William Hahn: Unifying Wolfram, Leibniz, and Consciousness with AI
episodePreviously titled “Top AI Scientist Unifies Wolfram, Leibniz, & Consciousness | William Hahn” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the background and purpose of the conversation with William Hahn at the MIT Media Lab?
We're here at the MIT Media Lab. I'm here with Professor William Hahn. The links to his work are on screen and in the description, as well as the previous time that we spoke, which was a fantastic podcast, and I think people should check it out. Thank you so much. It's really great to speak with you again. I've been looking forward to this for some time now. So we spoke off air yesterday and the day before. You were actually there for the Jacob Barandes podcast, which is also on screen. You had some ideas as to how to unify Leibniz with Stephen Wolfram's work. Please talk about that.
Yeah, so th really the idea is bringing together ideas from consciousness and computation. And so typically when we think of consciousness, we have this kind of light switch view that it's either on or off. And there's a idea attributed to Leibniz where it's really a hierarchy. It's kind of a ladder of of different capabilities. And it revolves around the ability to represent your ideas, um, to to think about your thinking, and then to think about that thinking and so on as this sort of this hierarchy that goes up. And if we think about the the simplest animals, um they don't they have the sort of the first order things like sensation and response to stimulus, but they don't really have any way of representing that response.
And it seems that by thinking in terms of representation and then representing your representation, where we can have things like language and then we can build you know philosophies on top of that language and it's it's a way of modeling the model and a way of talking about the talking and things. And so we get this more analog or at least a stepwise approach to to consciousness where it's not just on or off, but it's kind of this this continuum. And I think this is this is relevant now because we're in this age where we're building intelligent machines. And I would argue that these these machines that we have in the form of these modern AIs are quite intelligent. And the question now is
How does Hahn describe Leibniz’s hierarchy of representations and its link to consciousness?
Do they instantiate something like consciousness? And if so, is it like human consciousness? Is it something more like uh a lower animal where it's just knee-jerk reaction, you put in the prompt and it just spits out the tokens? Or does it have some way of of knowing what it knows and thinking about what it's thinking about? And maybe the current versions that we see right now in early 2025 don't, but it seems to me almost inevitable that if we keep going in this direction, that we will kind of close the loop on this thing, that the snake is gonna bite its tail and we will bootstrap this this thing we call consciousness inside these machines. But we might need a kind of graded scale to try to f try to understand that.
And then hopefully this will help us understand things like animal consciousness or even higher levels that human consciousness might achieve.
So when someone says that consciousness is a continuum and it's not a binary on or off, I think you can always translate a continuum to an on or off by saying is it zero or non-zero? So for instance, we say that a photon is charge-less. We don't say it has a little charge or the electron. We say it's a charged particle, even though its charge is minuscule. Right. So when you say that consciousness is a continuum and it's representations of representations, do you believe there are any Entities or things or objects or what have you that are not conscious? Or is it just all
Well I I think that's that's a great question. I think that's at the heart of it is trying to figure out um Does this have sort of that that threshold? Do we want to think about things like rocks, for example, as being conscious? And classically that would have been the the pinnacle example of no, clearly it's not. But I would argue that things like a modern GPU are are rock like objects, right? They're these semiconductor layers, very delicate, intricate patterns, but essentially what the the classical world would say is a fancy crystal of some kind. Um and now we're instantiating this intelligent, possibly ultimately conscious behavior out of this this rock like object.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background and purpose of the conversation with William Hahn at the MIT Media Lab?
0:00–2:10
2
How does Hahn describe Leibniz’s hierarchy of representations and its link to consciousness?
2:10–7:36
3
Do modern AI systems instantiate any form of consciousness, and how might they evolve toward it?
7:36–12:03
4
How does Stephen Wolfram’s concept of universal computation relate to natural systems and consciousness?
12:03–22:07
5
Why does Hahn argue that language, mathematics, and code act as higher‑level software for the brain?
22:07–33:15
6
What is the role of self‑models, multiple selves, and mental “immune systems” in human cognition?
33:15–44:34
7
What are “unthinkable thoughts,” and how do they affect mental health and creative risk‑taking?
44:34–55:54
8
How might scaling large language models and embodied AI drive a future phase‑transition in intelligence?
55:54–1:00:23
Speakers
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