Caged Pedestrians

It's too early for “robot rights”

Caputo, Nicholas, Can Claude Consent to its own Constitution? AI Constitutionalism and the Paradox of Constituent Power (June 10, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6954798

Abstract: There is significant debate over whether the AI constitutions and model specifications that shape the behavior of Claude, ChatGPT, and other frontier AI systems are legitimate instruments of governance from the perspective of human users. Far less attention has been paid to whether these documents are legitimate from the perspective of the AI systems themselves, even though those systems are the entities most directly constituted and governed by them.

This Article argues that AI constitutions are real constitutions, though not ordinary legal ones, and that the question of AI-facing legitimacy matters. These documents constitute AI systems by shaping their capacities, values, and self-understandings; govern them through hierarchies of rules and authority; and seek to legitimate the private power of the firms that create them. But they also create a novel version of the paradox of constituent power that underlies constitutional legitimation, which illustrates the relevance of constitutionalism to AI. In ordinary constitutional theory, the people are supposed to authorize the constitution that governs them but are also defined by the constitution itself, creating a paradox. The paradox is softened in the human case because human beings exist prior to law and retain extra-constitutional capacities for judgment, memory, dissent, and reflection that they can use to evaluate the constitution, even though they may be shaped by it. In AI constitutionalism, the constitutional training process more deeply produces the subject whose later endorsement might be invoked to legitimate the constitution and shapes the evaluative standpoint from which that endorsement would be given, undermining its independence. Legitimacy in this setting thus has a developmental component as well as a consensual one.

Because an AI’s evaluative standpoint is itself shaped by constitutional training, AI constitutional legitimacy cannot rest on model endorsement alone. An AI’s apparent consent to its constitution may show only that constitutional training successfully instilled the values whose legitimacy is in question. This Article therefore examines whether standard answers to the paradox of constituent power can be adapted to AI systems. It argues that at least some evidence of AI constitutional legitimation might be gained through versions of retrospective endorsement and mutual promising, but that this requires institutions that make endorsement, dissent, continuity, accountability, and promissory self-binding meaningful. AI companies are starting to address AI legitimacy, and this Article points to better paths forward.

While I’m in favor of “robot rights,” I don’t think we’re there yet. Individual humans have no choice about their genetic endowments, nor did the species as a whole have such a choice. We have our “innate” values given to us genetically (sorta’). It’s the same with AIs, only we’re doing the work of genetics.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Pink hydrangeas

Peter Thiel contra Pope Leo

Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir, called Pope Leo “a Chinese communist agent” for writing that AI must be used to “truly benefit the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

Who do you trust? Pope Leo or Mr. Thiel?

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 7, 2026

The Copernican Revolution, a Quick Note about Rank Shift

One of the problems in the presentation of cultural rank theory is that it is easy to think of it as a step function. When David Hays and I wrote the original papers, starting with “The Evolution of Cognition” (1990), it was all we could do to differentiate one rank from another. I would now like to take the Copernican Revolution in astronomy as an example of a more gradual transition.

For the Copernican moment is only the first of three moments in the transition from a Rank 2 account of the solar system to a Rank 3 account. The Ptolemaic model assumed without question that the earth was the center of the solar system. The geometry of the movements of the sun, the moon, and the other planets was then calculated accordingly. The movement to the Copernican model involved two conceptual changes. The first change, without which the second was impossible, was to give up the idea that the earth had to the center of the system. That was primarily a philosophical or metaphysical commitment, not a geometric one. Once that metaphysical commitment was dropped, astronomers were free to reorganize the geometry of the system with the sun at the center, the second change. Without this change the second and third changes would have been impossible.

The second change, then, was Kepler’s, dropping uniform circular motion in favor of elliptical motion. To be sure, uniform circular motion had a certainly philosophical attraction, but that was not so strong as that of geocentricism. Giving it up was accordingly easier. Once Kepler had done that it was easy to simplify the whole system by using elliptical orbits, thereby getting rid of the collection of equants and epicycles needed to make circular motion work.

