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Open-Ended Intelligence
This monograph offers a thought-provoking transdisciplinary perspective on thinking, cognition and intelligence touching on everything ranging from universal principles to one’s most private existential deliberations. Replacing the individual as the primary metaphysical element with individuation as a primary metaphysical process is at the basis of a metaphysical paradigm shift.
In bringing forth sense from non-sense and knowledge from the unknown, such individuating processes manifest open-ended intelligence – a kind of intelligence which is not purposeful or predictive but rather experimental and generative. Open-ended Intelligence is probably the single most critical theoretical element missing from our contemporary understanding of intelligence.
It’s entirely possible that understanding of Open-Ended Intelligence and its practical implications is critical for the survival and flourishing of humanity and its successors. —Ben Goertzel (Preface)
In bringing forth sense from non-sense and knowledge from the unknown, such individuating processes manifest open-ended intelligence – a kind of intelligence which is not purposeful or predictive but rather experimental and generative. Open-ended Intelligence is probably the single most critical theoretical element missing from our contemporary understanding of intelligence.
It’s entirely possible that understanding of Open-Ended Intelligence and its practical implications is critical for the survival and flourishing of humanity and its successors. —Ben Goertzel (Preface)
388 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 1, 2022
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January 12, 2025
A few years before Iain McGilchrist published “The Matter with Things,” Weaver articulated an analogous philosophical system here, in the Open-Ended Intelligence, informed by the philosophy of H. Bergson, G. Deleuze, and G. Simondon.
Weaver’s work affords to the reader a rare, highly aesthetic experience of witnessing the mind perform exactly what is being described. That is the experience of craving to solidify and to hold on to the fruits of this operation, all the while the problematic legitimacy of the conceptual conventions that serve to facilitate this process is being gently washed away. To walk with you, step by step, from the pure nothing to a perishable, arbitrary something and back (if you dare to think back) is precisely the point. What the author seems to be asking is this: would you endure partaking in a reality as fluid and porous as it is, without placing the imaginary turtles underneath your feet? How about foregoing the imaginary thinker as well?
Human beings are a form of intelligence wired for grasping—and for applying that which was grasped towards a human-reinforcing effect, thereby deemed practical. Yet notwithstanding the entire cognitive machinery so intensely invested in their own ongoing reinforcement, human beings with all our grasped certainties soon enough perish, quite insubstantially. This harsh realisation tends to be shielded away, by being known rather generally, an abstract painting in a large frame, and—more effectively—by the ongoing thought-by-thought counterbalancing with the ever more solemn grasping towards the ever stronger reinforcement. When the very being is at stake, how could we afford to let the mind wander and dance, release and diffuse, scrap and start anew, other than during the short leisure breaks optimised for the overall persistent effectiveness?
Weaver’s beautiful book affirms that we can and that we, actually, do afford all that—all the while the relevant meaning of the ‘we’, here, turns out very different from what our linguistic conventions tend to presume. I will not spoil the reader’s pleasure of personal discovery, by explaining that meaning here.
Weaver’s work affords to the reader a rare, highly aesthetic experience of witnessing the mind perform exactly what is being described. That is the experience of craving to solidify and to hold on to the fruits of this operation, all the while the problematic legitimacy of the conceptual conventions that serve to facilitate this process is being gently washed away. To walk with you, step by step, from the pure nothing to a perishable, arbitrary something and back (if you dare to think back) is precisely the point. What the author seems to be asking is this: would you endure partaking in a reality as fluid and porous as it is, without placing the imaginary turtles underneath your feet? How about foregoing the imaginary thinker as well?
Human beings are a form of intelligence wired for grasping—and for applying that which was grasped towards a human-reinforcing effect, thereby deemed practical. Yet notwithstanding the entire cognitive machinery so intensely invested in their own ongoing reinforcement, human beings with all our grasped certainties soon enough perish, quite insubstantially. This harsh realisation tends to be shielded away, by being known rather generally, an abstract painting in a large frame, and—more effectively—by the ongoing thought-by-thought counterbalancing with the ever more solemn grasping towards the ever stronger reinforcement. When the very being is at stake, how could we afford to let the mind wander and dance, release and diffuse, scrap and start anew, other than during the short leisure breaks optimised for the overall persistent effectiveness?
Weaver’s beautiful book affirms that we can and that we, actually, do afford all that—all the while the relevant meaning of the ‘we’, here, turns out very different from what our linguistic conventions tend to presume. I will not spoil the reader’s pleasure of personal discovery, by explaining that meaning here.
Displaying 1 of 1 review