In this fascinating exposition, Stephen Wolfram connects two of the most important breakthroughs of our time: AI and the ruliad.

I ask Stephen how he thinks about knowledge hypergraphs, which I’m exploring at Open Web Mind.

He offers several important insights.

Stephen draws a distinction between human-like minds and formal knowledge.

Human-like minds include both our own brains and Large Language Models. Such minds, Stephen suggests, are good at making broad but shallow connections.

Formal knowledge, on the other hand, is deep and precise. Stephen has spent a lifetime building computational towers of such knowledge.

He proposes that Large Language Models might serve as interfaces to formal knowledge. He warns, however, that much of this knowledge might be inaccessible to minds like ours.

To illustrate the difficulty, Stephen contrasts the 50,000 or so concepts to which we humans have assigned words, such as “cat” and “dog”, with the infinite variability an AI can generate, both within human concepts and in the interconcept space in between.

Tying this back to physics, Stephen Wolfram posits that the concepts of space, time, energy, etc. we have internalized occupy only a tiny part of the ruliad.

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Stephen Wolfram

• Stephen Wolfram
• The Wolfram Physics Project
• Wolfram Institute
• Wolfram Institute Community Discord

Related writings from Stephen

• Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds
• How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
• The Concept of the Ruliad

More on knowledge hypergraphs at Open Web Mind:

• Open Web Mind
• Open Web Mind YouTube channel
• Sign up for my newsletter

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery founder of Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

Can you hold in your mind two different threads of experience?

In this five-minute excerpt from my conversation with Stephen Wolfram, he introduces the strange idea of a multiway mind.

Most of the time, we as observers succeed in weaving multiple different paths through the multiway graph into a single thread of experience.

In some circumstances, however, we’re unable to do this. If we’re unfortunate enough to find ourselves on the surface of a black hole – at the event horizon in physical space, at the entanglement horizon in branchial space – we might find ourselves frozen, unable to form a classical thought.

In just five minutes, Stephen not only introduces the possibility of multiple threads of experience in a single mind, he also succeeds in weaving in diverse topics from quantum computing to societal decision-making.

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Stephen Wolfram

• Stephen Wolfram
• The Wolfram Physics Project
• Wolfram Institute
• Wolfram Institute Community Discord

Concepts mentioned by Stephen

• Quantum computing
• Distributed computing
• Event horizons and entanglement horizons
• Branchial space

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery founder of Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

Fields don’t exist.

I mean, a field with grass in it, that kind of field does exist.

But a field in physics?

A gravitational field? An electric field? A magnetic field? A quantum field?

No such thing.

I’m not knocking the physicists who came up with these fields.

These fictions can be convenient.

But sometimes, these fictions can blind us to the underlying reality.

And that’s what’s happening right now in physics.

Our long-time love affair with fields is blinding us to the true nature of space and everything in it.

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery founder of Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

The full article is here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.