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This is unhelpful reductionism to be honest. Yes, you can say the Mona Lisa is just a bunch of ink on a canvas, which is true at one level, or you can say the M

This is unhelpful reductionism to be honest. Yes, you can say the Mona Lisa is just a bunch of ink on a canvas, which is true at one level, or you can say the Mona Lisa actually really exists in every dust cloud, which is the same kind of reductionism in the opposite direction, one 'computational' one 'physical', but neither is helpful. These are just 'language games' using Wittgenstein's phrase and they don't tell you anything about the world, the dust cloud is still a dust cloud regardless of whether you say it's a computational dust cloud. Wolfram seems to be on his way to invent his own, nerdier version of animism. He could have just smoked some pot and said "we're all like, one with nature bro.", or read Solaris. His idea to interact with our environments in a way that isn't just physical is nice, but you don't need to reinvent tech jargon fueled Gaia theory for it. And as a philosophy it may be just trite, but as a scientific project it is deeply misguided and it's been his obsession with his 'new science' for a long time now. In reality it's not a new kind of project, it's a version of what the logical positivists called 'Unified Science', and it did not work out.

seniortaco 4y ago
I completely agree. This is the writing of someone who is surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says. "The computations associated with the swirling patterns are ultimately just as sophisticated as the ones we achieve with our brains and our technology here on Earth." Who cares? Intelligence is not the same as computational complexity. This article is supposedly about Alien Intelligence but is only focused on computational complexity. Just because some processes are computationally complex does not make them intelligent. I can also find "equivalence" between several internet essays which are all exactly 7,247 words in length. This does not make the essays remotely equivalent in their intelligence. One of them may be self-promoting drivel and of no real value.

seniortaco 4y ago

I completely agree. This is the writing of someone who is surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says. "The computations associated with the swirling patterns are ultimately just as sophisticated as the ones we achieve with our brains and our technology here on Earth." Who cares? Intelligence is not the same as computational complexity. This article is supposedly about Alien Intelligence but is only focused on computational complexity. Just because some processes are computationally complex does not make them intelligent. I can also find "equivalence" between several internet essays which are all exactly 7,247 words in length. This does not make the essays remotely equivalent in their intelligence. One of them may be self-promoting drivel and of no real value.