The River of Intelligence and the Beaver's Dam

Intelligence is not a human invention. It is a property of the universe, and it has been flowing since the beginning, in forms that range from chemical self-organization to biological evolution to conscious thought to cultural accumulation to artificial computation.

What we call human intelligence is a remarkable and recent expression of a process that is vastly older and vastly larger than our species.

Stuart Kauffman

"Life exists at the edge of chaos. Networks in the regime near the edge of chaos — this compromise between order and surprise — appear best able to coordinate complex activities and best able to evolve as well."

At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity · 1995

→ On AI: Chapter 3: The Edge of Chaos

This claim is large enough to sound like mysticism. It is not. It is physics, and it is biology, and it is the most simple reading of the evidence we have. It is also the frame without which nothing