A new cosmology of intelligence

These four patterns form a lifecycle of intelligence where each pattern generates the conditions for the next:

• Local intelligence creates the contingent variations that become the foundation for collective breakthroughs.
• Collective intelligence drives discovery when different perspectives collide to generate new experiments to validate.
• Proven intelligence validates what works to provide the grounds for further experimentation.
• Evolving intelligence uses creative tensions to discover new local constraints to explore, starting the process all over again.

Combined, these patterns act as a generator of increasingly adaptive intelligence. Each turn expands the space of possibilities for intelligence to manifest. The cycle never converges but forever spirals outward, each revolution opening domains that couldn't be imagined at previous levels. This creates endless possibility—not by eliminating constraints but through infinite regeneration within them.

This cyclical understanding reveals a fundamental difference in how each myth sees intelligence. The Singularity sees a single transformative event when intelligence “takes off” to achieve pure certainty and control, remaking the world in its own image. The Plurality sees a continuous process of intelligence, an ongoing dance with uncertainty that has no final destination yet never ceases to generate new possibilities.

The irony is that the Plurality achieves its own form of infinity—not through certainty and control but through adaptive engagement with expanding possibility. Four billion years of evidence suggests that the most infinite form of intelligence is the one that keeps discovering new ways to play an infinite game.