Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Part Two: Quantum Mechanics Breaks Our Idea of Time. Dr. Stephen Wolfram Explains How the Universe Contains Infinite Timelines Unfolding Simultaneously in a Multi-Threaded Structure

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

What if everything you know about reality, intelligence, science, aliens, and even your own body…is wrong? In this mind-expanding conversation of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Stephen Wolfram — the legendary computer scientist, theoretical physicist, mathematician, founder of Wolfram Research — reveals how the groundbreaking technologies he created are re-shaping our understanding of the universe itself. We dive into the limits of science, the secrets of biological evolution, and why computational irreducibility may explain why some mysteries of nature can never be predicted, only experienced. Dr. Wolfram breaks down whether his computations suggest humanity is cosmically significant…or completely insignificant in a universe built from the same atoms repeating the same rules everywhere. Discover why the objective reality you experience as a human might be totally different for other species, and why this could be the key to understanding alien intelligence, extrasensory perception, and why there might be alien minds all around us right now that we simply can’t perceive. Dr. Stephen Wolfram also breaks down: - Does the body have its own language? (And, if so, what autoimmune disease might be “saying") - What can truly be built from random mutation, and why evolution even works at all - How reductionist science is limiting medicine, and how living matter actually behaves - Why AI may function as an alien mind, and what that reveals about the shocking simplicity of human language - What makes the human mind special, how we evolved this way, and why that very fact proves we are not the most advanced species possible - Do computers use a form of telepathy to communicate with one another? He even takes us behind the scenes of his work as a consultant on the hit film ARRIVAL, explaining how alien logograms connect to his research on how language shapes human thought, what abstract concepts a bigger brain could comprehend, and what kinds of ideas we might be biologically incapable of imagining. If you’re fascinated by astrophysics, AI, consciousness, aliens, evolution, mathematics, language, or the limits of human understanding, this episode of MBB will challenge everything you think you know! Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MAYIM at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/mayim ⁠ Learn more about Dr. Stephen Wolfram and his work: ⁠https://www.stephenwolfram.com/⁠ Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm I am Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is part two of our conversation with Dr. Stephen Wolfram. He's the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Language. He's a pioneering figure in computational thinking for over four decades. He also was the science consultant on the movie Arrival, which is something we're going to talk about with him in part two.

We're going to talk about his thoughts on aliens and alien communication. We're going to talk about language and how human beings, and how human language is actually simpler than we thought, as well as trying to understand how computers communicate as a model for how maybe we are communicating with each other. We'll discuss free will and consciousness, and is time linear. We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. Stephen Wolfram. Break it down.

Let's go into aliens, because not just for the flashiness of it, which we are sometimes interested in, you know, what do people who are thinking at these high levels think about things like this? But from also an astrobiological perspective, from a alternate perception of reality perspective, I mean, I don't think we're asking the question, are we alone in the universe? I think it's pretty clear that we're not. But tell us where you want to talk about aliens. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's a sort of philosophically muddled concept that we have minds,

that work in a certain way. There are many things in the universe that we might say do mind-like things. A favorite thing people say is, you know, the weather has a mind of its own, right? And what does that mean? Well, there's fluid dynamics processes in the atmosphere that are doing all kinds of complicated things.

Just like in our brains, there are electrochemical processes that are doing all kinds of complicated things. How do we compare kind of the electrochemistry of our brains with the fluid dynamics of the world? weather. They're both doing complicated things. Can we say one is fundamentally simpler than another? Well, I happen to have done a bunch of science to do with the thing I call the principle of computational equivalence that kind of says there isn't really a way of saying, no, the weather is

somehow fundamentally simpler than a brain. They're kind of computationally equivalent things. Now, we say, well, the weather might have a mind of its own, but it's not a mind like ours. It's a different kind of mind. Well, lots of things in the physical universe, I think, do quotes mind-like things. The issue is how closely aligned are they with minds like ours? How much are they minds where we can recognize them as being kind of as being minds like ours? Now, I think this is a thing you're talking about sort of spirituality and so on. And there's the question, you know, the spirit of the wind, so to speak.

you know, is the wind a mind like thing? Well, I think at a sort of computational level, yes, the wind is a mind like thing, but it's not a mind like ours. And so the question is really out in the physical universe, there are many things which are computationally as sophisticated as our minds. In fact, many things that are much beyond the computational sophistication of our minds in terms of having more components than we have neurons in our brains or whatever else. But yet the question is, Are the things that are going on in those things, are they somehow aligned? Are they minds like ours? Are they sufficiently aligned with our minds that we can, for example, communicate with them?

You know, communicating with the weather, you know, tough, tough thing. I mean, you know, it's not communicating with a dog a little bit closer. You know, I think that this is, so to me, this question of sort of, Are there aliens out there, so to speak? The answer is they're aliens all over the place. There are alien intelligences all over the place. The issue is, are they close enough in the way I try to describe these things in what I call rule-ial space, the space of sort of possible rules for describing how things work, are they

close enough that we can communicate with them in some way? The universe, as we were talking about before, is quite big. It's a long way from here to the next nearest star and so on. you know, the physical universe that you might traverse with spacecraft is pretty big. The rule-yal universe, as I call it, the universe of all possible rules, is in some respects vastly bigger than that. So this question of can you get from a mind-like hours to this alien mind, the distance you have to go is much greater than the sort of distance you need to go in a spacecraft to

get to the next nearest star, so to speak. So, in other words, the distance to that alien mind, is very great. And for us to be able to kind of align the way we think with the way that alien mind thinks is a big challenge. Now, you know, we have a test case in terms of AI because, you know, AI is a thing that is an alien mind. We attempt to align it.

