Stephen Wolfram

Well, I think there are things, certainly in terms of the speed of processing certain kinds of things, for sure.

I mean, the question of what, you know, is there a game of chess, for example?

Is there cat chess that the cats could play against each other?

And if we tried to play a cat, we'd always lose.

I don't know.

It might have to do with speed, but it might have to do with concepts also.

There might be concepts in the cat's head

I tend to think that our species, from its invention of language, has managed to build up this kind of tower of abstraction that, for things like a chess-like game, will make us win.

In other words, we've become, through the fact that we've kind of experienced language and learnt abstraction, we've sort of become smarter at those kinds of abstract kinds of things.

Now, that doesn't make us smarter at catching a mouse or something.

it makes us smarter at the things that we've chosen to concern ourselves, which are these kind of abstract things.

And I think this is, again, back to the question of what does one care about?

If you have the discussion with a cat, if we can translate things to have the discussion with a cat, the cat will say, I'm very excited that this light

is moving and will say, why do you care?

And the cat will say, that's the most important thing in the world, that this thing moves around.

I mean, it's like when you ask about, I don't know, you look at archaeological remains and you say, these people had this belief system about this, and that was the most important thing in the world to them.

And now we look at it and say, we don't know what the point of it was.

I mean, I've been curious, you know, there are these handprints on caves from 20,000 or more years ago.

And it's like, nobody knows what these handprints were there for, you know, that they may have been a representation of the most important thing you can imagine.

They may just have been some, you know, some kid who rubbed their hands in the mud and stuck them on the walls of the cave.