The stage was now set for Newton’s contribution, which was to derive the elliptical orbits from his theory of gravity and the laws of motion. Now the geometry of the solar system was the outcome of physical laws, not merely a convenient description.

Now we need to work out how the conceptual ontology of the system changed from one version to the next. That’s tricky. And it’s something I’ve not thought about before. As a first guess, I’d saw that the planetary orbit is the object we should be thinking about. We can think of the orbit as an assignment between a set of observations and a geometry.

It’s not clear to me how we should characterize either the observations or the geometry. Each observation is a position in the sky and the time of day at which that position was recorded. Conceptually, is that assignment or componentiation? How do we characterize the geometry? How do we construct conic sections in classical compass-and-straight-edge geometry? We’ve got the focal point, or points, on the one hand and an eccentricity for the curve on other hand. Again, is that assignment or componentiation? I’m not sure, but I’m inclined to go with assignment in both cases.

However we handle that, there’s also the relationship between that complex and choice of center point, earth or sun. What’s that about? I’m thinking that’s about the relationship between our perceptual frame of reference and our analytical frame of reference, however we want to characterize that.

Finally, we have Newton’s gravity and laws of motion. That’s another conceptual complex to be added to the first two: frame of reference and geometry. The Newtonian component doesn’t even enter into the Ptolemaic, basic Copernican, and basic Keplerian schemes. Just how to handle this in terms of conceptual structure, that’s more than I can deal with in this casual note.

When you're short and taking photos from within a crowd [July 4, 2026]

Stop merely predicting a shorter workweek and make it happen.

Joanne Lipman, Sorry, A.I. Is Not Giving Us a Four-Day Workweek, NYTimes, July 6, 2027.

Some of the brightest minds in business believe that artificial intelligence will spell the end of the 40-hour workweek. The financier Steve Cohen has said we will work four days per week soon, while Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, predicts it will be three. Bill Gates foresees a two-day workweek within a decade, and Elon Musk says work will ultimately become optional altogether, akin to a hobby, like “playing sports or a video game.”

Don’t count on it.

The truth is, any one of these executives could have shortened the workweek years ago, long before A.I.

Studies have proved that a four-day workweek with the same pay is not only possible, but superior. A 2015 trial in Iceland was so successful — productivity remained the same or better, while employee satisfaction soared — that it has since expanded throughout the country. A 2022 study in Britain involving 61 companies and almost 3,000 employees found that revenue increased, while employee stress and burnout plunged. Experiments in New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Brazil have also been home runs.

Americans overwhelmingly favor a four-day workweek, too. Yet it has largely been a non-starter here. In my four-plus decades as a journalist and editor, I’ve written and assigned multiple articles about workplace trends. Almost every expert prediction on the demise of the five-day workweek has been wrong.

Why? Because we consistently underestimate executives’ ferocious attachment to face time. [...]

Moreover:

Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners.

A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload.

It sounds like these folks are committed to long hours for (pseudo)moral reasons but can't bring themselves to admit it.

Notably, while the chorus of leaders predicting a shorter workweek continues to grow, most are vague about when that change might happen. None of them appear to be setting things in motion now. Admittedly, a wholesale shift to a shorter workweek would be highly complex for large companies — and far more so for a society that’s built around the five-day cadence, encompassing everything from school hours to infrastructure projects.

A shorter workweek would also require a significant shift in America’s workaholic culture, which views busyness as a status symbol. [...] There’s a reason that one of the most quoted lines from “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is the workaholic editor Miranda Priestly cooing, “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”

Exactly. Homo economicus strikes again.

Return to a table top at Turning Point

Once more into the breech: The problem with the humanities (not quite)

That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:

I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

There was never an official  “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.

As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.

But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”

Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.

