Stephen Wolfram

So I'm telling you that this human...

I mean, this human has a hard time understanding a bunch of the things that are going on.

But what happens in understanding is one builds waypoints.

I mean, if you said, understand modern 21st century mathematics, starting from counting back in whenever counting was invented 50,000 years ago, whatever it was.

right, that will be really difficult.

But what happens is we build waypoints that allow us to get to higher levels of understanding.

And we see the same thing happening in language.

You know, when we invent a word for something, it provides kind of a cognitive anchor, a kind of a waypoint that lets us, you know, like a podcast or something.

You could be explaining, well, it's a thing which works this way, that way, the other way.

But as soon as you have the word podcast,

and people kind of societally understand it, you start to be able to build on top of that.

And so I think, and that's kind of the story of science, actually, too.

I mean, science is about building these kind of waypoints where we find this sort of cognitive mechanism for understanding something, then we can build on top of it.

You know, we have the idea of, I don't know, differential equations we can build on top of that.

We have this idea or that idea.

So my hope is that if it is the case that we have to go all the way sort of from the sand,

to the computer, and there's no waypoints in between, then we're toast.

We won't be able to do that.

The question is whether it is something that you asked whether our human brains will quote, understand what's going on.

And that's a different question because for that, it requires steps that are sort of from which we can construct a human understandable narrative.