Institute Output

What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds beyond Ours
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds beyond Ours

Stephen Wolfram

We humans have perhaps 100 billion neurons in our brains. But what if we had many more? Or what if the AIs we built effectively had many more? What kinds of things might then become possible? At 100 billion neurons, we know, for example, that compositional language of the kind we humans use is possible. At the 100 million or so neurons of a cat, it doesn’t seem to be. But what would become possible with 100 trillion neurons? And is it even something we could imagine understanding? 

Read More
Can AI Solve Science?
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

Can AI Solve Science?

Stephen Wolfram

Particularly given its recent surprise successes, there’s a somewhat widespread belief that eventually AI will be able to “do everything”, or at least everything we currently do. So what about science? Over the centuries we humans have made incremental progress, gradually building up what’s now essentially the single largest intellectual edifice of our civilization. But despite all our efforts, there are still all sorts of scientific questions that remain. So can AI now come in and just solve all of them?

Read More
How Inevitable Is the Concept of Numbers?
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

How Inevitable Is the Concept of Numbers?

Stephen Wolfram

The aliens arrive in a starship. Surely, one might think, to have all that technology they must have the idea of numbers. Or maybe one finds an uncontacted tribe deep in the jungle. Surely they too must have the idea of numbers. To us numbers seem so natural—and “obvious”—that it’s hard to imagine everyone wouldn’t have them. But if one digs a little deeper, it’s not so clear.

Read More
Why Does the Universe Exist? Some Perspectives from Our Physics Project
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

Why Does the Universe Exist? Some Perspectives from Our Physics Project

Stephen Wolfram

Why does the universe exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are old and fundamental questions that one might think would be firmly outside the realm of science. But to my surprise I’ve recently realized that our Physics Project may shed light on them, and perhaps even show us the way to answers.

Read More
What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project

Stephen Wolfram

Consciousness is a topic that’s been discussed and debated for centuries. But the surprise to me is that with what we’ve learned from exploring the computational universe and especially from our recent Physics Project it seems there may be new perspectives to be had, which most significantly seem to have the potential to connect questions about consciousness to concrete, formal scientific ideas.

Read More