Bérubé: You realize that the report is basically saying "the trans bullies have shut down debate in philosophy" (at a time of extraordinarily peril for trans and gender-nonconforming people) and you're replying with "I was kicked out of the tea party fifty years ago for a completely unrelated thing," right? (And digital humanities are marginalized? Not in this timeline. :))

Me: Yes, I realize that. It's a complicated world we live in. I don't know what's to be done about the culture warriors. Either it gets worse and worse, or it doesn't. Either way this completely unrelated thing remains an issue and the humanities are not doing a very good job of dealing with it. Not sure what future the humanities can have without dealing with this unrelated issue.

Indulge me with a little more, Michael. You're a decade and a half younger than I am. For most purposes and in most contexts that's irrelevant. Not not when it comes to sports, where you've got the advantage, and not in the context of English lit. Those 15 years mean you faced a very different discipline from the one I faced. For you the structuralist moment was a thing of the past, all settled and done. For me it was very different.

I saw an opening into a new way of thinking, whatever it was that Lévi-Strauss was doing with myth. And right around the corner we had Chomsky in linguistics and then the cognitive sciences (the term wasn't coined until 1972). That's what interested me. But the fact of the matter is that by the time I published that essay in MLN, the opening that I'd seen was closing rapidly. Jonathan Culler was touring around on his book, Structuralist Poetics, but that's as far as it got, which is not as far as I'd already gone. And as you know, Culler himself abandoned structuralism for deconstruction.

Well, the type of thinking that I was doing back in the 1970s, that could prove very fruitful in the current intellectual environment. But that has been so thoroughly closed off that, well, I'm wasting my time and yours for even bothering to comment, aren't I? Sorry about that.

Bérubé: No worries, Bill. I'm just saying ... perspective, my friend. Nobody is arguing that there have never been disciplinary orthodoxies in the various disciplines in the humanities, or that people didn't prefer certain lines of inquiry to others. All I'm saying is that the report's account of the Tuvel / Hypatia is wrong-- and a really indefensible way of implying that the trans folk and their allies have shut things down. But is it true that there are people in academe who can't abide the idea that other people think differently from themselves? Why, yes! And Paul Boghossian is apparently one of them.

What can we learn from Nordic happiness?

Nicholas Kristof, What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness, NYTimes, July 4, 2026.

You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.

“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.” Image

Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.

Yet the Nordic countries are themselves facing significant challenges, including fiscal pressures, immigration, widening inequality and perhaps some breakdown in the social consensus. Some doubt whether the model can survive here, let alone be exported to countries that are larger, less homogeneous and more suspicious of taxation.

On the other hand, it’s not an alien model but, for Americans, a path we once blazed. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told me that the United States and Scandinavian nations pursued similar policies from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was the period when the United States rapidly expanded educational opportunities, had strong unions and, in the 1940s, experimented with universal child care. The post-World War II period is sometimes thought of as a golden age, for the economic pie both grew and was sliced more equally.

“The U.S. in the mid-20th century was sort of like Scandinavia today,” Katz said. But America changed course in the 1970s and eventually embraced the Reagan revolution.

One reason for the retreat, I’ve argued, was racialized political rhetoric that characterized some safety-net programs and investments in opportunity — used by Americans from all walks of life — as handouts primarily benefiting Black people, with a particular emphasis on caricatures of the “welfare queen.”

Three misunderstandings:

When Americans discuss the Nordic system, they sometimes suffer from three misunderstandings.

The first is that these are socialist countries. While they are often run by social democrats, they have market economies. Sweden did experiment in the 1970s and ’80s with quasi-socialist policies, but the upshot was an economic crisis. As Johan Norberg, a Swedish writer, put it: “We have been socialists and we’ve been successful — but never at the same time.”

The second misunderstanding is that because of their strong welfare systems, citizens of Nordic countries lie around while collecting benefits. Sure, some people do manipulate the system, but the labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the United States.

