Systems Thinking
What if knowledge has an assembly index? Breakthroughs don’t appear out of nowhere—they sit atop ladders of prior work. Teams and human–AI partnerships can assemble similar depth, building capability larger than individual minds through shared primitives, artifacts, and purpose.
Systems Theory
Life and mind are often treated as exceptions—protected from physics by mystery or myth. Complexity science offers another path: one where meaning is not bestowed but assembled, where history carries causal weight, and where understanding is earned through time, not escape hatches.
Consciousness
If individual minds emerge from availability, integration, and depth, what happens when those same conditions appear at the scale of civilization? We argue that political decay may be better understood not as moral failure, but as a cognitive pathology of systems that begin to lose their memory.
Artificial Intelligence
How will we recognize AGI when it arrives? Benchmarks measure performance, not generality. This essay argues that general intelligence emerges as a phase transition, when availability, integration, and depth co-occur, and outlines a new framework for evaluating presence of mind.