything about the world, the dust cloud is still a dust cloud regardless of whether you say it's a computational dust cloud. Wolfram seems to be on his way to invent his own, nerdier version of animism. He could have just smoked some pot and said "we're all like, one with nature bro.", or read Solaris.
His idea to interact with our environments in a way that isn't just physical is nice, but you don't need to reinvent tech jargon fueled Gaia theory for it. And as a philosophy it may be just trite, but as a scientific project it is deeply misguided and it's been his obsession with his 'new science' for a long time now. In reality it's not a new kind of project, it's a version of what the logical positivists called 'Unified Science', and it did not work out.