In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical complement and necessary companion of knowledge.
The relationship between knowledge and the unknown is in fact so subtle and so deeply encrypted across the entire surface of our experience that we are generally quite blind to it. There is a fundamental discontinuity running through the heart of things and this is (also) the logical bootstrap of sentient self-awareness.
This discontinuity is also the “secret sauce” that is missing from Artificial General Intelligence. Where we most often attempt to brute force our way towards sentient machines we are failing to understand the mischievous nature of paradoxical self-containment that inflates our own gestalt awareness.
Any good story always leaves out just enough to keep a mind reader intrigued, to engage the faculty of intuitive imagination – invoking a possibility of cathartic insight. This may or may not be a good story but the fact remains that the most interesting organisational and logical principle of autonomously self-propagating soliton-like information-processing systems is, and must always remain, conspicuous by it’s absence.
Everything else is silence.
Daedelus Kite 