Stephen Wolfram

you know, we don't know.

But this whole question of what is

When you say this question of sort of what's the smartest thing around, there's the question of what kind of computation you're trying to do.

If you say you've got some well-defined computation and how do you implement it?

Well, you could implement it by nerve cells firing.

You can implement it with silicon and electronics.

You can implement it by some kind of molecular computation process in the human immune system or in some molecular biology kind of thing.

There are different ways to implement it.

And, you know, I think this question of sort of which, you know, those different implementation methods will be of different speeds.

They'll be able to do different things.

If you say, you know, which... So an interesting question would be...

What kinds of abstractions are most natural in these different kinds of systems?

So for a cat, it's, for example, you know, the visual scene that we see, you might, you know, we pick out certain objects, we recognize, you know, certain things in that visual scene.

A cat might in principle recognize different things.

I suspect evolution, biological evolution is very slow.

And I suspect what a cat notices is very similar.

And we even know that from some neurophysiology.

What a cat notices is very similar to what we notice.

Of course, there's one obvious difference is cats have only two kinds of color receptors.

So they don't see in the same kind of color that we do.