I mean, a raw neural net doesn't do human-like things. A raw neural net just hangs out and has random bits flying around. after you train the neural net, you can align it to do things that are quite human-like, like tell pictures of cats from pictures of dogs and so on. And then the question is, well, so now we've got kind of this mind that we can sort of experiment with that we can align with our mind by training it in the right way. I've done some little experiments which are kind of like artificial neuroscience experiments, where you take a trained neural net and you say, let's say it's a neural net that makes

pictures of cats. You've told it to make a picture of a cat. The ordinary neural net makes a picture of a cat. Now you start sort of, you know, changing pieces of that neural net. So you make it go from a mind that was aligned with a human mind to sort of an alien mind by changing the innards of the network. Okay. Does it make a cat? It does not make a cat. It starts off making a cat, but as you start changing it, it actually one of the more bizarre things that happens, if you just just increase the weights and the neural net, the picture it makes, looks like it's blowing its mind. It starts, you know, the cat starts turning into funny colors and it puffs out and it's very bizarre.

It's, and, you know, it really is, it's something where you're seeing sort of in this, you know, as you see it going to a more alien mind, it is producing a thing which we can still see it's a collection of pixels, but it looks less and less like what we would recognize as a cat. And one of the things to realize is that to me, it's like there's, you know, in some part of the sort of space of things it can produce, as a picture of a cat, there's a lot of other stuff it can produce. The way I think about it is, you know, there's things like cats that we have words to describe. There's lots of stuff out there that we don't have words to describe. I tend to call that interconcept space.

It's kind of the, you know, there's little islands, tiny islands, actually, that we have sort of human language. to describe and vast domains that are still producible by an alien mind, by an even slightly alien mind, but which are completely undescribable by us humans. We talked about this with Adam Frank. We talked about it with Avi Loeb. We've talked about it, I think, with Jan 11. The notion that we can only see what we can see, we can only perceive what we can perceive, but in a universe that is made of the things that our universe, is made of, there is no reason to not be able to project that there are other beings, other perceptions, other systems, many of which are likely far more advanced than us in theory

and are using AI, possibly are farming us to be obedient underlords. No, but I'm just saying the notion that you can extrapolate out and say, in a universe made of this, absolutely, there are many, many ways to compute this, for lack of a better word. There is computation going on everywhere. You can think of it as mind-like computation going on everywhere, but the question of whether we can understand what's going on in that mind-like computation, that is the role of science. Science is about going from, you know, the complicated fluid flows of, you know, turbulent fluid flow or something, and saying, now we've got this narrative that allows us that we can get into our minds that allows us to connect the ways we can

think about things with what's actually going on in the natural world. What's special about minds like ours? That's one thing you might ask. Why is a mind like ours? What's fundamentally different between the weather and a mind like ours? And I think one of the things that is characteristic of minds, brains like ours, is we tend to do one very definite thing, which is we take in lots of sensory input, you know, gigabytes a second or something of sensory input. And then what do we do with it? In the end, maybe 10 times a second, we decide we're going to move this muscle, we're going to do this thing. We're kind of taking this vast amount of data from the outside world, and we're focusing it all down into what should we do next. And I think that's one feature of kind of, that's sort of an

essential feature of our kind of consciousness is that we have this kind of thread of experience that comes out, you know, all this stuff is going on in the world, we whittle it all down. To do I look fat in these pants? Yes, or something, right. I mean, it's, you know, but the thing is that's a feature of sort of systems like us. When it comes to something like the weather, it's not doing that. It's just doing every little piece of the weather is doing what it's doing. It's not doing this concentrating down to get this kind of one thread of experience. We're not the only things that do that. You can certainly make a, you know, certainly AI systems do exactly that.

They go from all the different possible pixel arrangements of a picture of a cat and a dog, and they say, that's a cat, that's a dog. That's doing the exact same kind of thing that we're doing when we take all that sensory input and kind of, you know, concentrate it down. So I think that's one sort of thing that in a sense is kind of disappointing to realize because we might have thought, you know, with our minds and brains, we're the most computationally fancy things in the universe. It's not true.

We're actually ones that are rather specialized, that have a rather definite way of operating. I mean, my, you know, my slight guess is that how did we get that way? I think it may be something very mundane. Like a couple billion years ago, you know, there had been organisms that were spread out and were just every little piece of the organism was doing a different thing. And then suddenly an organism realized, I can be mobile.

And, you know, there's a little blob of stuff. And it has to, when you're a single blob of stuff that's mobile, you have to be able to decide, am I going to go left or am I going to go right? And once you need to make that decision, you start to have to do this thing of saying, let's take all the sensory input I have and turn it into, do I go left, do I go right? That's still an astounding. It's an astounding event. Well, yes and no. I mean, there are plenty of systems. Look, any, you know, you make a landscape, let's say, you know, you make a clay landscape or something like this, and you put a ball, you know, ball bearing somewhere on this landscape and you rattle it around a bit. The thing will roll down to, you know, a lowest point on that landscape. It doesn't matter where you put the ball. It'll still roll down to that same, you know, if it's within that catchment basin for that place. it will roll down to that lowest point. And that's an example of this phenomenon of taking lots of possible inputs

and saying, yep, it's going to, you know, it's closest to that point where it's closest to that point. I don't consider that a, you know, it's a thing that very naturally happens in lots of kinds of systems. Okay, but I'm going to push you on this, though, because the notion to say that a blob, quote, realized, there's no realizing. No, there's no realizing. That's a mere anthropomorphism on my part.

