The Advanced Imaging International Festival held a conference from 3 to 6 November 2022 at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on “AI – Variation of an Art”. They invited researchers to diagnose the present and the blueprint of the future of Artificial Intelligence. Researcher and Artist Renate C.-Z.-Quehenberger (Quehenberg) presented an online talk on “AI vs. the natural world as higher-dimensional neural network”.

Read her abstract:

How can we imagine intelligence in the first place ? 

In ancient times, pre-Socratic Greek philosophy tells us about the aether, a high region of fine, thin air considered as seat of the gods and intelligence. 

Meanwhile digital 3D hyper-Euclidean geometry shows us that the aether, synonymous with Aristotle’s quintessence and Plato’s 5th element, is actually the geometry of the 5-, respectively 10-dimensional space as visualized during the Quantum Cinema project (funded by FWF/ PEEK with Peter Weibel at the University of applied at Vienna). 

The ontologic assumption of a higher dimensional space gives rise to the image of the earth itself as intelligent self-sustainable entity, called GAIA 5.0 — in an art project developed for the SciArt festival DATAMI of the Joint research center (JRC) of the European Commission (EC). 

In this talk we search for morphologic similarities between the assumed substructure of living systems and artificial neural networks applied in machine learning devices. 

Hence, we may pursue two strands, 
1) cybernetics, autopoiesis and self-organization in the context of Gaia theory,
2) cybernetics as a mechanistic, later digital implementation of the principle of self-organization to create an artificial intelligence, aka.“deep learning“.

In this context we may compare principles prevalent in nature visualized as higher-dimensional geometrical structures and algebraic operations expressed by Boolean algebra that became the backbone of classical computing as well as the principles of superposition and entanglement which are the basics of quantum computation — the final goal to boost AI into its ultimate functionality. 

The philosophical part of the talk will revise Kant’s transcendental idealism according to which nature is a projection of consciousness: According to Hegel, space & time arise from an evolutionary process — nature is teleologically linked to man, the spirit of nature awakens in the consciousness of man. What should we learn about the nature of human consciousness in order to evolve an artificial intelligence? 
And how does the post-humanistic convergence of imagination & science, myth and technology in contemporary culture relate to Ibn Hassan’s “matrix of performance which is the matrix of the Universe”?

See her presentation:
Renate Quehenberg | AI vs. the natural world as higher-dimensional neural network | ppt.