Natural intelligence differs from current artificial intelligence not just in degree but in kind, being tied to consciousness, intentionality, qualia, understanding, and aesthetic or ethical judgment that go beyond rule-based or correlation-based processing. Psychological research shows natural intelligence ranges from unconscious processes to focused reasoning, and from embodied cognition to true agency and creativity, operating on 'bits of meaning' rather than data. The author proposes an alternative view of natural intelligence as information processing plus 'bundle pushing', illustrates how this can shortcut processing, and suggests initial ideas for neurobiological and information-theoretic experiments.
A properly formulated idealism can offer an alternative view of the mind/matter gap and shed light on open questions in the scientific materialist worldview. To investigate this, idealism needs a model integrating modern science that allows a mathematically consistent reinterpretation of the physical world as a limiting case of a world that is both material and non-material, making idealist considerations accessible to scientific investigation. The author explains what 'scientifically tenable' idealism means, formulates the emanation problem (which replaces the interaction problem for idealism), briefly summarizes available elements from philosophical literature, sketches design questions for constructing such models, and presents a first model for a scientifically tenable objective idealism.