Intelligence and Spirit Quotes

“Intelligence without risk is an empty thought, as is an intelligence whose realization takes no time. Risk and time are the presuppositions for the history of intelligence in which nothing is given in advance and nothing is completed as the totality of that history.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“To be human is the only way out of being human. An alternative exit— either by unbinding sentience from sapience or by circumventing sapience in favour of a direct engagement with the technological artefact—cannot go beyond the human. Rather it leads to a culture of cognitive pettiness and self-deception that is daily fodder for the most parochial and utilitarian political systems that exist on the planet. In delivering sentience from its so-called sapient yoke, one does not become posthuman, or even animal, but falls back on an ideologically charged ‘biological chauvinism’ that sapience ought to overcome, for it is the very idea of humanist conservatism that misrepresents what is accidental and locally contingent as what is necessary and universal. In discarding the human in the hope of an immediate contact with superintelligence or a self-realization of the technological artefact, one either surreptitiously subjects the future to the predetermined goals of conservative humanism, or subscribes to a future that is simply the teleological actualization of final causes and thus a resurrection of the well-worn Aristotelian fusion of reasons and causes. Human sapience is the only project of exit.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“Artificiality is the reality of the mind. Mind has never been and will never have a given nature. It becomes mind by positing itself as the artefact of its own concept. By realizing itself as the artefact of its own concept, it becomes able to transform itself according to its own necessary concept by first identifying, and then replacing or modifying, its conditions of realization, disabling and enabling constraints. Mind is the craft of applying itself to itself. The history of the mind is therefore quite starkly the history of artificialization. Anyone and anything caught up in this history is predisposed to thoroughgoing reconstitution. Every ineffable will be theoretically disenchanted and every scared will be practically desanctified.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“It is one thing to explain the causal origins of thinking, as science commendably does; it is an entirely different thing to conflate thinking in its formal or rule-governed dimension with its evolutionary genesis. Being conditioned is not the same as being constituted. Such a conflation not only sophistically elides the distinction between the substantive and the formal, it also falls victim to a dogmatic metaphysics that is impulsively blind to its own epistemological and methodological bases qua origins.
It is this genetic fallacy that sanctions the demotion of general intelligence as qualitatively distinct to a mere quantitative account of intelligent behaviours prevalent in nature. It should not come as a any surprise that this is exactly the jaded gesture of antihumanism upon whose shoddy pillars today's discourse of posthumanism supports its case. Talk of thinking forests, rocks, worn shoes, and ethereal beings goes hand in hand with the cult of technological singularity, musings on Skynet or the Market as speculative posthuman intelligence, and computers endowed with intellectual intuition. And again, by now it should have become obvious that, despite the seeming antagonism between these two camps - one promoting the so-called egalitarianism of going beyond human conditions by dispensing with the rational resources of critique, the other advancing the speculative aspects of posthuman supremacy on the grounds of the technological overcoming of the human condition - they both in fact belong to the arsenal of today's neoliberal capitalism in its full-on assault on any account of intelligence that may remotely insinuate an ambition for collective rationality and imagination.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“What makes Hegel's picture of geist a significant contribution not only to the history of functionalism and philosophy of mind but also, intriguingly, to the history of artificial general intelligence, is that it presents a social model of general intelligence, one in which sociality is a formal condition for the realization of cognitive abilities that would be unrealizable by individual agents alone.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“It is therefore necessary to grasp the concept of artificial general intelligence not merely as a technoscientific idea, but more fundamentally as a concept belonging to a thought or form of intelligence that treats its very possibility as an explicit opportunity to pierce through the horizon of its givenness: it does not matter what it currently is; what matters is what can be done - all relevant things considered - to expand and build on this possibility.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“Or think of Goodman's own example: the shift from the analogue to the digital should be regarded as a veritable worldmaking. In this process, continuities are deleted. We are now in the domain of pure mechanizability: discrete inputs, discrete states, and discrete outputs. This shift realized by deletion is a radical one. The very distinction between human and machine collapses. The human world will be revealed as nothing but a special qualitative kind of integration of computational algorithms. As an alternative to this digital world, we can imagine a computational world where continuity, and above all the realtime interaction between the system or the abstract machine and its environment, is restored (supplemented). This is a new computational world in which the system and the environment interact without any pre-given limitations. The interaction is computation itself in a truly concurrent sense, to use the idiom of today's theoretical computer science. The prospects of such a paradigm of computation for remodelling the very notion of spirit or geist as a multi-agent system (interacting computational processes) is beyond our acquired practical reason, if not truly theoretically and practically unbound.