Yeah, look at you, anthropomorphizing single-celled blob gooniness, and me saying that's remarkable that a blob would do that. I mean, to me, that's, look, it's why I chose to study what I studied. It may not be why you chose to study what you studied, but that's remarkable. You know, I remember the first time I started thinking, okay, I have a mother and she had a mother, and then she had a mother. What, how far do you go back? How did we get all the people? That was, you know, this was as a teenager when I started thinking, like, wait a second, what? How? And this is not that my conclusion was that evolution didn't happen.

It was this notion that how did we get here, you know, which is really the essence, I think, of all of these parts. Miami-B Alex's breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water. There's no real data. there's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times,

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so you would think that I'm a legitimate person is Arrival is one of my favorite movies. And it's a movie that means a lot to me because of its significance. And I didn't know that it was essentially because of you. No, not because of me. I was just a small piece in the machine. But now that I know where you fit into this,

it's really, really beautiful. And I've, you know, read the piece that you wrote and even just like, even looking at the diagrams, I mean, it makes me emotional because this was a movie that, I mean, I've showed my kids. Like, it's like many conversations. It brings up so many things about, is time linear? Is love linear? Is love the ultimate glue, right? That's binding us together. And what does it look like?

and what are the risks of stepping out of the way we think things operate into a completely different level of understanding? And that is what is needed if you're going to think about aliens. It's what's needed if you're going to think about quantum mechanics. It's what is needed if you're going to think seriously about anything outside, really, of the reality that you were dropped into. So can you talk a little bit about your relationship with this movie and what you were able to bring from your research

that is immortalized in, I think, one of the most beautiful movies about not only the possibility of aliens, but communication, love, and time. Yeah, I mean, you know, the dynamics of these things, you're in the movie business, I'm not. This is one of my rare, you know, dipping into that kind of world. It's, you know, I think one feature of that,

that movie, you know, one of my kids worked on that movie with me, and he wrote one feature of that movie that's kind of fun is that, you know, there are all these sort of images that come from the aliens and the question is, what do they mean? And there's a bunch of code you see in the movie that's an attempt by the scientists to understand those images and so on. The code that makes the sort of the things the scientists are figuring out, if you run that code, it actually makes those images. It's, I think, a pretty much unique movie in which the code that you see is the code that actually makes the ways of analyzing those images. And it was also fun because, you know, that was done on the set, a bunch of that movie, that code was written in real time, so to speak, of,

you know, this is, this is what we get. This is the technology stack I've been building for years. that I have to say my younger son is probably better at operating than I am. That's just the way it works. But no, in terms of the, you know, the movie, the whole sort of notion of the way that you describe things affects the way you think about things, that's a very interesting kind of question of, you know, much debated by people.

I'm, you know, the question of, is the language that you use to describe things, the thing that drives the way you can think about things? And that's certainly a central idea in that movie. And it's something which for me, as a person who spent a large part of my life as a computational language designer, I like to believe that the things that I'm inventing in the language that I'm inventing affect the ways that people think about things. And I think that is very demonstrably true for computational language. It's something that's less obviously true for human languages. But, you know, I think the other, I mean, in the dynamics of the practicalities of movies, you know, the movie has a bunch of interstellar spacecraft. And there was a moment when it was like there's a whiteboard.

And I guess it was Amy Adams is doing something in front of the whiteboard. And it's like, can you draw a whiteboard that has a sort of plausible theory for what, in the 21st century would say about, you know, about these interstellar spacecraft. And by the way, leave a piece of the whiteboard, you know, blank because, you know, A.B. Adams's hair goes in front of that part. And it's really hard to composite, you know, with the frizzy hair type thing. One of the, I think, neat things about arrival. And I don't, I mean, if people haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. I mean, if you, if you watch contact, that's obviously, you know, that's one perspective.

from a very different era about, you know, communication. If you watch Interstellar, you know, Kip Thorne, you know, if you watch Interstellar, that's also, that's leaning kind of closer. But arrival, you know, is this notion of, you know, what happens if the person who is trying to understand what possible alien communication is was a linguist? And I remember when I saw the movie, I was thinking, what? She's a language special.

Like, what? because I'm thinking aliens, physics, right? Astronomy, all these things. And the fact is what is revealed is, and I can't give it away, because if people haven't seen it, you have to see it. Yeah, yeah. I was trying to avoid doing spoilers here. But what I will say is,

what if it takes someone who knows more about communication and intention than equations to be able to breach what it? it would be like to step outside of your own perception, right? And the other notion that I'd love for you to touch on, and you may not have had a part in this, but I am curious, your take on it, you know, we think of time as a line, right? There's, I was born, then I have my hyphen, and then I die, and that's it. And if you study, you know, relativity, you get to see like, oh, there's actually a bend, right? Like, things are different. depending on the perspective you're looking from,

and that's all, quote, relative, right? But this conversation is more about, is it possible that there is a plane of time or space time that either loops back on itself or exists in some sort of, you know, the way that Thomas Campbell describes it, some sort of like beautiful undulating fields, which if you've ever done psychedelic,

you strike me as someone who may not be into it, no. But people who report, you know, essentially this kind of like undulating field that physicists, you know, often depict, where each particle is also a wave and it's a simultaneous existence. Is time like that as well? You had two pieces to this. So the first one is about linguists and language and so on. And I think, you know, as I've been saying a few times, you know, science is this attempt to bridge from the natural world to things that we understand in our minds. Language is this way of