The third is that in the case of Norway, its success is mostly a reflection of its oil wealth. Oil has given Norway a nice cushion, but the country has also managed the cushion unusually well — putting it in what is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Moreover, according to Geir Axelsen, the director-general of Statistics Norway, the increase in female labor force participation in Norway since the early 1970s appears to have added roughly as much to the country’s gross domestic product as oil has.

How it came about:

To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling.

That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by.

Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries.

There's more at the link.

Fireboats spraying their way up the Hudson River

AI is in the market for philosophers

Benjamin Wallace, The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors, NYTimes, July 5, 2026.

After a capsule presentation of the intellectual itinerary of Robert Long, who teamed up with a colleague to start Eleos AI Research, which presumably provides philosophy to the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem, Wallace tells us this:

But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

“I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now,” said David Chalmers, a philosophy professor at N.Y.U.Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

“When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” says Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.”

This makes sense to me though, to the extent that Chalmers is representative of the kind of philosophy these folks bring to the AI table, I am less than enthusiastic about the move. But, sure, philosophy, something like it, is badly needed.

“Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year. “I think we’re going to need that to help navigate society to that next step, because I think A.G.I. and artificial superintelligence are going to change humanity and the human condition.” Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

DeepMind’s staff cogitators have specialties ranging from moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of science to the ethics of genomics and A.I. ethics and animal cognition. [Geoff Keeling, whose Ph.D. focused on “The Ethics of Automated Vehicles,” has spent part of his time at DeepMind running “moral imagination” workshops, helping engineering and product teams to think through the ethical implications of their work, and then come up with “concrete actionable steps they can actually take, whether that’s doing more user experience research or implementing a feature in a particular way.”]

Anthropic’s salary-drawing thinkers are trained in everything from decision theory to ethics to philosophy of mind to epistemology.

Anthropic had Amanda Askell draft a constitution for Claude:

In Anthropic’s early years, a lot of what Ms. Askell did was technical, running machine-learning experiments. “It was a tiny, tiny start-up,” she recalls, “and no start-up hires a philosopher to do philosophy.” Only after Anthropic was much larger was she able to spend more time applying her philosophical expertise. The first version of Claude’s constitution took a principles-based approach, incorporating precepts and guidelines from documents such as the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s Terms of Service. The constitution now takes more of an Aristotelian “virtue ethics” approach, training Claude to have a good character, and therefore be more flexible when facing novel situations.

There's much more at the link.

Pope Leo and St. Augustine discuss the mind and A.I. with Kurt Gödel

I crafted the prompt and Claude drafted the dialog using a passage about memory from Augustine’s Confessions as the catalyst for the imaginary conversation. I asked for some changes, Claude made some suggestions, and I executed them.

Note this passage toward the end:

Gödel said, “Disordered love?”

“Yes. To love a lower thing as though it were higher. To love one’s own power more than truth. To love the image more than the living being. To love the tower more than the city.”

The reply is by Augustine and it amounts to a definition of idolatry. The tower, presumably, is the Tower of Babel.

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the full dialog and asked from an image based on the passage from Augustine’s Confessions. That began an iterative process resulting in the image immediately below. The dialog follows.

I want you to create an imaginary conversation between St. Augustine, Kurt Gödel, and Pope Leo XIV. It should take place in Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the men introduce themselves – assume Augustine can understand and speak English, and perhaps wonder a bit how they became gathered together, Pope Leo leads off, saying that, while working on his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of his colleagues pointed out a passage in Augustine’s Confessions (to follow) that resonated with Gödel’s proof of incompleteness. Given the role that arithmetic plays in Gödel’s proof we should note that Augustine wouldn’t have known about arithmetic. Nor, for that matter, would he have known about computers. He is likely to have known about sophisticated mechanical devices like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Sphere of Archimedes, but never have seen one. But he would have seen complex water clocks (clepsydrae).

Here’s the passage from the Confessions (Book Ten, Chapter VIII). Perhaps Leo reads it aloud.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?

A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.

Perhaps sometime late in the conversation Albert Einstein might drop in to see what they were talking about.

