Stephen Wolfram

Back in the 1980s, I was doing a bunch of work with some very good mathematicians, and they were trying to pick away, can we figure out what's going on in these computational systems?

And they basically said, look, the math we have just doesn't get anywhere with this.

We're stuck.

There's nothing to say.

We have nothing to say.

And in a sense, perhaps my main achievement at that time was to realize that the very fact that the good mathematicians had nothing to say was itself a very interesting thing.

That was kind of a sort of, in some sense, a whispering of a different part of the Rulliad that one was not accessible from what we knew in mathematics and so on.

yeah it's just a bunch of meat it's just a bunch of meat um yeah does that make you make you a little sad kind of a shame i mean i kind of like to see how all this stuff works out but i think the thing to realize you know it's an interesting sort of thought experiment you know you you say okay you know let's assume we can get cryonics to work and one day it will the

That will be one of these things that's kind of like ChatGPT.

One day somebody will figure out how to get water from zero degrees centigrade down to minus 44 or something without it expanding and cryonics will be solved and you'll be able to just put a pause in, so to speak, and kind of reappear 100 years later or something.

And the thing though that I've kind of increasingly realized

is that, in a sense, this whole question of one is embedded in a certain moment in time.

And the things we care about now, the things I care about now, for example, had I lived 500 years ago, many of the things I care about now, it's like, that's totally bizarre.

I mean, nobody would care about that.

It's not even the thing one thinks about.

In the future, the things that most people will think about, you know, one will be a strange relic of thinking about, you know, the kind of, you know, it might have been a theologian thinking about, you know, how many angels fit on the head of a pin or something.

And that might have been the, you know, the big intellectual thing.

So I think it's a, but yeah, it's a, you know, it's one of these things where particularly, you know,

I've had the, I don't know, good or bad fortune.

I'm not sure.