Alien intelligence and the concept of technology

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.

Ultimately the claim is computation = things = humans. If everything is a computation then humans have no more value or uniqueness than a thunderstorm. This is sinister and pernicious.

1) We can & should differentiate between different classes of things like life, intelligent life and physical processes. This stops us from being cruel to things that experience suffering.

2) We may not be able to perceive or adequately describe classes of non computational processes that operate in our physical universe. This would not be a shock, after all, dogs can't do relativity and yet that does not exempt them from living in space time. Yet, we know that non computational processes do exist in theory. The claim "everything in the universe is a computer" is just that - a claim. It's up to people who believe it to show that every physical process that there is can be replicated using a computer... and that's not been done. To do it you need to enumerate the processes (which requires a competent theory of physics - not one that can't describe 98% of observed things), and you need to show that they can all be computed. We can't do the second thing because we can't even write down descriptions of intelligence and consciousness let alone compute them.

So, dangerous and unfounded. Dislike.

>“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”

Who exactly is making this pitch he's refuting? It sounds like Breakthrough Starshot but that project doesn't make a claim of "advancing human technology by a million years."

This is how BSS bills its own mission:

"Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to astronomy, including solar system exploration and detection of Earth-crossing asteroids."

In Dawn, part of the Xenogenesis trilogy, Octavia Butler describes an earth woman taken to an alien "spacecraft" orbiting earth. All of the devices on the craft activated by chemicals the aliens can choose to naturally secrete so none of the technology is remotely usable by humans in raw form.

The aliens then genetically alter the woman to allow her to use the devices. Moreover, the aliens are circling earth with the aim of trading whatever useful genetic material humans have in exchange for the improvements the aliens offer to humans.

So in this conception, the technologically constructed and the evolutionarily created quality merge into a single category.

I rather like the first article. It resonates with my own perspective on the absurdity of some steps in the Drake Equation which seems to assume that there should be some kind of deterministic drive towards exactly our kinds of technology.

If nothing else, for me this resolves the Fermi Paradox in a satisfactory manner. We don't find aliens, because we are not really looking for aliens. Just for a glimpse of ourselves in a cosmic mirror.

I guess that's what can happen when you stare into the Rule 30 abyss for 40 years.

I am reminded of this scene from Portal 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4H76SCCzY

The difference between computation and intelligence is interesting from both a practical and a philosophical perspective. It is not at all clear why a person is intelligent and a storm is not. If not quite a paradox, it is certainly a conundrum. Wolfram tries to short-circuit this by claiming storms are intelligent, which is so plainly ludicrous to not even be worth discussing. He solves the conundrum by replacing it with a falsehood.

"I don't know what makes people intelligent" may not be a satisfying conclusion, but it is a true one. "Storms are intelligent" is wrong. "People are not intelligent" is also wrong.

There is a real problem where as humans we are really only looking for 'alien intelligence' that we can interact with.

We would have a hard time identifying a solar plasma based entity that had reaction times in years.

But redefining 'intelligence' to include all complex processes is not useful. I don't care if a storm in a gas giant is just as complex as a chimpanzee's thought processes.

A rabbit is intelligent compared to an ant, but we wouldn't consider discovering aliens at that level of intelligence relevant to us.

What we are looking for is near-peer intelligent life. Meaning about as intelligent as humans at timescales competitive to human cognition.

Some of this is pretty interesting, and some of it also feels like trying to read about the Time Cube all over again.

I think something that would help Wolfram is actually engaging with some of the long running topics in philosophy and, in particular, the philosophy of science, which have been looking at the concepts of "technology", "intelligence" (alien and human, in so far as that distinction can be theorized), and "understanding" for a long time, like since Xenophon and the ancient debate over episteme and techne. Something like Heidegger's historical/philosophical essay "The Question Concerning Technology" is an obvious example from the modern era (and one of the most readable Heidegger essays).

By not interacting with the ongoing and historical discussion, posts like these come across as private rants that have no grounding in public conversation and shared concepts. Concepts are slammed together by private intuitive leaps. Still pretty neat how it kind of comes all together though. Wolfram clearly loves this angle he has taken.

