Introduction

A journey in polymathy

“If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?” - T.H. Huxley

Reality can be viewed in different ways, from different perspectives, from different angles. So which of them is the right one? Or maybe we should ask, which of them are better than the others, and in what ways?

The instrument we use to perceive and assess reality is our intelligence. Thus it’s perhaps with intelligence we should start. How does intelligence work? How can we improve our intelligence to serve the above questions of optimally understanding reality?

The quest to make sense of reality also takes us to the questions of how information and knowledge operate. How do we seek and process information to the above end? Having built up a body of knowledge by doing so, how can we harness this to better achieve our goals in this context?

If these are questions that are of interest to you, read on. (At this juncture, if you haven’t, it’ll greatly help to read my personal introduction on my personal substack stream, where I lay out my own motivations and goals.) And if you’re still with me after that, great!, let’s explore these questions together.

In order to tackle them as effectively as possible, whatever your motivations to do so may be, I propose that applying skills and knowledge across a wide range of disciplines will give us a more powerful intellectual apparatus to accomplish these goals. And this is exactly what I intend to do here: build a consolidated foundation of knowledge as derived from a wide array of disciplines as I’ve outlined in my personal introduction as having been my life’s passion.

We are living on the cusp of a massive revolution in the domain of intelligence, a Cambrian explosion! After more than half a century of unsuccessful attempts, technology has advanced to such a stage that we are now able to viably build intelligence into a machine. Not sufficiently viable yet for all our needs and wants, but we have made a start. We are at that stage in machine intelligence as flight was when the Wright brothers were still alive - rickety and unreliable, but still showing promise. After all, it had just been shown that man could indeed fly. It was now just a question of: can we do it safely and long-lastingly.

This rapid rise of artificial intelligence has indeed shaken things up a bit. It’s even led some to question, in an imminent age where machines will – with the infinitely greater processing capabilities that’ll be available to them – become rather powerful computational entities, whether human intelligence is worth anything? Whether we as a species will be relegated to an inferior or even subservient existence by our own creation.

I propose that that is not the likely outcome. Whatever the strengths and power of artificial intelligence, there will likely always be some things only humans can offer. In any case, the man-machine combination has to logically be more powerful than either a standalone AI or the lone-wolf human. And yes, this convergence, this transcendental future is inevitable. With the emergence of brain-machine interfaces functional to an advanced enough extent, it’ll be compelling to combine human and machine intelligence for such an advantage, for such gestalt - where this new merged entity will be more powerful than either intelligence operating alone.

And I propose that, in such a new world, those of us who have already played with applying our intelligence across a wide range of disciplines will have an edge over those whose focus has been narrow, over those who have operated in silos.

Human professional specialization was necessary in the industrial age when we each were, in some sense, cogs in the big wheel of industrial production. And it behooved us that we didn’t end up square pegs in round holes.

But with this advanced state of man-machine convergence, we won’t have to invest our own energies to train our own brains into huge amounts of narrow specialization, instead we will have at our behest the vast sum of knowledge available to us instantly by our machine extensions. What we will have to be good at is marshaling such resources, shepherding such vast amounts of knowledge.

Such potential would also mean that there will be demand for generalist experts: yes, so far we could only be master of one trade, whilst being jack of others. But in this new world, we can be master of all trades, all at once: thanks to our machine extensions. But also, importantly, thanks to our ability to apply our core human intelligence across several disciplines.

So yes, the intellectual journey I propose to take you through here, should be rewarding for its own sake - if you are like many of us value polymathy for its own sake. But as we enter a new chapter in the annals of human intellectual history and endeavor, this could serve us uniquely well in the new landscape we will find ourselves in.

It’s hard to predict how superhuman machine intelligence is going to turn out to be - there are just too many unknowns. But if we’ve sharpened our knife in the application of our own intelligence in a way far more expansive and ambitious than otherwise, I propose, we stand a better chance to embrace an exciting new chapter.

Come join me on this journey!