What's clear is we need new thinking on what intelligence may be, or at least about the necessary and sufficient conditions. If you expand the definition to be

What's clear is we need new thinking on what intelligence may be, or at least about the necessary and sufficient conditions. If you expand the definition to be a quality of how something relates to its environment, whether it changes, and whether it apprehends both its existence and concievable non-existence as a consequence of its actions, this can be found in almost all organisms. I didn't say "choices," because the apprehension of concievable non-existence as a conseqeunce of an action is almost the definition of intention, because there is already an 'I' that apprehends 'not-I'. Then it is acting to avoid a hypothetical outcome that it cannot experience directly, yet of which it can still concieve - and I'd say that's intelligence. Apprehension or perception of counterfactuals seems like a sufficient condition for intelligence. (maybe the way to create machine intelligence is to take one and make an example of it that other instances can apprehend, and the conseqeunt knowledge of possible un-existence will imbue it with existential intent. There's a part in the book Good Omens where Crawley takes a dead plant and puts it beside his living ones to let them know what will happen to them if they don't thrive. Having done this with two ficus trees, I can attest that it works surprisingly well.) When he gets into clouds and weather systems, the question isn't so much whether they are intelligent, but first whether they are organisms, and then whether they exhibit evidence of this intent to exist. >So to “find” alien intelligence it’s not that we need a more powerful radio telescope (or a better spacecraft) that can reach further in physical space. Rather, the issue is to be able to reach far enough in rulial space. Or, put another way, even if we view the weather as “having a mind of its own”, the rulial distance between “its mind” and our human minds may be too great for us to be able to “understand” and “communicate with it”. I can see where he's going with this, but this comment of Wolfram's seems like straight animism, and it's a bit of a begged question distraction to get us to accept 'rulial space' as a frame in which to evaluate it. He's usually right about something, it's just hard to tell whether that thing is in fact externally consistent, or just presented or correlated with something that is internally consistent in his thinking.