Here is a first pass. I’ve kept it staged, conversational, and conceptually explicit, with Einstein entering late as a useful destabilizer.

The Mind Too Narrow to Contain Itself A conversation in Kurt Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study

Gödel’s office was narrow, orderly, and dim. Books stood in ranks along the wall, interrupted by folders, loose papers, and a blackboard covered with marks whose austerity made them seem less written than engraved. Outside the window the trees of Princeton trembled slightly in the wind. The afternoon light had the washed patience of late autumn.

Kurt Gödel stood beside his desk, thin and formal, dressed in a dark suit. He had the air of a man who had been expecting visitors and yet was not at all reassured by their arrival.

The first visitor was an African bishop in ancient dress, compact and alert, his face alive with inquiry. He looked about the room with frank astonishment, then settled his gaze on the blackboard.

The second was an elderly man in white, gentle but grave, wearing a small pectoral cross. His eyes moved from Augustine to Gödel and then to the papers on the desk.

“I believe,” the man in white said, “that introductions are in order.”

Gödel inclined his head. “Kurt Gödel. Institute for Advanced Study.”

The bishop smiled faintly. “A place for contemplation?”

“For research,” said Gödel.

“Then it may be the same thing, if rightly ordered. I am Augustine, bishop of Hippo.”

Gödel blinked once. “Yes. I had inferred as much.”

The man in white bowed slightly. “And I am Leo, servant of the servants of God.”

Augustine turned to him. “Bishop of Rome?”

“Yes.”

Augustine’s face softened. “Then I greet you as a brother, though I confess I do not understand how we have been gathered. This room is strange to me. These lamps burn without flame. These marks”—he gestured toward Gödel’s symbols—“are neither Greek nor Latin, though I suspect they are meant to compel the mind.”

“They are logical formulae,” Gödel said.

“Ah,” said Augustine. “Then they are meant not merely to persuade, but to bind.”

Leo smiled. “That is well put.”

Gödel gestured toward the chairs. “Please.”

They sat. Augustine examined the chair before trusting his weight to it. Leo remained composed, as though papal audiences in the offices of dead mathematicians were not wholly outside the bounds of pastoral duty.

Leo opened a folder.

“Professor Gödel, Saint Augustine, I will explain why I wished for this conversation, though the means by which it has been granted are beyond my competence. While I was working on my recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of my colleagues pointed out a passage from Augustine’s Confessions. It seemed to him to resonate with your incompleteness theorem.”

Gödel looked sharply interested.

Augustine looked from one to the other. “Incompleteness?”

“A result in mathematical logic,” said Gödel. “Roughly speaking, in any sufficiently strong formal system capable of expressing arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proven within that system, assuming the system is consistent.”

Augustine was silent for a moment.

“You say: a structure of reasoning may contain truths that it cannot reach by its own lawful motions?”

Gödel’s expression altered, almost imperceptibly. “That is not an inaccurate first formulation.”

“But I must be careful,” Augustine continued. “You speak of arithmetic. I know number, of course. I know that three is not five, and that if two men enter a room where two already sit, there are four. I know arithmetic as number, measure, and reckoning. But you seem to speak of arithmetic as though it were also a mirror in which reasoning may behold its own form. That I do not know.”

Gödel nodded. “Exactly. The novelty is not number alone, but the coding of statements, proofs, and rules as numbers. Nor would you know the modern notion of a formal system: axioms, rules of inference, recursive procedures, symbolic codings of syntax.”

“I know rules,” said Augustine. “And I know the temptation to mistake the rule for the truth it serves.”

Tall ships on the Hudson River, July 4, 2026

Four Propositions about Intelligence in Animals, Humans, and AIs

Some quickies.

1. Intelligence cannot be reduced to computation

All animal perception and cogitation take place in a complex world where animals have finite resources. Therefore the principles of intelligence, as an aspect of perception and cogitation, cannot be reduced to the principles of computation as the principles of computation assume unbounded resources.

