PERSON
Reza Negarestani
Iranian philosopher and theorist of computational rationalism whose 2018 Intelligence and Spirit offered the most ambitious contemporary reading of Hegelian Geist as the architecture of artificial general intelligence.
Reza Negarestani is a philosopher whose work has moved from experimental fiction (the 2008 Cyclonopedia) to rigorous philosophy of mind and AI. His 2018 Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic) presents the most sustained contemporary argument that Hegel's concept of Geist provides the architectural resources for understanding artificial general intelligence. Negarestani's claim is audacious: the structural features Hegel identified in the development of self-consciousness — normative self-regulation, the dialectical movement through alienation and recognition, progressive self-articulation — are substrate-independent features of intelligence as such. If this is right, Hegel's philosophy is not applicable to AI by analogy but provides the philosophical architecture within which AGI would be possible and comprehensible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Negarestani's reading rejects the dominant twentieth-century philosophical positions on AI. Against Dreyfus's Heideggerian critique of AI (which argues that embodiment is necessary for intelligence), Negarestani argues that embodiment is contingent — what matters is the functional structure of normative self-regulation, which can be instantiated in multiple substrates.