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“As Krämer and Dutilh Novaes have elaborated, de decoupling of formal languages from any subject matter or content (desemantification) conditions the possibility of resemantification or 'applying a given formalism, which is developed against a specific background, to a different problem, phenomenon, or framework'. Accordingly, the systematic treatment of the formal - i.e. treating logical powers in terms of their own structure rather than their transitory experiential content or epistemic application - not only allows new contents to be structured and accessed (semantic enrichment), but also brings about a debiasing effect, in the sense that it strongly mitigates the perceptual biases of reasoning. It is the debiasing effect that makes of formal languages tools or cognitive technologies that enable the transition from the common-sense framework of understanding and knowing content to the scientific framework of epistemic inquiry.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“In line with the total assault of scientific investigation and critical rationality on our most well-cherished and established intuitions, why should we expect the characteristics of reality to be trivial extensions of characteristics specific to the temporal-causal perspective of the subject? [...]
Liberation from a model of time restricted to a particular contingent constitution does not rob the subject of its cognitive and practical abilities, but releases it from the shackles of its most entrenched dogmas about the necessity of the contingent features of its experience. In doing so, it sheds light on the prospects of what the subject of experience and the exercise of change in the world is and can be as it cognitively matures. The transition to a state where one is no longer afraid of being lost in time, having come to the realization that time accommodates no one, should be celebrated as the sign of rational maturity, rather than decried as a manifestation of the subject's impotency. It is in continuity with the critical attitude of rational agency to adopt a model of experience that can interrogate the most natural and established 'facts of experience' rather than corroborating them via the so-called fact that these are simply the ways in which we experience the world. As the extension of this interrogation, such a model should also enlarge the field of our experience, and in doing so, should theoretically and practically challenge popular yet puerile ideologies built around either a temporal account of progress or the second law of thermodynamics.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“Images of time as an endless flow that underlines the insignificance of the human and its paltry concerns turn out to be antihumanist veneers upon a subjectivist account of time which, far from breaking from the dogmas of humanism, reinforces a deeply conservative form of humanism. This is a humanism afllicted by a deep-seated transcendental blind spot that not only uncritically posits the local and contingent characteristics of egocentric human experience as the characteristics of reality, but it also deems this very anthropomorphic reality - whether under the rubric of preindividual singularities or ceaseless becoming - to be the horizon for overcoming human exceptionalism. Such metaphysical accounts of time champion an infinite which is more pure alterity than the suspension of the finite. As such, they must both leave the finite intact in order to maintain their alterity and debase the finite as that which does not matter in so far it is perishable. The so-called finite of such images of time is thought, mind, or the human. But the human as finite will be haunted by human pettiness and its associated limitations. It will be doomed to bear the marks of exactly that which it seeks to seek clear of.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“This is not to say that we ought to forego all metaphysical claims - in this case, the metaphysical account of time. The point is not to be quietist when it comes to metaphysics. For it is precisely once we presume that we have purged ourselves of metaphysical assumptions, that we become susceptible to the most dogmatic and veiled forms of metaphysics. The fanatic Kantian critical crusade against metaphysics only leads to an illusory disillusionment as one ends up with a stock of unexamined and unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions. In contrast to this approach, in the vein of Plato and Hegel, the aim is to be concretely self-conscious with respect to metaphysics and indeed strive to develop a robust metaphysics - in this case, a robust metaphysics of time.