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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? 

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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.

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