Learning, IMO, is not elemental. It’s a combination.
IMO the 3 intelligences are:
1) World engagement, whether the physical or the energetic. A stone has this sort of intelligence.
2) Discernment (being able to distinguish things and detect patterns in them)
3) The yearning for greater possibility. What is the relentless drive of a spermatozoon or the heliotropism of a flower but a yearning for possibility?
In upper animals, curiosity is what the yearning for greater possibility looks like in the wild.
In humans, the drive for possibility expresses itself as a wide variety and combination of yearnings: for beauty, excellence (arete), and self-actualization. What’s over that hill? What’s in this drop of water? What can I achieve (ambition; competition)?
Memory is composed of writing and reading. Writing is 2 + 1, namely, discernment using energy to write a pattern on stone, paper, or magnetic disks. Recall is using a sensor to detect those patterns and feed it back to discernment.
There are two types of learning: artificial and natural.
Natural learning is curiosity (yearning) writing down what happened and flagging what drives towards greater possibility. It requires all 3 intelligences..
Machine learning is a combination of 2 and 1. It requires artificial yearning written in programming (which is memory, see above - intelligences 1 and 2) to drive them. As machines get better sensors and actuators, their ways of engaging with the world will get better, and so will their artificial learning, which can be harvested by those with taste (natural learning).
Viruses are an example of machine learning in the wild. They have no yearning, and are conceptually thought of as being between non-living and living, much as LLMs can be.
Like viruses, once a machine was given physical substrates and a seed program (artificial yearning), through memory and discernment (pattern manipulation), they can self-perpetuate and through “evolution” can generate novel patterns expressed in physical substrates.
Organismal (living) learning is a combination of 1, 2, and 3
Humans have an exquisite variety of yearnings for possibility, beauty, excellence, and self-actualization, so their combinations of 1, 2, and 3 are the most fractal and interesting of all.
________
There was a man who couldn’t see the forest for the trees
He couldn’t see what it’s for - to be or not to be.
The thinker came with chalked-up hands and mapped his branching mind
But careful logic led him back to questions left behind.
The dreamer felt the shape of things his reason couldn’t know
He called it truth, though truth slipped past — music left the bough.
The sensor touched, the empath wept, the analyst stood apart
Each summoned up a piece of him but couldn’t find the root.
And in that grove of reasoning, where insight met the real
The real was there, the heart was not: what was there to feel?
Here's an idea I've been kicking around, that's kind of orthogonal to those three: generating mistakes to learn from, and not just from ignorance. One of the hallmarks of being human, and, I've come to believe, an essential component of "creativity", is to perturb the system with what amounts to randomness, no matter where it comes from. Indulging in hilarious blunders (impossible to foresee) is frequently the seed crystal of inspiration. It's a key thing that takes us beyond pure ratiocination. It may be that perturbing the system in this way is within the prospective capabilities of AI, but I can't see it from here.
Very interesting post as usual. It could be, however that humans have more “types” of intelligence, I can think of two: sensorial related (the ability to act in response to raw senses, e.g. “instinct”). “Emotional “ intelligence, related with the capability to act with emotions playing a major role. Part of that is correlated with the “knowledge of the world, but not all”. A robot does can have a reasonable model of the world but doesn’t feel pain or empathy.
The creation of emotion as the underlying basis of the three areas you describe, will be the basis of the desired advancement. The creation of emotion serves as the basis for memory and real world interaction.
Computational systems will need to evolve to magnetic field interaction rather than electrical connection ...
see Magnetic Field technology as researched by Keshe Foundation.
This is really interesting. It makes me think of abstraction less as knowledge, and more as a kind of relational vision — the ability to see patterns across possibilities without needing direct experience.
But on its own, that can drift. It seems like what we call intelligence really emerges when that vision is grounded in the world and stabilised over time through learning.
Super curious how the periodic table of cognition works out. I have a feeling that something as fluid as our cognition will be hard to map down - especially now.
It's this weird thing where I think AI will sort of reveal a lot about human intelligence - while at the same time, morph our intelligence as we begin to offload different functions of our cognition and social systems evolve. Exaptation or whatever.
Learning, IMO, is not elemental. It’s a combination.