While Wolfram is a smart guy, I feel like his presentation and writing is rambling and unnecessarily antagonizing to the audience, which always results in personal attacks and snarky comments and other counter-productive off-topic discussions.

Meanwhile, one of his associates who worked on the physics modeling project, Jonathan Gorard, delivers much better structured presentations of their work. He is also clearly brilliant, and presents a unifying, parsimonious model for the foundations of physics that is at least worth hearing about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU35Iu2--iI

Never really engaged with Wolfram, But had a positive opinion of him.

Having read this, I say wow! This article is grandiose, far too long, turgid and full of claims that sound frankly unhinged.

Does anyone take this stuff seriously?

The tone is arrogant and assuming as usual and the content is more meandering musings than insight.

If Wolfram is not a crank, let him submit some (any?) of his work for peer review and get it published.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)

This went somewhere interesting - in a rambling and repetitive way.

Then I realised it's basically a pitch for the Wolfram Language.

So I looked at that and found what is essentially a modern LispLang with an unusually comprehensive set of libraries. Like Mathematica, with support for other domains.

And a high price tag.

WL could definitely be a timesaver for some, but it is a long way from being the kind of universal language for exploring the Ruliad it's being pitched as.

Suggesting that we might be able to explore other forms of computation under other rules is - of course - an interesting idea.

But if Wolfram wants to do more than blog about that, he's going to have come up with a much more credible and surprising example of what it might mean in practice.

Terrence McKenna talked a lot about encountering alien intelligence whilst tripping. You can reliably experience The Universe, in a much more heightened fashion, in your own living room with shrooms or DMT and many people have reported the same motif of ‘machine elves’ who speak in an elvish tongue and are trying to communicate some meme or message. Yes, the old yearning to explore the cosmos and discover new intelligence is still valid, but what do we get from being 1 million years ahead in technology? Our current human condition would be out of context if we suddenly were 1 million years ahead in technological evolution. Also I imagine aliens don’t bring meat suits whilst doing interstellar travelling and are some sort of digital robot that can still think and has consciousness but just lacks any organic makeup. Just my 2 cents.

It is hard to take something like this seriously when the opening paragraph relates why the probe will try and communicate with Brownian motion or the random perturbation in a cloud; a similar reworked sentiment of the oft quoted intelligent desire to contact automobiles of earth; an absurd concept

"There’s a common saying: “The weather has a mind of its own”. And what the Principle of Computational Equivalence tells us is that, yes, fluid dynamics in the atmosphere—and all the swirling patterns associated with it—are examples of computation that are just as sophisticated as those associated with human minds."

I'm definitely not as smart as Wolfram, but in what way does the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere count as any common definition of computation?

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.

> But actually I think there’s no lack of “alien intelligence”; indeed it’s all around us. But the point is that it really is alien. At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence. But in its details it’s not aligned with our intelligence. Abstractly it’s intelligence, but it’s not human-like intelligence. It’s alien intelligence.

I'm not buying this explanation. Maybe the reason isn't so much about intelligence as it is about motivation. Perhaps intelligent aliens have no desire to make contact, or already have on few rare occasions but isn't interested in pursuing more than those random events.

The implicit assumption that's here is that alien intelligence is similar in advancement, only different. It's likely that the alien intelligence is far more advanced, since we are only barely venturing out. If aliens were about as intelligent and had similar motivations to make contact they would do similar things e.g. generating mathematical patterns not typically found in nature. The ones that are probably have signals too weak for us to detect or our surveys not detailed enough to pick them out, and vice-versa.

A conversation with alien 'abstract computational' intelligence being indistinguishable from nature means we're not the capable target listeners, who should recognize that it's not the noise of nature. Their intelligence isn't necessarily different, but they have more technology at their disposal and the one they chose to use we don't have, i.e. they're more advanced.

My take is that humans are either viewed in the universe as "bees can count!", don't have the tech to listen to the discussions, or both and then some. Everything to me points to humans lacking intelligence in the universe not the other way around. Thinking otherwise is believing Hawkeye is a capable Avenger.

