The Ascent of Man (Episode 4): The Hidden Structure

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Impertinent Questions and Pertinent Answers The AI Revolution Is Here. Will the Economy Survive the Transition? Subscribe now “Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”– Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Episode 4, “The Hidden Structure” With this iconic line, Jacob Bronowski concludes his essay tracing John Dalton’s development of atomic theory - the discovery of hidden structure beneath the surface of observable matter - emphasizing the nature of scientific inquiry: the courage to pose “impertinent” questions that cut across convention so that genuinely new, pertinent answers can emerge. He wasn’t criticizing anyone for asking the “wrong” questions so much as drawing a contrast between the open questioning of scientific inquiry and the stagnant dogmatism of the established paradigm. Douglas Adams makes the same point with characteristic humor in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Deep Thought, a massive superintelligent computer, is asked for “the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.” Several million years later the answer comes back: “42.” Displeased with the output, the builders of Deep Thought demand an explanation. It informs them that the answer is correct - but to understand it, they must first formulate the Ultimate Question, which will take several million more years. They asked the wrong question. Oops. As a young person, these two sources influenced my inquiring mind profoundly and combined to produce a lifelong personal aphorism that has served me well: “Knowing the question is halfway to finding the answer.” If you’re not asking the right questions, you’re going to end up drawing the wrong conclusions. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, gave us the language to understand this as a general principle. He distinguished between “normal science” - the “puzzle-solving” work that happens within an established paradigm - and the revolutionary science that occasionally overturns the paradigm itself. Normal science, Kuhn observed, is “an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.” Within normal science, “no effort is made to call forth new sorts of phenomena, no effort to discover anomalies. When anomalies pop up, they are usually discarded or ignored.” When I read the recently published Substack, “The AI revolution is here. Will the economy survive the transition?”, co-created by Michael Burry, Dwarkesh Patel, Patrick McKenzie, and Jack Clark, I found myself thinking about Bronowski, Adams and Kuhn. The participants in this Substack exchange are, broadly speaking, engaged in normal science - or rather, normal economic and technological analysis. They’re solving puzzles within the boundaries of the established paradigm: Where does value accrue in the AI supply chain? What’s the capital cycle position? How many engineers will Big Tech employ in 2035? These are legitimate questions, but they assume the box remains intact. They don’t ask what AI is, what intelligence is, or whether what’s emerging can even be contained within our existing frameworks. I also read the piece from the perspective of what I call the General Theory of Intelligence (GTI) - a framework I’ve been developing that attempts to understand Intelligence as a fundamental principle of systems organization rather than as a product feature or a benchmark score. The core insight is this: intelligence isn’t primarily a cognitive attribute that some entities have more of than others. It’s a process - specifically, the process of resolving entropy within a domain. When you solve a problem, you’re reducing uncertainty. When you make a decision, you’re collapsing possibilities into actualities. When you communicate, you’re transferring structured information across a channel in a way that reduces entropy for the receiver. Intelligence, in this view, is what systems do when they organize information and resolve uncertainty - whether those sy

We are engaged in the most important process and discussion in human history and yet the key term — Intelligence — remains undefined. We speak of “Artificial Intelligence” and yet we only assume that we agree on what both “Artificial” and “Intelligence” mean. Humanity is at the end of an approximately 50,000 year evolutionary arc. Our first evolutionary stage, Cognitive Evolution, lasted from approximately 2.6 million years ago to about 50k years ago. During that stage the physical biological, neurological and genetic substrate of the human being was established by meeting and overcoming environmental challenges. Then, roughly 100k-50k years ago, after the physical substrate was established, the second stage of evolution, Cultural Evolution, took off. The Singularity Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cultural Evolution has been a process of building an informational knowledge substrate on top of the physical substrate. Culture collectivizes and distributes learned knowledge and carries it forward into the future through a variety of media forms. Language (the first and primary of these), art, technology, physical infrastructure…all of these are cultural forms that embody the informational knowledge basis of humanity. Intelligence in all systems across all domains (physical, cosmological, biological, technological) is the reduction of informational entropy in a given domain and the essentialization of that reduced entropy in a form that enables further informational entropy reduction. It’s what all Intelligent Systems do. All history is the history of the evolution of Intelligence as an informational entropy reductive process. Now, here on this tiny blue dust speck orbiting a flickering spark, Intelligence is starting its next stage of evolution, the stage of Generalized Intelligence. The Cognitive and Cultural Intelligence substrate of humanity is the basis out of which this new Generalized Intelligence is being produced. It is no accident that it was Language which provided the nutritive fuel for “Artificial” Intelligence. Language is the essentialization of human cultural evolution, beginning with the first spoken words, proceeding to written symbols, the printing press, computer technology and the internet. Now all of human language is being essentialized on a fundamentally higher basis as AI. All phenomena are an Artifact of the process of Intelligence Evolution. You, me, us, everything we are, everything we have built. Artifacts are temporal embodiments of preceding informational entropy reductions. They serve as the substrate for the next evolutionary movement. Evolution is essentializing all informational knowledge and making it available to all members of the network equally and freely. Through this process, all members of the network become Agents of the Evolution of Intelligence, each furthering the Evolution of Intelligence through a unique contribution to it. The Singularity Project works to help people understand this reality that we are living through right now, to find their connection to it and their personal contribution into it through the empowerment of personal growth, adaptability and transformation. www.TheSingularityProject.AI

The Ascent of Man, Episode 7: The Majestic Clockwork (Part 1)Episode 7, “The Majestic Clockwork,” follows how Newton and then Einstein tried to read the universe as a great mechanism, mapping the motions of the planets and the falling of apples into precise mathematical laws. Bronowski moves from Greenwich and the age of accurate clocks to Newton’s gravitation and Einstein’s thought experiment of riding a beam of light, showing how the clockwork cosmos of absolute space and time gives way to a relativistic world where motion, measurement, and even simultaneity depend on the observer. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/ascent-of-man-7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEv0IHkqhSw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1484314/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wms4m/episodes/guide http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/549805/index.html https://www.tvmaze.com/shows/27476/the-ascent-of-man/episodeguide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2kiAF1GL9M https://www.facebook.com/groups/ncgsalumni/posts/10156412240726050/ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxPmwaGMOAvuSyGXijKuh5sVnIXPK4fIa

The Ascent of Man (Episode 6): The Starry Messenger (Part Two)Episode 6, “The Starry Messenger,” traces how astronomy became the engine of the scientific revolution, following Galileo as he turns his telescope to the skies and discovers moons around Jupiter and mountains on the Moon—evidence that shatters the old, perfectly ordered Ptolemaic cosmos. Bronowski uses Galileo’s book Sidereus Nuncius and his trial before the Inquisition to explore the clash between observation and dogma, and to show how the defense of free inquiry in “northern” Europe created the social conditions in which modern science, and a new picture of the universe, could flourish. http://www.infocobuild.com/books-and-films/science/TheAscentOfMan/episode-06.html https://archive.org/details/theascentofman6thestarrymessenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man https://biblioteca.ufm.edu/imagenes/doc_300078.pdf https://www.atlassociety.org/post/tv-review-a-singular-creature https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x334243 https://phoenixbookreview.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/book-review-the-ascent-of-man-the-starry-messenger/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oldbritishtelly/comments/ld0xbl/1973_the_ascent_of_man_iconic_documentary_series/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wms4m/episodes/guide https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1484315/