IMO the 3 intelligences are:
1) World engagement, whether the physical or the energetic. A stone has this sort of intelligence.
2) Discernment (being able to distinguish things and detect patterns in them)
3) The yearning for greater possibility. What is the relentless drive of a spermatozoon or the heliotropism of a flower but a yearning for possibility?
In upper animals, curiosity is what the yearning for greater possibility looks like in the wild.
In humans, the drive for possibility expresses itself as a wide variety and combination of yearnings: for beauty, excellence (arete), and self-actualization. What’s over that hill? What’s in this drop of water? What can I achieve (ambition; competition)?
Memory is composed of writing and reading. Writing is 2 + 1, namely, discernment using energy to write a pattern on stone, paper, or magnetic disks. Recall is using a sensor to detect those patterns and feed it back to discernment.
There are two types of learning: artificial and natural.
Natural learning is curiosity (yearning) writing down what happened and flagging what drives towards greater possibility. It requires all 3 intelligences..
Machine learning is a combination of 2 and 1. It requires artificial yearning written in programming (which is memory, see above - intelligences 1 and 2) to drive them. As machines get better sensors and actuators, their ways of engaging with the world will get better, and so will their artificial learning, which can be harvested by those with taste (natural learning).
Viruses are an example of machine learning in the wild. They have no yearning, and are conceptually thought of as being between non-living and living, much as LLMs can be.
Like viruses, once a machine was given physical substrates and a seed program (artificial yearning), through memory and discernment (pattern manipulation), they can self-perpetuate and through “evolution” can generate novel patterns expressed in physical substrates.
Organismal (living) learning is a combination of 1, 2, and 3
Humans have an exquisite variety of yearnings for possibility, beauty, excellence, and self-actualization, so their combinations of 1, 2, and 3 are the most fractal and interesting of all.
________
There was a man who couldn’t see the forest for the trees
He couldn’t see what it’s for - to be or not to be.
The thinker came with chalked-up hands and mapped his branching mind
But careful logic led him back to questions left behind.
The dreamer felt the shape of things his reason couldn’t know
He called it truth, though truth slipped past — music left the bough.
The sensor touched, the empath wept, the analyst stood apart
Each summoned up a piece of him but couldn’t find the root.
And in that grove of reasoning, where insight met the real
The real was there, the heart was not: what was there to feel?
Here's an idea I've been kicking around, that's kind of orthogonal to those three: generating mistakes to learn from, and not just from ignorance. One of the hallmarks of being human, and, I've come to believe, an essential component of "creativity", is to perturb the system with what amounts to randomness, no matter where it comes from. Indulging in hilarious blunders (impossible to foresee) is frequently the seed crystal of inspiration. It's a key thing that takes us beyond pure ratiocination. It may be that perturbing the system in this way is within the prospective capabilities of AI, but I can't see it from here.
Very interesting post as usual. It could be, however that humans have more “types” of intelligence, I can think of two: sensorial related (the ability to act in response to raw senses, e.g. “instinct”). “Emotional “ intelligence, related with the capability to act with emotions playing a major role. Part of that is correlated with the “knowledge of the world, but not all”. A robot does can have a reasonable model of the world but doesn’t feel pain or empathy.
The creation of emotion as the underlying basis of the three areas you describe, will be the basis of the desired advancement. The creation of emotion serves as the basis for memory and real world interaction.
Computational systems will need to evolve to magnetic field interaction rather than electrical connection ...
see Magnetic Field technology as researched by Keshe Foundation.
This is really interesting. It makes me think of abstraction less as knowledge, and more as a kind of relational vision — the ability to see patterns across possibilities without needing direct experience.
But on its own, that can drift. It seems like what we call intelligence really emerges when that vision is grounded in the world and stabilised over time through learning.
Super curious how the periodic table of cognition works out. I have a feeling that something as fluid as our cognition will be hard to map down - especially now.
It's this weird thing where I think AI will sort of reveal a lot about human intelligence - while at the same time, morph our intelligence as we begin to offload different functions of our cognition and social systems evolve. Exaptation or whatever.
Great stuff thanks kevin
https://sovra-mhce-lambda-lexicon.vercel.app/
Very insightful, thank you.