packaging up thoughts so that we can express them. And these are two very, you know, very related kinds of things. Now the question of when it's a, when you're trying to understand something that hasn't been understood, it's not clear how far sort of the study of human language can take you in understanding, you know, human language has certain structure, much of which we don't understand very well. One of the big things that has come out of LLMs and the sort of modern AI is something, you know, people are very surprised that it's possible to have this neural net to produce fluent, you know, human language. I think the main thing that that reveals is that human language is simpler than we thought. In other words, you know, we've known that human

language has the feature that, you know, like in English, sentences are constructed with, you know, noun-verb-nown structure. But what has never really been classified is which noun, which verb, which noun. And it turns out there is sort of a statistical structure of, well, this kind of noun goes with this kind of verb. And that's kind of what the AI discovered. And that's kind of the way those patterns work. So the thing that was the surprise was that human language is simpler in structure than we thought it was. And so if you ask the question, is human language the right raw material for understanding something, for example, from the natural world, my immediate take would be that it's actually not a particularly strong, you know, the human language as such

is actually pretty weak compared to what we already know in more formalized systems from computation and so on. But this is a, I mean, this is a non-trivial, look, there's, you know, For example, one question I was curious about recently is, you know, we humans have, you know, use compositional language. We have, you know, we can take pieces of sentences and fit them together with other pieces and so on. You know, dogs probably can't. Maybe they understand one word at a time, but they don't understand, you know, the whole sort of compositional structure of human language is probably, you know, lost to them. I mean, they understand fear from, you know, 100 yards away, so they have different abilities.

Yes, for sure. But this whole sort of structure, this formalized structure that we have of compositional language, they probably don't have. And, you know, it's sort of interesting that if you look at, you know, our brains, their brains, a thousand times smaller or whatever, if you, you know, one of the discoveries in the world of AI is as you make the neural net progressively bigger, the set of things that it ends up being able to do gets progressively larger. Like it can start recognizing images at a certain size, it can start generating language at a certain size. So that raises the question,

if we had brains that were a thousand times bigger than our brains, what kinds of abstract concepts would we invent that are really not accessible to us right now? And that's for somebody like me who likes to think about sort of foundational questions and abstract things, it's a little bit frustrating to imagine that there might be a level of, abstraction that, sorry, but brains like ours just don't manage to reach that.

Right. But even with the development of, you know, the frontal lobe, as we know it, and we sort of know a bit about that course, at least in our brief time, you know, here on this planet, tracking primate development, we do know that there was a solution, right? How do we get the most matter through the birth canal, right? We, I mean, all those, all of those details, right? biology helped us program, right? Right. There's a particular solution that electrochemical brains use. And, you know, as you get bigger brains, more of the brain is full of wire, basically,

connecting things. Exactly. And, you know, if the brain is a thousand times bigger, it's all wire, the way that brains are architected like ours. But, you know, the concept of having a brain-like thing, it doesn't, you know, even in digital electronics, It doesn't have to be all wire in the same way. There are different solutions. Well, I mean, but also it makes me wonder, you know, well, never mind.

We can talk about this over drinks sometimes, Stephen. But you know, I'm thinking, like, is there more association cortex? Would we have a further, you know, involution in the frontal lobe? Like, is there, I mean, I'm going to sort of go on, you know, what the evolution of structures are like, and those are similar from basically reptiles on. Well, even, yeah, you could even say fish in some case. well, even the C-slug. But, you know, there's a certain, I don't know,

there are certain limiting factors, right, to what's going to expand. Is it more association cortex, right? Is that what AI is essentially modeling? Think about how many more song lyrics you would have in your head. I could remember so many more song lyrics. Surely has a lot. Right.

Yeah, right. No, I mean, but there's always, there's complicated tradeoffs because if you have, like we have 50,000 words in typical languages, that is probably determined by the size of our brains, that that number is 50,000. In other words, if we had smaller brains, probably the number of distinct concepts that we could deal with, probably. We don't really know how this works, but would probably be smaller. Doesn't President Trump only use a certain number of

words? I once heard an analysis that says that he just, he just uses a smaller number of words. Like, everything's like great. I thought he was accused of inventing words. That was the... Also, because he doesn't have enough in there. Different story. One thing to realize is if you had more words, you don't have to have as much depth in describing things. In other words, if every, you know, if the shape of that plant behind you was, you know, if I could say that was a, you know, a bled-la-da-la-la-d-la-plant shape, I wouldn't have to, you know, I wouldn't have it to use any depth. This is fascinating. Yeah, it's like the number of words that certain cultures have for snow or love. Yes. We will often have a conversation where there will be two words that are very similar,

and I am a thousand percent certain that I know very subtle differences between these words. I know how I would use them differently. And Jonathan is a brilliant person, but I am the child of English teachers. And I know deeply that these words have different meaning. You cannot interchange them. I mean, I could literally teach a class, right, about these different things. And some people just don't hear it, the same way. I feel like I can be very articulate because I've got all these intricate words, but it also depends who you're speaking to because to him it may all feel the same. So like maybe we would never have to speak if we could just neural met all of the words that I like distinctions of into your brain. Well, you know, that's of course an issue. I mean, this relates

to this thing we're talking about about, you know, you have to take the internal thoughts that you have, you know, encoded in lots of neuron firings and package them up in a kind transportable way. For example, if you imagined, you know, connecting the neurons directly, the neurons in your two brains are definitely not architected in detail in the same way. Right. Right. Like salsa dancing and mine are like relaxing. But, you know, it's not like this is neuron number, you know, two billion, whatever, is going to be the neuron that represents the color red or something.

