Stephen Wolfram Q&A

Submit a question

Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

March 8, 2017

From: Interview by John Horgan, Scientific American

What’s the ultimate purpose of the Wolfram Language? Can it fulfill Leibniz’s dream of a language that can help us resolve all questions, moral as well as scientific? Can it provide a means of unambiguous communication between all intelligent entities, whether biological or artificial?

My goal with the Wolfram Language is to have a language in which computations can conveniently be expressed for both humans and machines—and in which we’ve integrated as much knowledge about computation and about the world as possible. In a way, the Wolfram Language is aimed at finally achieving some of the goals Leibniz had 300 years ago. We now know—as a result of Gödel’s theorem, computational irreducibility, etc.—that there are limits to the scientific questions that can be resolved. And as far as moral questions are concerned: well, the Wolfram Language is going in the direction of at least being able to express things like moral principles, but it can’t invent those; they have to come from humans and human society.

Contact | © Stephen Wolfram, LLC