We propose a venture into an existential opportunity for establishing a world ‘good enough’ for humans to live in. Defining an existential opportunity as the converse of an existential risk—that is, a development that promises to dramatically improve the future of humanity—we argue that one such opportunity is available and should be explored now. The opportunity resides in the moment of transition of the Internet—from mediating information to mediating distributed direct governance in the sense of self-organization. The Internet of tomorrow will mediate the execution of contracts, transactions, public interventions and all other change-establishing events more reliably and more synergistically than any other technology or institution. It will become a distributed, synthetically intelligent agent in itself. This transition must not be just observed, or exploited instrumentally: it must be ventured into and seized on behalf of entire humanity. We envision a configuration of three kinds of cognitive system—the human mind, social systems and the emerging synthetic intelligence—serving to augment the autonomy of the first from the ‘programming’ imposed by the second. Our proposition is grounded in a detailed analysis of the manner in which the socio-econo-political system has evolved into a powerful control mechanism that subsumes human minds, steers their will and automates their thinking. We see the venture into the existential opportunity described here as aiming at the global dissolution of the core reason of that programming’s effectiveness—the critical dependence of the continuity of human lives on the coherence of the socially constructed personas they ‘wear.’ Thus, we oppose the popular prediction of the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’ with a call for action: instead of worrying that Artificial Intelligence will soon come to dominate and govern the human world, let us think of how it could help the human being to finally be able to do it.

Recent experiments have perfectly verified the fact that quantum correlations between two entangled particles are stronger than any classical, local pre-quantum worldview allows. This is famously called the EPR paradox first conceived as a thought experiment and decades later realized in the lab. We discuss in depth the nature of the paradox and show that the problematics it presents is first and foremost epistemological. After briefly exploring resolutions to the paradox that after many decades of discourse still remain controversial, we argue that the paradox is rooted in the failure of our current metaphysical scheme, being the foundation of our knowledge, to accommodate and cohere our knowledge of the phenomena of entanglement. We then develop and make the case for a novel and more fundamental resolution of the paradox by changing the underlying metaphysical foundation from one based on individuals to a one based on individuation. We discuss in detail how in the light of this new scheme concepts central to the paradox such as realism, causality and locality are adjusted to the effect that the paradox is resolved without giving up these concepts so fundamental to our thinking. We conclude with a brief note about the important role of metaphysics to the progress of knowledge and our understanding of reality.

The human cognitive system is a remarkable exemplar of a general intelligent system whose competence is not confined to a specific problem domain. Evidently, general cognitive competences are a product of a prolonged and complex process of cognitive development. Therefore, the process of cognitive development is a primary key to understanding the emergence of intelligent behavior. This paper develops the theoretical foundations for a model that generalizes the process of cognitive development. The model aims to provide a realistic scheme for the synthesis of scalable cognitive systems with an open-ended range of capabilities. Major concepts and theories of human cognitive development are introduced and briefly explored focusing on the enactive approach to cognition and the concept of sense-making. The initial scheme of human cognitive development is then generalized by introducing the philosophy of individuation and the abstract mechanism of transduction. The theory of individuation provides the ground for the necessary paradigmatic shift from cognitive systems as given products to cognitive development as a formative process of self-organization. Next, the conceptual model is specified as a scalable scheme of networks of agents. The mechanisms of individuation are formulated in context independent information theoretical terms. Finally, the paper discusses two concrete aspects of the generative model -- mechanisms of transduction and value modulating systems. These are topics of further research towards a computationally realizable model.

The current social reality is characterized by all-encompassing change, which disrupts existing social structures at all levels. Yet the prevailing view of society is based on the ontological primacy of stable hierarchical structures, which is no longer adequate. We propose a conceptual framework for thinking about a dynamically changing social system: the Living Cognitive Society. Importantly, we show how it follows from a much broader philosophical framework, guided by the theory of individuation, which emphasizes the importance of relationships and interactive processes in the evolution of a system. The framework addresses society as a living cognitive system -- an ecology of interacting social subsystems -- each of which is also a living cognitive system. We argue that this approach can help us to conceive sustainable social systems that will thrive in the circumstances of accelerating change. The Living Cognitive Society is explained in terms of its fluid structure, dynamics and the mechanisms at work. We then discuss the disruptive effects of Information and Communication Technologies on the mechanisms at work. We conclude by delineating a major topic for future research -- distributed social governance -- which focuses on processes of coordination rather than on stable structures within global society.

Artificial General Intelligence is a field of research aiming to distill the principles of intelligence that operate independently of a specific problem domain or a predefined context and utilize these principles in order to synthesize systems capable of performing any intellectual task a human being is capable of and eventually go beyond that. While "narrow" artificial intelligence which focuses on solving specific problems such as speech recognition, text comprehension, visual pattern recognition, robotic motion, etc. has shown quite a few impressive breakthroughs lately, understanding general intelligence remains elusive. In the paper we offer a novel theoretical approach to understanding general intelligence. We start with a brief introduction of the current conceptual approach. Our critique exposes a number of serious limitations that are traced back to the ontological roots of the concept of intelligence. We then propose a paradigm shift from intelligence perceived as a competence of individual agents defined in relation to an a priori given problem domain or a goal, to intelligence perceived as a formative process of self-organization by which intelligent agents are individuated. We call this process open-ended intelligence. Open-ended intelligence is developed as an abstraction of the process of cognitive development so its application can be extended to general agents and systems. We introduce and discuss three facets of the idea: the philosophical concept of individuation, sense-making and the individuation of general cognitive agents. We further show how open-ended intelligence can be framed in terms of a distributed, self-organizing network of interacting elements and how such process is scalable. The framework highlights an important relation between coordination and intelligence and a new understanding of values. We conclude with a number of questions for future research.