Stephen Wolfram, welcome.

Hello there.

Donald Hoffman, welcome.

Thank you.

It's my understanding this is the first time you both are meeting.

Indeed.

Yes, people say to me about things I work to in physics and so on,

oh, that's related to things that Emmanuel Kant did.

And they say, might be related to things that

Donald Hoffman has done. Well, Emmanuel Kant I'm too late for. But Donald Hoffman, we get a chance to

actually talk about things. That would be fun. Absolutely. Don, do you see yourself as Kant 2.0?

Well, I'm not nearly as smart as him, so it would be a lesser version.

But similar, it's idealism, but with some mathematics behind it.

And how about, are you a Leibniz 2.0 as well, or are you, I don't not...

Yeah, much, much less smart than Leibniz, that's for sure.

But yeah, it's very, very similar.

I like Leibniz's monodology.

There's a lot of good ideas in there, and the work I'm doing on conscious agents in some sense,

I can view it as simply a mathematicization of Leibniz's ideas.

Interesting.

I still have to, you know, people have told me for four decades that things I'm doing are sort of Leibniz related. And at various times I have tried to understand Leibniz's monad idea, and I've usually failed. Although one thing that helped me a lot recently was realizing, and maybe you can comment on this,

that Leibniz didn't imagine that you could have mind made from non-mind.

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