Encyclore,
“paladins of systemity,” “the stalwart logicians”: argue that, even as creators of Minds, we are no closer to understanding intelligence — worse, are now hopelessly understanding-proof by having profited too much from blind luck. Encycloreans (many are themselves Minds) uphold — “almost ritualize” — the old quest for a thinking machine: a fully deterministic device that, from a finite set of statements about the world, logically deduces everything else; progress is claimed compared to the pre-Mind era, with some results reportedly unreproducible by any amount of “pondering” (Encyclore term for the “organic” way humans and Minds think). Encyclore’s vast and still-growing ontologies — systematic “world facts” — have been useful outside the project (feelery training, Knowledge automation) but no one can say if a “critical mass” is within reach or achievable at all; few outsiders still share the project’s vision of “intelligence from the ground up.” ■ No free lunch, don’t believe it until you make it: is this at the root of systemic conservatism? Or is it a breed of solipsism, doubting the very existence of consciousness outside the I, at most we? Or a Platonic resignation: nothing substantial ever comes from the dance of shadows on the wall — absent the toils of a philosopher king who alone can meaningfully forge the world? Apart from Minds' “make-believe sentience,” Encyclorean mockery extends to the exoteric civic science (“you don’t run into something valuable by chance”), especially evolving (“no amount of calculation will do your thinking for you”); this correlates with a general skepticism towards the post-sparsening society in which “too much just happens.”