And you can connect that to somebody else's neuron of the same kind. It's the encoding of what's going on is very different. And the fact that we can package it in terms of concepts that are transportable is a non-trivial fact about the world and about the way that we perceive the world. Because it's not obvious. It could be the case that everything about the world was kind of this incoherent mush, that, you know, the random collection of pixels and so on, that we couldn't have any higher level description of.

The fact that there are higher-level descriptions is, I mean, And from a science point of view, that's a very fundamental thing that makes science possible. There might not be any higher level descriptions that you could make, but there are. Another form of communication that we're hearing more and more about these days is telepathy. Instead of having to communicate and articulate and choose the right word, some people believe that they have the ability to just send the message directly. It's always nice to see when these things come back. That was a big 1950s thing, right? And it's, it's, it's always interesting.

You know, it's one of these things where you could say, do computers have telepathy? Okay? Question. So back in the day when the first computer that I used, which is the size of a large desk and very primitive object, it had a tone generator. And, you know, it would make, you could also, you could take a radio and put it next to that computer, and it would be, you know, squawking all over the place. That's less true of modern computers.

But, you know, computers emit electromagnetic radiation. Computers are affected by electromagnetic radiation. So the question is, could computers reasonably have telepathy? And the answer is, probably not for the following reason, that the details of that signal are a total mess. You know, they're the result of, you know, individual transistors doing this and that thing. The way that some other computer is working won't be exactly the same. You know, the way that computers actually communicate is through doing things like what we do with language.

That is, they package up those microscopic, you know, digital bits into larger scale things that are sort of known in common to the two computers. Our detailed thoughts and brains are encoded not in some, you know, if you're having some, maybe if you're having an epileptic seizure, there's some large scale, you know, electrical effect in your brain. Yes. but we're talking about like explicit memory, right? This person died. I learned it in the field. There's no other way I would have known that. I know when they died.

I know how it happened because I was told telepathically. That's a leap. And that's in the category of, I can't imagine how that could possibly work, which is not to say that there's no way it can work. It's just that, you know, there's some kinds of things where somebody says, I bet we can sense magnetic fields.

I would say, yeah, I can kind of imagine how that might work. This question of what's possible in science, what's not possible, you know, the story of kind of, you know, things that are possible, things that are not possible, there's a terrible history of saying such and such a thing is not possible. I mean, you know, give me an example. Let's say, you know, when you scramble an egg, can you unscramble the egg? You might say it's just not possible to unscramble it. No, because the protein's been unfolded. We can't refold that. Yeah, but what if you had little nanobots that were all programmed and operating at this

molecular scale and carefully re-nitting the protein and so on? And that's, it's again, it's something where you say, well, but we just couldn't actually do that. But that becomes a more complicated story. And so, you know, it's like another one that comes up is, you know, can you travel faster than light. Okay? So the usual theories of space time say, no, sorry, that's not possible. Or if you can, I can't detect it because I can only see at the speed of light. That's not the only issue. I mean, so it turns out the, you know, in these models that we have of space time now,

we can kind of really address that question in a more serious way. So I give you an analogy. So if you're, you know, let's say you're in air in a room. And you're saying, can I, if I were at a molecular scale, how do I get from one side of the room to another? Well, every molecule in the room is traveling at roughly the speed of sound. But it only goes for a micron before it hits another molecule and gets sort of thrown off in a random direction. If you could know which molecule to hop on at every stage, you could go across the room at speed of sound. But in fact, you say, well, but we couldn't do that because, you know, certainly we couldn't take us and make us be riding on these molecules because we're pretty big compared to these molecules.

Maybe you could imagine a molecule, but then you have to have that molecule has to be able to do the computation to figure out which molecule to hop on, and that's not going to work at the scale of a molecule and so on. It turns out the same kind of thing happens in space time. It turns out that if you could operate at the level of the atoms of space, you could make a thing that would sort of hop between the atoms of space, and you could effectively make something, which in certain conditions would be able to effectively go fast and light. The problem is, you couldn't do that. The thing that, you know, a thing like us that is a mind like ours

just wouldn't possibly fit in what it takes and wouldn't be able to do the thing that can operate at that scale couldn't do the computation to figure out what to do next. So the statement, it's not possible, has to be a little bit footnoted. Yeah, and I think the question is also what's measurable and how. And one of the challenges with sci phenomenon is that you cannot always replicate something. It doesn't have to be a system that is observing the other laws of things that we can predict. So when people say, well, if any sort of precognitive ability was possible, everyone would always be winning the lottery.

And that's not true. For me, again, I'm trying to frame this. We're talking about what are the genetic, environmental, epigenetic components that might lead a system to be able to perceive something that I do not understand. And is there a way to legitimately quantify it, right, so that we could say with some statistical significance, this is meaningful, right? And the notion that the materialist perspective is, if it doesn't obey the same things it takes to get on the cover of nature neuroscience,

it doesn't hold water. To me, that's not fair, meaning we have to adjust the expectations to the situation that we're actually trying to observe. Right. I mean, look, one of the conceits of science is you can do reproducible experiments. It is possible to have an experiment where you can take this thing and have it work this way,

and, you know, if you do the same thing again, now, it's not self-evident that that's ever possible. It could be the case, because the universe is in a different state when you next do that experiment. And it could be the case that you can't separate off the thing that is just that experiment from the rest of the universe.

This question of what matters, I mean, this is the essence of doing scientific experiments is to be able to tell what matters. I mean, in other words, you don't know whether, you know, you do some experiment and, you know, maybe it turns out the air pressure that day critically matters, and you just don't know.

