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.