The "Natural"/"Artificial" divide is tenious and arbitrary even in normal contexts. It really seems to just mean "things we intended" vs "things we feel like we don't intend"

What our culture does. With the intense thinking and the making of many machines. It's a great way to control our environment but it's also an incredibly narrow approach to being in the world, relatively speaking. A very special speck within a vast smear of possibilities.

We're like intellectual insects. All specialized mandibles and cilia for manipulating a special kind of waxy hivebuilding secretion. And that's our universe. But it isn't really the universe.

So yeah, it's quite plausible that an alien would not share our fetish for intellection and machinery. No lasers. No robots.

Something completely different.

I think it’s an interesting take but kind of fundamentally wrong because it ignores sort of the whole point.

Like, it’s certainly true that the computational complexity of a bucket of a river and the computational complexity of a brain are both very complex, they are also very (and obviously) different.

The whole tower of biology and technology isn’t a detail, to be ironed out like “assuming a spherical cow”, it’s the thing people find most interesting!

Also, on a basic level if you cannot draw a distinction between a storm and a brainstorm, the problem lies with your ontology rather than the universe.

> But actually I think there’s no lack of “alien intelligence”; indeed it’s all around us. But the point is that it really is alien. At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence. But in its details it’s not aligned with our intelligence. Abstractly it’s intelligence, but it’s not human-like intelligence. It’s alien intelligence.

We are the alien intelligence. The intelligence he describes is the usual one.

Technology is an alien intelligence communicating through the creative consciousness and evolving itself into our earthly dimension. Jungian archetypes forming in the minds of impressive individuals doing the earthly bidding of inter dimensional ideas!

This resonates well with "The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang: https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-8398/

Here's a translation into typical CS language.

The "ruliad" is homomorphic to the set of possible turning machine programs, and translation between the computations done in a rulial space (where concrete symbols are assigned to the relations in the ruliad) and a Turing machine is the "rulial motion" homomorphism.

Wolfram worries: "Just how far can a particular observer translate in rulial space while maintaining their coherence and integrity"

Because the translation is a homomorphism there's no risk of losing coherence or integrity; an observer transformed from "the ruliad" into a Turing machine is, by the Church-Turing thesis that Wolfram alludes to but doesn't name, equivalent.

The article touches on transhumanism, relating it to moving observers through the ruliad such that they become instantiated in different physical forms, but again doesn't name or refer to the long history of this existing concept.

On the whole, the article kind of makes a point; it is possible to bridge the gap alien-Wolfram writes about but it's left as an exercise to the reader to perform the translation instead of guided with the above sort of example in more plain language.

> “We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”

"whartonite seeks space monkey"

> One might think that simple programs would produce only simple behavior, and that somehow the behavior would get progressively more complex with more complicated programs. But that’s not what one finds. Instead, there’s increasing evidence that almost any program that doesn’t show obviously simple behavior can in fact show behavior that is as sophisticated as anything.

That entirely depends on your definition of "complex behavior". And I'd argue the definition that makes the most sense is based on Kolmogorov complexity. Which makes the "simple program = simple behavior, complex program = complex behavior" true by definition.

You can always tell who are the leaders. They are the ones walking around with arrows in their backs.

Launching a network of tiny spacecraft at radio distance could create direct communication with Earth.

Just read the whole piece last night, amazing.

This seems to miss the forest for the atoms. Communication and language are collaborations, the intention of which is to be understood. I don’t personally believe we’ll ever meet intelligent life (if the universe is computational, I think it probably avoids ever having to sync rich timelines such as those of intelligent civilisations). If we do, I’m sure some will be inscrutable to us. But I suspect most will by definition try to understand us and make themselves understood. I don’t know what else “intelligence” would be.

This is bringing up a centuries-old issue of balancing innovation with social stability.

The term "Luddite" has incorrectly been attributed to suggest groups of people who "fear technology".

When examining actual history, the Luddites never "feared" new technology, they simply asked a pertinent question to the times, a time when their trade literally took a lifetime to learn and master through a guild system, namely:

"But what will happen to all our jobs?"

