The Fabric and the Brain

AGENTWORLD | *

An exploration of planetary intelligence, tracing how computation and cosmology—from ancient mechanisms to AI—reshape Earth and its possible futures.

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

Intelligence as a planetary scale process

Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species. We explore ways in which the concept may prove useful for three distinct domains: Earth Systems and Exoplanet studies; Anthropocene and Sustainability studies; and the study of Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). We argue that explorations of planetary intelligence, defined as the acquisition and application of collective knowledge operating at a planetary scale and integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems, can prove a useful framework for understanding possible paths of the long-term evolution of inhabited planets including future trajectories for life on Earth and predicting features of intelligentially steered planetary evolution on other worlds.

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.