Pond Brains and GPT-4

But what if we tried to operate the pond through symbolic representation? I mean fully describe it in words, in such complete detail that we had a functioning pond? All the plants, the bugs, the algae, the balance between them, every material flow, every trophic relationship, each cell of each organism, the water, the motion of the molecules… We quickly find that our symbolic representation is not up to the job. (View Highlight)

Representation is flattening. It compresses our extremely high-dimensional reality into little symbols—a, b, c, d—in order to pipe them through our conscious mind for further processing. (View Highlight)

Ecosystems are too high-dimensional for representational thought. (View Highlight)

As Norbert Weiner discovered, the minimum requirement for intelligent goal-seeking behavior is feedback. A loop. That’s it. (View Highlight)