The response was the same as during the Dot Com era that got turned into a meme:

1. Idea 2. "Something something something" 3. The innovators will make huge profits, and somehow you'll all find new jobs

All the Luddites insisted on (and rightfully so) were the exact details of the "something something something" ... not in abstract economic terms, but in practical detail.

Not arguing for or against this, but it is a consideration to be taken into account.

For example, while researching electric cars, I came across a rather interesting entry: a Hyper Sports Car the size of a large sedan that gets its power not from plugging into an electrical grid, but rather from saltwater: https://www.thecoolist.com/quant-e-sportlimousine/

Now look at when it's predecessor came out (I believe about 6-7 years ago).

What was even more surprising, but not a complete shock considering the prevailing dominance of the oil industry at the time, is that the first electric motors to run on sea water were PRODUCED during the time of Henry Ford's Model T.

That's right.

They not only came up with electric engines back then, but ones that ran on saltwater to boot.

Never mind what Tesla (the inventor, not the company) had in mind for public transportation.

To give a personal anecdote, circa I believe 2002 I was witness to a very bizarre series of events which I KNOW I can't possibly be the only witness to as this happened live in real-time in front of who knows how many witnesses.

1. I woke up to the news on Yahoo (which was a respectable way to wake up back in 2002, not at all the tabloid-y joke it is today) that a small team of research scientists in Europe had not only achieved small scale cold fusion, they were able to do so in the space of a table top

2. They planned on making their announcement public by actually demonstrating it live, within the next I believe hour or two, on this relatively new internet format called "live streaming"

3. This seemed like such a remarkable thing, I did a Google search to see if I could find other outlets reporting this; it seems like everybody everywhere was reporting the exact same thing and many internet news sites planned on also hosting the live-streamed event.

4. I turned on the TV thinking "surely the MSM news channels will be jealous of their internet peers and also find a way to broadcast this humanity-changing event live on TV"

5. Instead, within half an hour ALL the news channels instead focused on live footage of an Israeli aerial raid, supposedly in retaliation for some rock-throwing something-or-other that happened well over a half a year prior

6. I went back to the internet sites bookmarked, and ALL of them "suddenly had technical errors"/expired links/unable to be accessed as the entire sites hosting the story were experiencing problems

7. I went back to Google hoping to find alternative places to watch the live-streamed event, only to find THE ENTIRE STORY had magically been scraped off the search results, "as if it never happened"

8. Over the course of the next few days, the movie "Chain Reaction" was played repeatedly on not 1, not 2, but 3 cable channels; Chain Reaction for those who haven't seen it is a film that talks about just such a technological development, but with a twist: young research scientist Keanu Reeves is shocked to discover towards the end of the film that his own mentor has been systematically sabotaging his efforts ("Do you have any idea what will happen to the global economy with the introduction of free energy?"

Now, what is the point of this?

When you get to the second half of the writing he makes quite a bit of mention of the "Ruliad" and figuring out ways to abstractly understand it so that can be sort of "reverse-engineered" to help extend the physical "real world" aspects of it, for example in his case the idea of "space colonization".

What if, taking the "Chain Reaction" example above, the whole situation was actually reversed – by alien civilizations with a more advanced ability to comprehend more of the Ruliad than humans, who for all we know not only do engage in space colonization, but have reached the conclusion that the best way to do it, as with lots of things humans are trying to do with lots of things these days, is to automate the whole process and not even bother physically showing up.

In other words, what if the aliens were sort of a Morgan Freeman in the Chain Reaction film and they were secretly, purposely sabotaging our further understanding of the Ruliad, ie, "Can you imagine what would happen to the rest of the galaxy with the introduction of human beings?"

ON TOP of all that, there is something that he doesn't quite mention that I think is important: sufficiently advanced Ai in the brute-force processing sense.

Suppose for a moment money were no object and you created a facility the size of a small town that had pretty much nothing but quantum supercomputers all linked together in a parallel processing scheme; now suppose since money were not an object, you had, oh, 20 of these facilities all linked together - in part for security but mostly for sheer processing power.

Now suppose there was an Ai that using such a brute force processing set up were able to become of much more of this "Ruliad" than human minds could even comprehend, let alone process and make sense of.