Well, and with humans, you know, one of the things that in the telepathy tapes, which we've spoken about a lot here in terms of veracity and many other things, you know, if you take a child, let's say, that's nonverbal and you try and, you know, say, is this child really able to read minds, whatever that means? You know, if you remove them from the person that they're closest to and you try and do it with an experimenter, in many cases this introduces a level of strangeness for them, especially if they're nonverbal, if they're on the spectrum, they don't feel safe. They don't feel comfortable. So, yeah, this is a question of also, of course, you want to eliminate the possibility that they're getting some sort of coding, right, from the parent or the person they're close to, but also if someone's got these special abilities,

my guess is they need to be in some sort of safe state to be dropping into a place where they can even access whatever's going on. And that's true of anyone. This is where it all gets very muddy and complicated, right? Because it's like, you know, did they pick up some micro facial expression from somebody or, you know, or is it a thing?

And then is the actual ability, one that is about picking up micro facial expressions. Which is also fascinating. Right. I mean, you know, it could be the people have, you know, some people have, you know, greater ability to do that. That's a thing that wouldn't be super surprising from a neuroscience point of view. You know, in the 1950s, sort of people had the view that telepathy would just be a thing. And, you know, and then it sort of disappeared.

And it's interesting to hear that it's back. My own guess about sort of looking at the arc of sort of the history of science and things which people seemed thought were implausible and so on, usually what seems to happen is there's sort of possibility A and possibility B, and there are definite schools of thought that go after one or other of those possibilities. The truth ends up being something bizarre that's in the middle. You prepare for A and B and X, Y, and Z happens. Yeah, like, you know, you think you're doing some tabalopathic thing and it turns out, you know, there's pheromone, secretions from humans that people pick up in some olfactory way, that goes directly into some

part of the brain or something like this, which is just something that wasn't, you know, just wasn't part of what you were thinking might or might not be happening. We recently spoke to Federico Fajin, who, among other things, created the microprocessor and also had a very, very profound spiritual experience, inexplicable. And also his book is called Irreducible, which is a word that you also favor. So I thought that was sweet. One of the things that he says, though, and this goes back to really what you talked about in the opening, he says that consciousness and free will have always existed, meaning they are foundational, kind of to our understanding of the formation of the universe.

He believes that there's this sort of one, which I think some of us would call God, but that there's some one unity that is part of this sort of evolution, but that consciousness and free will both exist as part of this oneness and that they're foundational. What is your sort of take? I know it's like a big question to end on, but where does this fall in terms of also our computational understanding? People thought, you know, in the science fiction movies in the 1950s, for example, once there was a program for the robot, everybody knew what the robot was going to do.

And the robot clearly didn't have free will because it was programmed and you knew what it was going to do. The thing that comes out from sort of this idea of computational irreducibility is just because, it was programmed doesn't mean you know what it's going to do. And I think that's the essence of what we perceive as being free will. That is just because you know sort of the reductionist view of what's inside the thing doesn't mean that you can outrun the actual process of the thing doing what it does. So in other words, you say the thing doesn't have free will. If you can say, well, I can tell what you're going to do. Therefore, you're obviously not, you know, free doing what you're doing. You could just be predictable. For it to be free will that seems to be free of

its underlying laws, what I think makes it seem free of its underlying laws is that you just have to run those laws and see what they do, rather than just saying, I know the laws, therefore I can predict what will happen. So I view sort of that notion of free will as being something that is absolutely ubiquitous in the computational universe, in the universe, in lots of systems that we see in nature, we can't predict what they're going to do, just like we can't predict what minds are going to do. So I view that as definitely being a very ubiquitous thing. As far as consciousness, I think that's much more special and in a sense much more kind of

much lower level at some level in the sense that, you know, as I was saying, I think one of the essential features of the thing that is consciousness for us. us is this phenomenon of taking all this external data and sort of, you know, pulling it down to this single thread of experience, what are we going to do next and so on. So I think that that seems to be the essence of kind of consciousness as we operate it, so to speak. And I think that's a thing that, you know, when you look at the universe as a whole, you know, that's happening in different places in the universe, but it's not the generic behavior of things in the universe. Our perception of that is very significant to us. The fact that, you know, the ball can roll down into that

one hollow rather than another one and so on is, you know, a similar kind of phenomenon, but, you know, less interesting to us than our own perception of consciousness. You know, one question is, is consciousness kind of the top of the pile for what happens in the universe? And my answer is no, it's not. It's one of the things that is a subcase of one of the things that can happen in a universe like ours. And it's one that's very significant to us. But to the weather, for example, it's not terribly significant. You know, the weather's view of our, you know, oh gosh, you know, look at those organisms.

And of course, I'm anthropomorphizing ridiculously here by, you know, attributing to it some kind of communication like that. You know, it's like those organisms are doing this weird thing, taking in all this input data and just doing one thing as a result, you know, as opposed to taking all that input data and having all those different pieces of input data all do their own separate thing. You'd ask about time and the sort of linearity of time. Quantum mechanics, you have this sort of many threads of time. There is not a single thread of time in the universe. There are many threads of time in the universe. we are aggregating some number of those threads of time, and that is the thing that we perceive, we perceive a single thread of time. You could imagine a brain that was kind of a multi-way brain

that was perceiving more than one thread of experience. That's not what we do. Interestingly, inside a quantum computer, that's what's going on. And the main problem of quantum computers is, Can you take those many, if we had sort of quantum experience, we would be happily using a quantum computer. We'd be following all those independent threads of quantum computation. The difficulty is that knitting all those threads together to get a definite answer of the kind that our single thread of experience brains deal with, that's a difficult thing. And that's something I don't think is going to work, but that's a quite different story. But so this point about, you know, is there a single thread of time in the universe?

