The Fabric and the Brain

A Primordial Computing Soup

Fostering AI art scenius, creating an open planetary network of robots

Antikythera

A think tank for planetary computation & the evolution of intelligence

How AI coding is reshaping theoretical neuroscience

Agentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months. Neuroscientists weigh in on that tectonic change.

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness.

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

562 – Ecological Cognition III: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (part 1)

562 Continuing the journey in understanding the Ecological approach to cognition by looking at Tony Chemero’s book: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Conceptualizing cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics instead of computation and representation. What is RECS, and where did these ideas come from?Download link

AI Sycophancy and Decisions

We examine whether sycophantic AI advice distorts decisions. Our experiment involves 1,500 participants in 30 decision environments spanning core domains in eco

The Global Brain Argument: Nodes, Computroniums and the Ai Megasystem (Target Paper for Special Issue)

The Global Brain Argument contends that many of us are, or will be, part of a global brain network that includes both biological and artificial intelligences (AIs), such as generative AIs ...

AI in World Machine Theory

The telos of AI is to create liveness at planetary scale

Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion

For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).

satellitecomponent/Neurite

Fractal Graph-of-Thought. Rhizomatic Mind-Mapping for Ai-Agents, Web-Links, Notes, and Code.

Scaling Managed Agents: Decoupling the brain from the hands

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

The Octotypic Mind

Carcinization, Cognitive Prosthetics, and the Shape of Intelligence After AI