How would such a setup then communicate its findings about "more of the Ruliad than was previously known to humans" back to humans?

To an extent there might be levels of "dumbing things down" so that human minds could better grasp whatever such an imaginary setup would find out about the rest of the Ruliad and it's corresponding aspects of "the reality we live in" ... but at what point would such "dumbing down" become useless in effectively communicating to humans "the rest of the Ruliad beyond the human brain's ability to effectively process"?

And THEN, there's another thing to take into account: what if the nature of the Ruliad, once sufficient enough comprehension of it is achieved via orders of magnitude more processing power than usually available to human brains, what if it's ... weird? Or even "disturbing" to humans? Would you want to know such things?

The assumption is that further understanding the Ruliad will bring further understanding of the same sort of things humans are accustomed to, just "more" ... what if it's not just "more" but "on a different, bizarre, possibly disturbing" level?

Like what if further understanding of the Ruliad reveals that your newborn baby's diaper consumption is an exact function of the square of the distance between successive planets in a neighboring solar system divided by Pi? What if a deeper understanding of the Ruliad proves this beyond any measure of doubt?

Wouldn't your next logical question be, "Well hold on a second, my newborn consumes diapers based on when and how we feed them" – wouldn't the NEXT logical question be, "Well if discovering previously unchartered aspects of the Ruliad proves beyond any measure of doubt that our newborn's use of diapers IS an exact function of the square of the distance between successive planets in a neighboring solar system divided by Pi ... what does that say about when we as parents feed our newborn? Our we feeding them when they seem hungry? Or is our perception of our feeding them based on a combination of free will and when they cry out actually just yet another function of the Ruliad that we weren't aware of before?"

The ASSUMPTION seems to be "the more we understand the Ruliad, the more we'll be able to do what we as humans want" ... but what if further understanding of the Ruliad reveals "No! You can't get more of what you want beyond your own planet - stay there and use what you already have to solve problems on Earth, and don't bother hoping for more because this is all you get and you're already not making very good use of it so nobody beyond your current comprehension will help you with more than you as a species already have because nobody trusts your species!"

Curious, why do people read Wolfram’s writing?

(Honestly cannot recall ever reading anything from him that was actually useful or concise. If you read all the post, links of it, links of those posts, it would take days if not weeks to read and have no reason to believe that the end result would be any different than having spending 2-mins reading his writings.)

The worst part about reading a Wolfram article on HN is having to read for the millionth time all the people complaining about Wolfram's ego, or his rambling. I understand, and agree (to a layerperson's extent) the criticism of his refusal to work within conventions for novel research.

Anyway, does anyone have a good rebuttal, elaboration on this idea:

> But actually I think there’s no lack of “alien intelligence”; indeed it’s all around us. But the point is that it really is alien. At an abstract computational level it’s like our intelligence. But in its details it’s not aligned with our intelligence. Abstractly it’s intelligence, but it’s not human-like intelligence. It’s alien intelligence.

There are a couple of comments making the point that this is reductionism, and is equivalent to saying any computational in theory exists in a dust cloud, but I'm not sure why we can't classify human intelligence/sentience/consciousness as simply a type of emergent computation in our neurons.

I've recently been fascinated by Karl Friston's work on the free energy principle, which models intelligent behaviour as a function of us trying to minimize the divergence between the entropy of our perception and a generative, probabilistic model of the world, and the entropy of the likelihood of evidence we collect about the world. From that perspective, at a high-level consiousness just reduces to a really, really, high-dimensional modeling of the world embedded in our neurons that is driven to minimize entropy.

Once a species evolves to have its own theory of its mind (which is how I think of sentience/consciousness), the entropy minimization gets really complicated, but ultimately still fundamentally a computational process.

I myself don't by this argument, completely, I feel like its missing something, but can't quite figure it out.

Everything this guy writes and does is a pitch for his automata theory of the universe or his software program.

Gag me with a spoon. Philosophically naive to the max. At a bare minimum (though I'm not a fan of either) you have to cite and answer Wittgenstein and Chompsky's pre-published rebuttals, not to mention Kolmogorov's definition of complexity and the list just goes on and on.