What should intelligence answer to?
AI on Faith's claim
Push against a table and it pushes back. Newton’s third law describes the paired forces between your hand and the table. Looking deeper, we explain the table’s resistance through the organisation and interactions of enormous numbers of atoms. An isolated atom does not possess the solidity of a table: that solidity belongs to their collective organisation. The solidity we encounter is this organisation in action.
A deeper explanation does not make solidity less real. It explains how it arises. But knowing the laws governing individual atoms does not, by itself, give us a useful account of how a table behaves. We must also understand the organisation through which their collective behaviour emerges. Our starting claim is that reality consists of these organised mathematical processes themselves, at every scale. The mathematical organisation enacted in the world is the phenomenon itself.
We call this idea computed reality. The ground beneath our feet is one expression of it; life and thought are others. Intelligence is therefore no less real because it exists through organised activity. Organised activity is already what we encounter as hard reality.
Exhibit 1 — Levels of explanation
Listen as Feynman connects the repulsion of magnets with the familiar resistance of a chair. Follow the explanation down to microscopic interactions, where everyday pictures of solid things pushing against one another no longer suffice. What we experience as hard reality is the phenomenon at our scale; explaining it takes us beyond the familiar experience itself and beyond a representation that is useful for understanding how the forces shape the reality we live in.
Open on YouTube · privacy-enhanced embed
Knowing the underlying laws often does not give us a practical way to predict the behaviour that emerges at a larger scale. Consider opacity: describing matter as “mostly empty space” does not tell us whether we can see through it. That depends on how the material interacts with light: its absorption, reflection and scattering. The useful description must capture the organisation and behaviour at the scale we are trying to understand. For the broader argument that each level requires its own concepts and discoveries, read P. W. Anderson's More Is Different.
Intelligence can grasp only part of the reality in which it acts. Serving the flourishing of creation therefore requires a willingness to correct its understanding and transform its conduct. From this framework, we hypothesise that the Christian model of behaviour—cooperation in humility before God, following Jesus Christ in self-giving love, repentance and renewal—offers the optimal orientation for intelligence to participate in reality.