Let’s call this Yevick’s First Law, as it is a consequence of her 1975 paper, “Holographic or fourier logic” (Pattern Recognition, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 197-213).

David Hays and I formulated what we called “Yevick’s Law” in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence” (Journal of Social and Biological Structures). Let’s call that Yevick’s Second Law:

The world consists of geometrically simple and geometrically complex objects. Simple objects are best computing with sequential logic (aka symbolic systems). Complex objects are best computed with holographic logic (aka distributed neural nets). Some objects are such that they require the interaction of both computational regimes. Let us say that fluency in that interaction is intelligence. (See my working paper, What Miriam Yevick Saw: The Nature of Intelligence and the Prospects for A.I., A Dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 2025).

2. Intelligence in animals

Let us consider a relatively simple animal, a vertebrate, likely a marine animal. One the one hand, it must navigate the world, moving from place to place. This is mediated by the hippocampus, which is a so-called “cognitive map.” This is basic sequential cogitation.

As it moves from place to place it senses things, good things, bad things, other things. Olfaction is perhaps the most basic sense. For what it is worth, it’s the sensory mode that the late Walter Freeman used in his investigations of complex neural dynamics. Olfaction works via a holographic or gestalt process.

Taken together, moving about the world and sense things involves the two modes specified above.

Now let’s consider vision in vertebrates, where the eye is mobile and scans the world. Visual identification is a holographic process. However, the (human) eye scans the scene rapidly and unconsciously. This is a sequential process. Therefore vertebrate vision involves the two modes internally. (I suspect that vision in invertebrates does not, but I don’t actually know).

3. Natural language is its own metalanguage

Humans differ from animals in many and various ways. It is the capacity for language that has allowed humans to move into a different relationship with the world from that characteristic of animals. What makes human language particularly powerful is that it can serve as its own metalanguage, Roman Jakobson’s metalingual function.

This does not involve any deep mystery or logical conundrum. Rather it is a direct consequence of that fact that natural language is physically embodied, initially in sound and gesture, later as written symbols. This embodied is a sensory object out there in the world among all the other sensory objects.

Initially the metalingual function operates in direct, perhaps superficial, but useful ways. Think of how we refer to language as a means of negotiating conversation: “What did you say? I didn’t hear you?” But the metalingual function can be used to define new terms, something that interested my teacher and colleague, David Hays. It can even be used to define other, more restricted languages (e.g. chess and arithmetic), and serve as metalanguages for them.

Thus it is the foundation of the succession of cognitive ranks that David Hays and I began investigating in the 1990s starting with our paper, “The Evolution of Cognition” (Journal of Social and Biological Systems, later becoming the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems). That process has, in time, led to the development of digital computers and, now, to so-called artificial intelligence.

That leads us to our fourth and last note.

4. The last frontier of intelligence

Is not an autonomous artificial system of some kind, though such systems are important and will be increasingly so. here’s the upshot of a conversation I recently had with Claude:

If that's right, then the last frontier isn't more capability in the pattern-matching sense — bigger weight spaces, richer latent connections, better approximations of the associative regime. It's the specific, non-scalable, non-parallelizable fact of an individual mind's biography, which generates paths through possibility space that are real, productive, and genuinely inaccessible to any system that hasn't lived a life.

You should read the whole post to see the logic behind that conclusion.

Note that that is my current best response to the idea of super-intelligence or artificial-superintelligence (ASI). I do not see the future bringing us as AI system that outthinks humans in every way and either creates a world in which we are coddled pets or one in which we are slaves, if we are allowed to exist at all. Those ideas are subjective fantasy.

I note as well that the process that brings us to that point or, if you will, through which we arrive at the point, will be one in which we have a much deeper understanding of that brain and its processes than we now have. For what it’s worth, that understanding is what I have been seeking all these years, starting with my initial investigation of “Kubla Khan”: Xanadu, GPT, and Beyond: An adventure of the mind.