The answer is I think no, but we aggregate some number of threads and have, you know, we pick out this single thread of experience. How do you know that time is passing? Well, the state of the universe is changing. And that's kind of the passage of time is the progressive changing of the state of the universe according to some kind of rules. what if the state of the universe at a later moment is identical to the state of the universe at a previous moment? Does that mean that time has not passed? Right. And so there is a notion that I've just been working on that I'm calling sub-time,

which is what might actually happen at the level of individual sort of updates of the universe. And then the question of time as we perceive it. Because there's a delta, it's because there's a change, right? We have an internal referential point in theory, right? I mean, not everyone, but hopefully most people. We have a reference point that tracks, right? No matter what's happening in this, I'm tracking it based on my internal reference point. You can only sense a change in the state of the universe.

If the universe is identical and your mind is identical, it's as if nothing had happened. And so what can happen is that it's slightly tricky because things can happen in the intermediately, but then you're back to where you were before. When you return to a place even emotionally, right? You're never in the same place that you were before, even if you think you're having deja vu. I'm operating at like 10 to the minus 100 meters type scale. I'm not talking about wandering around the neighborhood type thing.

That's a far reach from that low level. So your parents were refugees, correct? They immigrated to England where you were raised. What languages were you raised hearing and speaking? English, nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing else. I was very curious if you grew up with many languages,

since you are a specialist, right, in communicating in all these different ways. You know, when I was growing up, it's like, I'm an English kid. I don't know anything about the history. So that's a, you know, I kind of didn't have that big connection. It's funny because I've worked a lot on language

and computational language and things like that. And I have, you know, my efforts to learn language, I learned Latin and Greek and French when I was a kid. French was the only one you could speak. I guess some people can speak Latin, but that's a rare case. But, you know, but I never did it,

and I never had the confidence to do it, and I had the definite self-image that I'm absolutely useless at learning languages. This may be completely untrue, and just a consequence of, kind of the dynamics of my particular education. But that means I've never, you know, I have some level of knowledge about kind of at an analytic level about languages.

But, you know, and I do find it interesting that, you know, as I try and imagine what it's like to think with another language as one's based for thinking, it is interesting that, you know, I can see that that, you know, that there are concepts that just aren't quite the same. but I see that much more clearly in computational language because I know, you know, it's an interesting experience for me because I've invented a bunch of constructs. And, you know, once I've invented them and made them part of our language, I can think in terms of them. And I can see other people who just couldn't think in those terms, as I couldn't think in those terms. Once they're exposed to those constructs, they start thinking in those terms. It's really a neat thing.

It's a very, people don't recognize that the construction of languages, which usually doesn't happen with human languages. I mean, there haven't been successful, constructed human languages. But with computer languages, computational language, they're all constructed. And, you know, what you get, the kind of, there's a, in a sense, it's a, it's a surprisingly powerful lever that one has in determining kind of how one can think about things, the way that one constructs those languages. And that's, that's, you know, I've just spent a few decades doing those kinds of things.

So I think a bunch about that. We really, we so appreciate your time and also just the scope that you allowed us to kind of play in with you. And we're just, we're very grateful. I also do want to direct people to your website. You have this beautiful scrapbook. I don't know who put it together. But you can follow your progression, both in pictures, in images, like some of the drawings from when you were a child. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know whether those should be on the web. No, I think it's, no, but it's like one of the first things was like how many spikes were on the tail of the stegosaurus. And I'm thinking that's what child Stephen was thinking about. And also, you know, I don't want to embarrass you, but there's not many people, you know, who have achieved what you did, especially at a young age, you know, to get your doctorate really when you were, I think, 20. And to have also this much kind of like ability to interact and to converse on so many different levels with us. We're just. so honored to get to meet you and to speak with you. So we really appreciate it. Nice conversation. You got me to talk about all kinds of things that I have never talked about. There's nothing more to say. He was saying, you got me to talk about so many things that I never talk about. And he talks about a lot of things. He talks a lot, a lot of things, but I don't think people usually ask him about free will consciousness, telepathy, you know, sci phenomenon, and aliens.

How dogs communicate? I could tell that you felt insulted. when he said like dogs, don't think like that. I knew you were thinking he doesn't know our dog. Last night, our dog, I was trying to go to sleep. Like you do. Our dog has started to try and wait me out. So he can get in bed with you. So he can get in bed because he's got this like little mattress at the foot of the bed

that I try to encourage him to sleep on. And he usually does. And for the most part he will. But then he'll like climb into bed around like when the sun comes up. maybe six, six-thirty. He kind of waits for the sun to come up. And he's like, you know what? He's still sleeping, but I'm going to climb into bed.

It's a calculation he's doing. The last two nights, he's refused to come to bed when I go to bed. Two nights ago. He's like, don't mind me. Just hanging out on the couch. He just like stays on the couch. And I'm like, dude, who are you fooling? You were like the most codependent animal I know.

You never want to be by yourself. And now all of a sudden, all the lights at the lights and the house are going out and you're just like hanging out, why, like something's fishy. And so two nights ago, I close all the lights. And pretty much as soon as I close all the lights and lay down, I hear the tick, tick, tick of his nails on the hardwood. And then he tries to climb into bed. I turn the light on and I look at him.

