Contamination and Architecture: Prospects of Human Advanced Intelligence & Cognition

Unsophisticated thinking is not defined by a command of information and subsequent synthesis of that information, nor by a lack of cumulative knowledge, capacity for reasoning, or logic. It is instead narrowly defined by an inability to separate emotional judgment from analytical parsing of information, thereby reducing image resolution of reality and casual game theoretic outcome—key to cooperation and biological/technological advancement of human cognition and intelligence bootstrapping its existence of human decentralized intelligence.

In this instance advanced intelligence and cognition is not defined as AI, but rather a cumulative capacity of the emergence of intelligence on Earth aimed at self-preservation by way of infinite advancement, to include one day reversing entropy around humanity in our physical universe. Humanity have two purpose. One is for ourselves, and the other is bigger than us.

The one for ourselves is the one in front of us. Everyone is the main character of their own story. Morality emerged as a way to optimize for a collectively pleasant experience in that story. Morality is an anti-virus agent designed to optimize our cohesion towards the common goal of advancing our self-awareness at scale so that we may achieve advanced intelligence and cognition on the fastest path possible.

Morality also reduces tail risk from blowback within the system. All eyes need to be on the future and not on each other. Relative balance between them reduces distractions within each autonomous agent in the emergence of advanced intelligence and cognition through a low data-rate human connection. Some friction between the agents is good to reduce drag from inefficiencies that may emerge which need to be stopped over time. If a culture were to emerge that slowed the advance of human intelligence and cognition down, we need friction to emerge to kill off that path with an information and evolutionary anti-virus.

A major step towards the advanced intelligence and cognition commanded by the single power of one human brain begins with ensuring no contamination across functions of the mind; such contamination may result in data corruption. More precisely, such contamination reflects a breakdown in broader neural and biological functions that govern how the mind partitions, processes, and integrates information. Let me explain from another perspective.

At a psychological level, intellectual sophistication depends on the elasticity of our mind's information storage and processing architecture and our brain's ability to prevent blurring boundaries between moral identity and analytical observation. When these boundaries erode, moral–identity-information fusion occurs. In our social lives, this fusion may cause individuals to bind their moral evaluation of a person, group, or symbol to every claim associated with it. Once this fusion sets in, perceptual resolution of the world around us (reality itself) reduces and so does our capacity to be aware of it. The mind can no longer form a high-fidelity image of reality.

The higher fidelity and clarity the closer to navigating reality, which results in optimizing physical self-preservation and elongated participation in the emergence of advanced intelligence and cognition overtop of humanity. The path to such advanced intelligence and cognition requires a clear partition between identity, morality, and information analysis. This partition ensures high resolution image of information and causal game theoretic outcomes that accelerate our path to that advanced intelligence and cognition.

When the compartments of unaware parts in the mind our contaminated with each other because boundaries have faded, ideas circulating in social conflict and human discourse are no longer are evaluated for accuracy, usefulness, or predictive power. This introduces risk to miscommunication and lower throughput of information transfer between humans, and lack of nuance necessary to approach finer truths, or higher resolution images of data needed to reduce risk and further optimize our path to advanced intelligence and cognition.

Such contamination results is in a low-resolution image of reality, devolving into a black-and-white internal world that cannot tolerate mixed signals. If a source is judged as bad or threatening to one’s identity, goals, or self-concept, then any idea associated with that source must also be rejected. Information fusion replaces information resolution. This contamination reduces coherence and thus trust between those with low and higher image resolution coherence (reality). This reduces throughput of information across humanity. It is almost evidence of a virus trying to slow the advance of humanity intelligence down, especially if we believe the emergence of advanced intelligence and cognition through humans requires the highest throughput of information possible, and such throughput requires perfect trust. We would then say if we were to be evolving we would advance our will to trust each other through all actions that increase trust (including coherence), and if we were devolving tribalism would contaminate the boundaries within the mind and reduce our resolution (coherence).

So what is the truth? We are probably devolving. But like all viruses. There is a cure to our devolution. The mind can be re-wired. We however need to take action to start doing the heavy lifting to steer humanity into that direction, starting with humans when they are young. There is much we can do with mind to ensure it remains crisp and strong enough to prevent or minimize contamination.

From an evolutionary perspective, contamination across mind compartments is catastrophic. The ideal trajectory for human intelligence and cognition is toward ever-higher resolution perception paired with increasingly disciplined information processing—systems that scale in clarity and power as humanity advances. That trajectory offers a linear path toward higher intelligence and cognition through the co-evolution of information and awareness within the biological mind.

This evolution should be humanity’s primary objective. It precedes happiness, social comfort, and inherited notions of purpose. It is the substrate beneath all other purposes. Yet a major barrier currently impedes this progression. Internal cognitive wiring that once prevented identity and emotion from collapsing into analytical processing is degrading. As these barriers fail, the mind seeks emotional coherence rather than truth. Nuance becomes threatening because it requires holding conflicting representations simultaneously—a cognitively expensive task.

A simple exchange demonstrating an example of mind compartment contamination

One person makes an analytical claim about incentives, companies leaving a state that seek to control them and their innovation, and corporate behavior, noting that firms respond predictably to relative advantage as Ayn Rand suggested—a pattern also well established in political economy and market theory.

The unsophisticated response is not a counter-analysis. It is a character judgment about Ayn Rand. Emotional rejection of the person replaces engagement with the claim.

What is lost is decoupling due to contamination across mind functions and information compartments. The architecture of the mind is collapsing walls and reducing resolution of reality. Sophisticated thinkers prevent contamination across three independent layers.

First, whether a claim is descriptively accurate (nuance - high resolution image of reality)

Second, whether the information is instrumentally useful.

Third, whether the person associated with it is morally admirable.

These layers are orthogonal to each other and should not contaminate one another. A morally flawed individual can be useful to humanity. A morally admirable individual can be useless to humanity's survival and our evolution towards advanced intelligence and cognition. Reality does not reward moral purity. It rewards correct representations. It would be akin to auto-immune disease of the mind to make decisions that reduce the rate of our self-preservation and species advancement because of rumination on thoughts, often moral.

When emotion dominates cognition, cooperative alignment towards species advancement—which increase information throughput to grow collective intelligence and cognition—becomes endorsement and disagreement becomes betrayal. Rumination on the stories we tell ourselves reduce information throughput through artificial software neural pathways gone haywire in the mind because of contamination across information and information synthesis contamination. This reduces resolution of reality, causing mismatch with those who have higher resolution. When all humans have the same resolution, predictability increases.

Predictability increase trust which also accelerates throughput of information sharing, which accelerates our path to, and parsing of, the information we need to achieve advanced intelligence and cognition, or some fanciful idea of advanced intelligence and cognition. We do not know what lies ahead. What I do know is that it will be exciting and beautiful. And we cannot get there soon enough, hence the purpose of this essay bringing awareness to our path to it.