Why aren't whales building rockets? They have bigger brains than we do, after all. In this episode, we talk about why more brain power doesn't always mean more understanding and how neural architecture faces physical constraints.

Yes, we are locked in a kind of prison, which is the prison of what human minds deal with. The things we care about are the things that human minds can kind of deal with. But there's a lot else out there in the computational universe, in the Ruliad, that is behavior that human minds can't, can't really wrap themselves around.

Stephen Wolfram says Even super intelligent AIs may hit hard computational limits. In our conversation today, we explore why intelligence has a ceiling and how ideas like Wolfram's Rulia, computational irreducibility and brain sized scaling reveal the boundaries of thought itself. Wolfram created Mathematica.

Wolfram Alpha.

It's probably in your pocket right now in your cell phone. And he's now building a radical new theory of everything grounded in computational reality. If he's right, smarter doesn't always mean deeper. It might just mean we get stuck.

Steven Wolfram, you've created Mathematica, you've built Wolfram Alpha. You've basically taught computers how to think. Your Theory of Everything, what you call the Ruliad, is considered by many to be the front runner among computational approaches to fundamental physics. But here's what I really want to know, Stephen. If the universe is just the entangled evolution of all possible rules, and observers like us are simply slicing our way through the Ruliad from our own computational vantage point, then what makes our experience, our qualia, what makes them feel so real, so privileged? What does it mean to have a brain? You're describing how the universe might even be thinking in a certain sense, but not in the woo woo sense. Are we discovering the universe, or are we really just bumping up against the limitations of our own computational prison?

Well, let's see. I mean, the, the way I see it these days, the sort of. The Ruliad is a representation of everything that is computationally possible. We, each one of us is sampling a tiny thread of what is possible in the Ruliad, of what happens in the Ruliad, just as we are sampling a tiny thread of what happens in physical space. You know, we're sitting on this one planet in a, you know, in a corner of a galaxy that's one of a hundred billion galaxies. You know, it's a, we are, we are sampling a small part of the, of even the, the physical spatial universe, let alone this kind of Much larger computational universe that is the ruliad. So if you're asking what makes that feel real to us, what else would it feel? That is, if we feel anything, we will feel that it is real, so to speak. If we're not, you know, and if we're asking what.

So there's a sort of interesting question of, you know, how do we know that anything is real? What does it even mean for things to be real? What's the difference between living in a simulation of the real and living in the real, so to speak? So these are complicated questions. There's a whole bunch to say about them. But maybe we can kind of dig into questions about. Well, for example, let's say the only thing that any of us are really aware of is what we are perceiving. In other words, I have a certain feeling about what's going on. I know what's happening in my own mind. To know anything about what you might think is happening, that's merely an inference. You seem a bit similar to me.

So I kind of project what I feel is going on as something that I would imagine you also feel is going on. And that's how we kind of have a shared sort of objective reality. Each one of us has just the particulars of what's going on sort of inside our own mind. I mean, I've kind of often thought, if you think about a computer, and what does a computer think is going on in the world internally? To the computer, it is something very similar to the kind of thing that we think is going on in the world. It's just that we don't identify with computers, so we don't sort of. We don't project ourselves into. It seems very alien and unnatural to us to imagine that there's a thing being perceived by the computer that is kind of like the thing that's being perceived by us. You just jumped right into kind of a pretty complicated area.