Open-Ended Intelligence Quotes

“Living life as an experiment is not merely a lifestyle choice. It is a metaphysical commitment to the primacy of difference over identity and of becoming over being. One’s life gains meaning in as far as it facilitates the possibility of evolution, of growth and the overcoming of limits. Life lived as an experiment becomes an expression of open-ended intelligence. Style and aesthetics do mightily matter but these are not prescribed; they need to be figured out in the course of one’s becoming. Life as an experiment is a thought experiment and an experiment in thinking. It is to think and let oneself be thought while not taking anything for granted; to be able to escape the banality of everything habitual in sense and thought. A real thought is real to the extent that it transforms the thinker.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Open-Ended Intelligence

“Making survival a fetish would never allow something positive and life affirming to be seen in change. This perspective is deeply rooted in culture, in language, in perception, in the conceptual systems that facilitate thought and reasoning, and of course in social constructs and the psychological makeup of human individuals. In a nutshell it is a fundamental metaphysical position that prefers the world to be described in terms of being rather than becoming, in terms of final products rather than processes and in terms of identity rather than difference, that prevents one from seeing life not only as the autopoeitic self-preserving process that it is but also as the self-overcoming open-ended process that it is. The very notion of thinking about life (or evolution for that matter) as having a definite purpose or goal is already a symptom of a deeply rooted bias in favour of the constant and against change. There are voices that will immediately attack this view, blaming it for insinuating that life has no purpose at all. But a dialectic of such kind is empty of any credence if not entirely absurd. The view I propose here does not indeed accept that life is subjugated to a single purpose or principle but instead affirms life as having not one purpose but infinitely multiple ones, not one goal but multiple goals and, moreover, the vast majority of these purposes and goals cannot be known a priori because they are subject to continuous formative processes of becoming. This is why life as such is open-ended.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Open-Ended Intelligence