Every thought, every theory, every work of art is made by one instrument: a brain that evolution built to answer survival threats. The rest of reality never threatened us, so we never learned to see it. We mean to break out.
Move across the bars. The violet is the part evolution hid.
Our brain was shaped by the particular threats our ancestors met. Parts of reality that posed no threat triggered no sensation, no model, no imagination. They are here, they may touch us someday, and until now their existence was beyond suspicion.
We are not content with the slice of reality evolution chose to show us. We want to know what else is there, and that unseen remainder may hold answers to problems we have struggled with for centuries.
Exploring past the bars may be the most fundamental project humanity can take on. It belongs to no single field. It calls on scientists, logicians, and artists alike.
For all of history we had no brain but the one evolution gave us, and the barrier looked absolute. Now we have built a second kind of mind. Artificial intelligence was not shaped by predators, hunger or cold. It can take in raw data at a scale no human can absorb and draw conclusions without first passing them through our evolved intuitions.
We built vehicles to carry us farther than our legs. Now we build machines to carry us beyond the reach of our evolved minds.
Physics is imagined in a Darwinian brain. The struggle to survive kept our ancestors from spending attention on parts of reality with no survival impact, and those parts are of unknown scope and dimension.
Even inside the cage we are overloaded. We absorb far more information than we can analyse, and we discard the overflow to match our capacity to make sense of it.
AI is the vehicle. Physics may turn into the craft of building AI capability to ride on, and its goal may become theory-replacement machines that connect raw data to conclusions.
It may not work. The paper is candid that the barrier could prove non-negotiable. That honesty is the reason to try in earnest.
The Theory of Everything is said to be around the corner. The claim that we have barely begun to see reality runs straight against it. Ideas like this meet three defenses, and a small team that stands together outlasts all three.
The first response is to ignore. We answer with publication: journals, conferences, essays, and a library anyone can check.
Next comes "la-la-land." We answer with experiments that can fail, and with the candor to report it when they do.
Lifetimes of work are at stake, and they will be defended hard. We answer as colleagues: the cage is no one's fault, and leaving it is everyone's gain.
He granted the cage might be real, then asked to stay inside it: there is enough to be curious about here. The founding team exists for the people who cannot stay.
To every eye the earth looked flat. Columbus tested a strange theory and found a continent nobody had looked for. He set out for India and reached the Americas.
Today, by every appearance, the universe is nearly understood. The cage theory says otherwise, and it can be tested. Whoever sails out may find what we searched for from inside the cage and never found, perhaps even the neighbors we have looked for among the stars.
This voyage belongs to the best, the bravest and the young. Who will be the Columbus of our time?
We are gathering a small international team that takes the cage seriously before the world does. Physicists, AI researchers, philosophers, biologists, artists, students. Age and title don't matter. Conviction does.
I believe we are deeply ignorant of reality at large, and proud without reason of the small part evolution was kind enough to show us.
At my age I accept the leadership of this initiative to get it started. My real task is to find the person who will carry it further than I can, and hand it on.
Gideon Samid Professor, PhD · Author of "Negotiating Darwin's Barrier"