"'If there's one thing I'll never be when I'm grown up, it's a philosopher!'
—Stephen Wolfram (age 8)
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The pieces I've collected here span a quarter of a century—though with considerable concentration in the past five years. Some were written as standalone pieces; some are excerpted from longer documents, particularly my book A New Kind of Science. Most can be read independently, though some fundamental ideas—such as computational irreducibility and the ruliad—occasionally end up being assumed.
Of all the things I've written over the years, many have a certain formal, technical sophistication. This book concentrates on my more conceptual pieces (and when these pieces have more technical parts, I've generally excised them here). The book ends up providing a fairly complete collection of my self-contained philosophical writings to date—though not the various brief philosophical analyses that my writings about almost anything tend to contain.
And all in all there's little choice but to say that at a personal level this book gives a lie to the pronouncement I made as an 8 year old. Of course, back then I had no idea that I'd end up discovering things in science (and technology) that would so much inform philosophy. But with what I discuss in this book I think we can look forward to an immensely fertile new dialog between science, technology and philosophy—that will benefit all of them."