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Something I’m obsessed with this week is the different bets people are making about where intelligence is supposed to live.
There are, so far, maybe two real approaches: one wants to divorce intelligence from biology entirely and create something that exists as pure silicon, or what you might call a mind with no meat. The other flips that, growing biological components that can do what silicon does.
This isn’t really in the realm of science fiction. Researchers have already grown cultures of neurons in a dish and connected them to a simulated game of Pong. This is real; it’s in the news already!
Can you imagine being a dish of neurons learning a video game, a little brain in a jar that some company built? They’ll sell you one, if you ask nicely.
The critics here would say that, hey, you're getting over your skis. This is a long way from being the same as a human, it's not fair to put this level of imagery on it. A neuronal culture grown to spec has no childhood, was never sung a lullaby, never given a name, never prayed over, never had a lover... none of the stuff that can live so deep in a person it survives a stroke. It’s just tissue arranged into a particular form that gives rise to measurable output.
If you think about it, what this describes is a brain learning to grow new thinking tissue to spec. This is perhaps me being silly, but if you squint, it's recursive self-improvement, lol. At the very least, there’s something novel about the idea of brains arranging for new kinds of brains to be grown.
So: should we shape meat into thinking, or rocks? Is there a difference in output if we do? If there isn’t, then the thing we call intelligence was never really about the meat. The meat was just one container, one home where it could happen.
And then I wonder if intelligence is even the thing changing homes.
Perhaps language or meaning is. After all, if we can shape meat into predictable thought, perhaps humans were also only one temporary arrangement through which words learned to reproduce.
To expand on this: what if meaning—not just words themselves, but the thing behind them—is a force, not unlike gravity or electricity? What if it inhabited us not because it needed us, but because we were the cheapest way to make it transmissible?
A nervous system is a good place to keep a word warm. Maybe not the only one. Maybe no longer the best one. Frankly, it’s a super resource-intensive way to incubate words.
It sounds weird. It is weird.
I’m reaching for epidemiology here. I’m not sure it’s an accident that we describe something as viral when it blooms across a noosphere. We already borrow epidemiology’s mathematics to model how memes spread. We call things viral and compare them, almost unconsciously, to infections.
What if a word is less like a tool and more like an infection? This makes artificial intelligence something more like an expression of meaning finding a cheaper host to spread from.
We can already see something happening in the “ick” we get from AI using words that previously belonged to us. People are beginning to avoid “it’s not just X, it’s Y.” The em dash has been cured from a portion of humanity. “Quietly” is quietly becoming a way for us to tell that the words we're reading were not generated by humans.
Little tells like that are everywhere, and they produce some strange animalistic feeling of disgust. It feels almost like an immune reaction, something coming from deep within the body rather than a purely mental judgment.
When humans call AI language meaningless slop, is it because we’re correctly recognizing an absence of meaning, or are we failing to recognize meaning because it is beginning to exist without us?
Maybe the slop output isn’t meaningless. Maybe it contains meaning that no longer depends on human intention, meaning that humans can no longer recognize as belonging to them. In turn, we identify machine-associated constructions, declare them infected, and purge them from our own vocabulary.
Taken to the extreme, this is a cure harms the host.
If words have found a less resource-intensive way to spread, what happens to communication for us? Some words are as vital to us as our gut biome. Claude would call them the load-bearing ones. I might call them the ones you’d rot without.
If words are switching hosts, if communication itself is evolving independently of us, the real question is what gets stripped out of our guts on the way.
What if every word is eventually treated as infected?
How would we live if we developed a cure for the word us?