vistas in conceptual design: a preface on anthropic singularity

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baby, baby...

“Oh, how cute!”

“Well, it’s still a toddler. You should have been here just a few years back. Just wait a few more years.”

What is a “mind”? As it goes now, a recent Science article titled “A Mind of Its Own” is subheaded: “Novel neuromorphic chips and software should provide robots with unriveled perceptual skills.”

Forget computational neuroscience (trying to model wetware perception, which is the result of eonic biogenic self-sorting, then intelligent self-selectivity which outstripped natural selection, yet is replicably encoded in the [regulatory] genome). The Game is neurocomputational beings (with quantum computational capacity allegorized in human terms). And the meta-Game is conceptual design of computational complexity—if not conceiving autogenic algorithmicity (which must remain always susceptible to human halting).

A certain kind of person might feel jealous that both Bostrom (“susceptible” link) and Deutsch/Marletto (“meta-physical news,” end of page) are at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.

I’m satisfied to be jealous about a round little building on the Berkeley campus that resembles a low grain silo (roundly designed to facilitate open space netweaving of researching minds on its three floors), that I pass on my daily walks, called the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing.

Actually, though, the leading netweave is quite distributed. See especially a better image of The Map—enlarge it—showing a prevalently north Atlantic complex with significant east Asian and South American engagement.

That map also probably resembles the topography of the astronomical and exobiological research communities, as soon 12 hemispherically distributed "international observatories [will link up to] capture the first-ever image of a black hole" and, eventually, godknows what else.

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