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“It is of course not the case that AGI research programs must wait for a thoroughgoing critique of the transcendental structure to be carried out via physics, cognitive science, theoretical computer science, or politics before they attempt to put forward an adequate model; the two ought to be understood as parallel and overlapping projects. In this schema, the program of the artificial realization of the human's cognitive-practical abilities coincides with the project of the fundamental alienations of the human subject, which is precisely the continuation and elaboration of the Copernican enlightenment, moving from a particular perspective or local frame to a perspective or experience that is no longer uniquely determined by a particular and contingently constituted transcendental structure. In the same vein, the project of artificial general intelligence, rather than championing singularity or some equally dubious conception of the technological saviour, becomes a natural extension of the human's process of self-discovery through which the last vestiges of essentialism are washed away. What remains after this process of retrospective reassessment and prospective revision may indeed - as Roden suggests - bear no resemblance to the manifest self-portrait of the human in which our experience of what it means to be human is anchored.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“In the wake of scientific rationality, mind turns into a wave of noetic deracination. This deracination of thought and its noetic drift is commensurate with what Plato calls the Form of Good as the Form of Forms, since it sets up the scaffolding for a conception of the realm of intelligibilities as a complex system of recipes for crafting a world which includes not only satisfying lives but also the perpetual demand for the better.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“The true revolutionary import of science lies in its capacity to amplify reason's own power of knowing and to instigate cognitive expansion. The convergent progressivist interpretation of scientific theories is often assumed to be a preventive measure against irrationality and relativism with regards to scientific theories; but in reality it is an oversimplification that causes more unnecessary problems which can become the source of irrationality. The rationality of science lies not in the uniform progression of science, but in how these theories are constructed and how they expand the capacities of reason and its cognitive traction on the world. In light of the dynamics of scientific structuration or theoreticity, the rationality of science can be preserved without a convergent progressivist reading of scientific change. Similarly, epistemological anarchism can be shown to be merely a parasitic outcome of the pseudo-rationality of an uncritically progressivist view of science.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“We as manifest humans must come to terms -psychologically, cognitively, and ethically - with the hard fact of what it means to be human: One cannot have the cake of humanity without eating its consequences. Once we treat ourselves as a species of rights and entitlements, once we say what ought or ought not to be thought or done, the moment we distinguish the order of things and respons to it in accordance with what we think is right, however far from the truth it may be, we have committed ourselves to the impersonal order of reason to which sapiens belongs - an order that will expunge our manifest self-portrait. We have crossed the cognitive Rubicon. In committing to this impersonal order we must realize that what is manifestly human - us as we stand here, now - will be overcome by that very order. Reason is a game in which we are all fleeting players and from which we cannot defect, so let us play this game well by committing to its interests and its ramifications.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“Functional analysis and the study of structural complexity should be approached as essentially conjoined programs. Unless both are in place, description and prescription in any form will be untenable, and prospective explanations, interventions, analyses, and critiques will result in dogmatic positions ranging, depending on their contexts, from resigned cynicism to fatalist optimism, from analytic stinginess to speculative overenthusiasm.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“However, in order for the intelligible unity of mind and reality (the autonomy of thought and the alien thing) to be concretely realized, in order for self-consciousness to establish the determinate truth of itself, it must become conscious of itself from a second-person viewpoint - that of a reality that is in excess of thought and yet is still intelligible. The formal autonomy of thought accordingly demands stepping into the open and conceiving self-consciousness from the viewpoint of a reality that is wholly other to it.
Once a minimal and formal self-relation is established, it opens up a gap between mind and world. Only by bridging this gap from the other extremity - that is, from what is now outside of the manifest identity of the I - can mind become concretely self-conscious. This is the labour of negation, where there is no direct access between mind and reality, between one I and another, but where contact can only be obtained through the hard work of conception. Through the labour of negation, what was a formally trivial identity relation (the monad of I=I) is now an identity map (I=I*) where I* is the self or mind from the perspective of an abyss, an unrestricted world or reality that is be to rendered intelligible. The intelligibility of I or self-conscious mind rests on the intelligibility of the abyss which is, properly speaking, something to be achieved, an objective striving. Intelligence only turn into intelligence when it loses its passivity, when it actively begins to render reality intelligible and, in so doing, begins to re-engineer the reality of itself.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit