Stephen Wolfram

I've increasingly realized as a result of science that I've done that there really isn't a bright line between the intelligent and the merely computational, so to speak.

Right.

So in our kind of everyday sort of discussion, we'll say things like, the weather has a mind of its own.

Well, let's unpack that question.

We realize that there are computational processes that go on that determine the fluid dynamics of this and that and the atmosphere, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

How do we distinguish that from the processes that go on in our brains of the physical processes that go on in our brains?

How do we separate those?

How do we say,

the physical processes going on that represent sophisticated computations in the weather, oh, that's not the same as the physical processes that go on that represent sophisticated computations in our brains.

The answer is I don't think there is a fundamental distinction.

I think the distinction for us is that there's kind of a thread of history and so on that connects kind of what happens in different brains to each other, so to speak,

And it's a, you know, what happens in the weather is something which is not connected by sort of a thread of civilizational history, so to speak, to what we're used to.

Absolutely.

And that's where we run into trouble thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence because it's like that pulsar magnetosphere that's generating these very elaborate radio signals.

Is that something that we should think of as being this whole civilization that's developed over the last however long, millions of years of processes going on in the neutron star or whatever versus what we're used to in human intelligence?

I think in the end, when people talk about extraterrestrial intelligence and where is it and the whole Fermi paradox of how come there's no other signs of intelligence in the universe, my guess is that we've got two alien forms of intelligence that we're dealing with, artificial intelligence and physical or extraterrestrial intelligence.

And my guess is people will get comfortable with the fact that both of these have been achieved.

around the same time.

And in other words, people will say, well, yes, we're used to computers, things we've created, digital things we've created, being sort of intelligent like we are.

And they'll say, oh, we're kind of also used to the idea that there are things around the universe that are kind of intelligent like we are, except they don't share the sort of civilizational history that we have.