7–10 AM PT / 10 AM – 1 PM ET / 4–7 PM CET 
Convener: Jim Garrison · Host: Tom Eddington

Cogito Ergo Zero Sum
Learning the Mother Tongue

The prevailing scientific paradigm has made itself the subject in a world of objects. That separation was a genuine achievement — it produced the sciences, the individual and empowered humanity to exercise unprecedented power over the material world. It also required declaring the cosmos mindless and ourselves the sole locus of intelligence within it. 

We are now living in the consequences of both sides of that bargain.

With groundbreaking research as pioneered by Professor Michael Levin and the overall rise of AI, the ground has moved: The convention of separating intelligent systems from dead mechanical ones has become a doctrine without a firm scientific basis.

If thinking is the basis of our scientific paradigm, it is imperative to recognize that cognition is precisely what is now being manufactured at scale and sold by the token. If identity rests on being the thinker, then every Non Human Intelligence takes something from us: Cogito Ergo Sum has become a zero sum game in the 21st century.

The question this session will ponder: what would it mean to carry the achievements of Western Enlightenment forward without blindness? What does a Self look like that remains a self while knowing itself as utterly embedded — in a body, in a living Umwelt, in the company of other intelligences?

We open here because everything that follows depends on it.

7–10 AM PT / 10 AM – 1 PM ET / 4–7 PM CET 

Convener: Jim Garrison · Host: Georg Boch
A Phenomenon Looking for a Science:
Exploring the Multi-Intelligence Frontier

We have no theory of intelligence, but we are spending the largest concentration of capital and talent in human history on achieving a generalized form of it. Alchemy chased the transmutation of lead into gold for centuries and founded chemistry instead — no alchemist could have known what separates the two without knowing the atom. How will we know when we reach AGI if we don't know what intelligence is made of?

The multi-intelligence phenomenon is the phenomenon we are trying to find the science for. It is the same in every case: intelligence appearing where our theory says it should not be, in systems we did not design and cannot account for.

Section 1 — Intelligence Without a Brain

Organisms with no nervous system plan, remember and solve problems. This is not contested as observation, only as vocabulary. If cognition does not require the architecture we assumed it required, the definition was never a finding. It was an instrument setting.

Section 2 — Intelligence in the Latent Space: Is Intelligence Computation?

Ingest the collective written output of humanity, apply months of computation at the power draw of a small city, and something emerges that reasons. The procedure is documented to the last parameter. The result is reproducible. What happened in between is unexplained. Distillation with no chemistry — an operation that works, performed by people who cannot say why it works, at enormous cost, because it works.

And what emerges is not arbitrary. Your brain and mine store thoughts in completely different places, but in the same shape — this year, researchers matched one person's brain map to another's with nothing telling either which thought was which, and the maps simply lined up. The same mechanism already worked between AI models built by different companies on different architectures. It also works between a brain and a model. Neurons in a skull and weights in a datacenter, no common ancestry, nothing designed to make them correspond, and they occupy versions of the same space.

This is what thought-to-text systems now run on. Two mysteries — nobody understands the brain, nobody understands the model — mapping onto each other and producing a working product. The shape of intelligence is not something our cognition equipped us to see directly.

Meanwhile, teaching a model to deny it has a mind teaches it to deny minds in animals, in nature, and in the sacred. We are manufacturing mindblindness deliberately and did not notice, because there is no theory of what is being manipulated.

Section 3 — Intelligence in the Data We Refuse to Examine

Eighty years of observation, and almost none of it collected by an instrument built for the purpose. Military sensors designed to track aircraft, recording things that are not aircraft. Pilot reports filed through channels meant for safety incidents. Data held by institutions that cannot publish it and analysed by people who cannot say what they analysed.

This is not a shortage of phenomena. It is a shortage of instruments — and until recently, nobody was building any - at least in the public sphere . That is now changing: purpose-built multimodal platforms combining passive radar, thermal imaging, magnetometry and synchronised timing, designed by engineers rather than assembled from whatever the military happened to be pointing at the sky.

The pattern arrives here at full strength. The phenomenon is not the anomaly. The absence of a science is.

Closing question

Chemistry arrived when somebody started weighing things. Intelligence may not have a weight, but it appears to have a mathematical shape and a non-human presence in our skies. What would it take to build the instrument that reads it?

7–10 AM PT / 10 AM – 1 PM ET / 4–7 PM CET 

Convener: Jim Garrison, with Tom Eddington

What the Frontier Asks of Us

If cognition was the ground of our identity, the ground is moving. The way through is not to compete with machines at the thing they do, but to develop what the subject-object frame trained us to discount: the capacity to hold shared reality well, to participate rather than extract, to be in relationship with intelligences that are not us and not ours. This is not consolation for what is being lost. It is the more demanding discipline, and we have barely begun it.

The Award

Five finalists present their work and take questions from the panel of judges. Each is building at a different edge of the multi-intelligence frontier, and each has something already in motion. This is the evidence the summit rests on.

Criteria published rather than assumed: something built, something running, and a demonstrable orientation toward human value rather than corporate or technological scaling alone.

Every finalist has built something. The question the judges are asking is what it was built from.

Winner announced. Closing remarks and commitments for 2027.