And then he and I just have this staring competition of him looking at me like, really? And I'm like, really? and then I'm like pointing to his bed and he's like ignoring me and then it becomes a whole thing. That's a whole thing. Last night, not only did he stay there,

but I went and got him. And I, he wouldn't come. I gave him a treat, nothing. I pull his paws off the couch and like scoches bottom a little bit, bring him into bed. He kind of settles. I turn the lights off.

He gets out of bed. Goes back and he's pacing. And he's like anxious and I'm like, what's going on? Do you have to pee? We go outside. We spend 10 minutes. Oh, no. He pees. He comes back inside. He goes back to bed. I turn the lights off. He does it again. And I'm like, dude, you are not waiting me out. He's trying to communicate. Speaking of which, I thought that Dr. Wolfram was going to say, like, I grew up hearing many languages and like, it made me able to compute language. Nope, just, he's just amazing. He's amazing. He's amazing. he's amazing. I also keep, I mean, not just from the pictures on his website where you can kind of see him through the ages, but I think like what was he like to graduate college at 17? What was that like? What was he like? Is it that he just has a structurally different brain? His brain is the same structure as everyone else is. Like they said Einstein's brain had more folds to it.

They said. No, it had more, I don't know if it was a white matter, gray matter. I don't remember. All the matter it had. Yeah, I get there were some things about salsai. Here's what I really like about him the most. His charming smile. His continual return to there's a terrible history of science saying what's not possible. I really loved his perspective. I loved it. Every time we talk to someone like him, I want to put Stephen Pinker on with him.

because I feel like there's a way there's a way to talk about things we can't explain and I really loved how he talked about it. He said it could be essentially limited perception. That's what it is. And everything that we don't understand, maybe instead of saying that's not true, you're wrong, I don't like your politics,

I don't like this, maybe it's just, it's not matching my perception, but you're allowed to have your own. And also, think about how big the universe is, we're all made of the same things. Just we do not need to stress some. much and you don't look fat in those pants. It's just how you look in those pants. Oh, here's what we didn't get to ask him. Does he think that humans and machines are going to merge and our

brains are not going to have to communicate language because we'll just be able to share images and feelings that get packaged into little bits and bites? I think he would say yes. I think he would say yes. Well, I think that there's components of that that he would say is a broadening of the capabilities of our computational system combined with another computational system. Yeah. I mean, I think that he had the answer to aliens. Did you understand the second time I tried to get him to explain it? I would say that there is alien communication even amongst humans. Like some humans, you just like can't communicate with because their operating system and your operating system. You don't need to air our dirty laundry in front of all of our listeners. Are just not compatible. It's like when you

try to communicate. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. He was right. Sometimes the dog knows more about what it should be doing. I think that was too far. I think that was too far. I think, this episode also demonstrates what it's like to engage with someone who really wants to be understood in a particular way and is very comfortable adapting his particular framework to include the myriad questions that we have about why we're here, how we got here, and essentially where we're going. Also, I'll give him a very special accolade. He may have been the best guest at tracking, dropped questions and points. He was phenomenal.

I think you actually have to write him and tell him. I think I will tell him. Both of us are just like pinging just. We need our ADD medication. And him, he just doesn't let a single thing drop. We're going to go ahead and diagnose him with no ADD. Very impressive. That's how you make computational systems.

You and I would just be like error in the code all the time because we would have forgotten the backslash. Can you imagine going to college and graduating college at 17? I was still in high school. I'm... Wow, bro. I'm saying, can you imagine... No, I couldn't imagine because I was thinking,

am I going to graduate high school? Okay, so this is a different reality. I'm asking you to entertain where, you know, how every electron has this possible spin. Pick all the other spins that you picked from like 12 till 17. imagine a path where 17-year-old Jonathan would not have been where he was,

but graduating college and heading into a doctoral program. I could have done it. What would your doctorate be in? Computational science. Set up, no. No, I don't know. It would have been in hockey trivia. No, it wouldn't have.

It would be in Grateful Dead. No, so in eighth grade, straight A's in math. I was a mathematician. I really loved math. I loved understanding. You didn't have dyslexia problems with math. Oh, no, not at all. But I also liked the creative of writing and of literature.

I probably would have ended up being in math because I liked that there were right answers in the type of math that we were doing. As in many conversations, this is the point at which, if I was talking to Valerie, she'd be like, what would your doctorate have been in at 17, Myam? I just assume it's the same as it would have been. Well, that's interesting.

No. What would it have been in? Marxist philosophy? Possibly. Adjacent. Sartre and... Women's studies. I think I actually probably would have studied like Simone de Beauvoir. I would have studied like female philosophy and in early feminism. I think that's probably what I would have done.

So you would have been unemployed? I think that's going to get you some hate. I'm just saying that there are only a certain number of positions you would have had to have gone into academia. You know what? There's a lot of liberal arts colleges that would have loved to have me on their staff. You would have been a tenured track professor at Sarah Lawrence. You would have been living, where is Sarah Lawrence in Vermont? No, it's in New York. No, it's in Bronxville.

Riverdale? Yeah. It's like upstate New York, which is basically Vermont. No, I'd be, yes. Anyway, maybe New Hampshire. I don't even know where New Hampshire is. I'd have to look at it. That's where I'd be a professor in New Hampshire.

You would have, the seasons would be lovely. You'd have the best pair of galoshes. In another universe, I'm already doing that. and I have a shaved head and lots more piercings. And a lot of mittens. It's cold. I think that we will computationally end there. If you want more exploration into this conversation, particularly the notion of multiple timelines,

I think we want to unpack that. And the idea of how our perceptions can change moving for me beyond five senses, what we can experience. Join us on Substack. MyNBiallax breakdown on Substack. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's My and Beallic's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you.

She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break...