Stephen Wolfram

Now the question is, so there may be other intelligences like the aphorism, the weather has a mind of its own.

It's a different kind of intelligence that can compute all kinds of things that are hard for us to compute, but it is not well aligned with us, with the way that we think about things.

It doesn't think the way we think about things.

And in this idea of different intelligences, every different mind, every different human mind

is a different intelligence that thinks about things in different ways.

And, you know, in terms of the kind of formalism of our physics project, we talk about this idea of a ruleal space, the space of all possible sort of rule systems, and different minds are, in a sense, at different points in ruleal space.

Human minds...

ones that have grown up with the same kind of culture and ideas and things like this might be pretty close in ruleal space, pretty easy for them to communicate, pretty easy to translate, pretty easy to move from one place in ruleal space that corresponds to one mind to another place in ruleal space that corresponds to another sort of nearby mind.

When we deal with kind of more distant things in ruleal space, like the pet cat or something, the pet cat has some aspects

that are shared with us.

The emotional responses of the cat are somewhat similar to ours, but the cat is further away in real space than people are.

And so then the question is, can we identify sort of the, can we make a translation from our thought processes to the thought processes of a cat or something like this?

And, you know, what will happen when we get there?

And I think it's the case that many animals, I don't know, dogs, for example, you know, they have elaborate olfactory systems.

They have sort of the smell architecture of the world, so to speak, in a way that we don't.

And so if you were sort of talking to the dog and you could communicate in a language, the dog will say, well, this is a flowing, smelling, this, that, and the other thing, concepts that we just don't have any idea about.

Now, what's interesting about that is one day we will have chemical sensors that do a really pretty good job.

We'll have artificial noses that work pretty well, and we might have our augmented reality system show us kind of the same map that the dog could see and things like this.

It's similar to what happens in the dog's brain.

And eventually, we will have kind of expanded in ruleal space to the point where we will have those same sensory experiences that dogs have, and we will have internalized what it means to have the smell landscape or whatever.