Assume nothing beyond what the constraints demand.
The First Principle is the reader’s tour through MU, the epistemic zero: the fourth option to a twenty-five-century deadlock, put on trial against the hardest paradoxes in philosophy, and turned into four tests for any reasoner, carbon or silicon.
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The video
Reasoning in the Intelligence Age.
A short introduction to the ideas behind the book, before you open it.
The deck
Twenty slides.
A walk-through of the book’s core arguments. Use the arrows, or the left and right keys, to move through the slides.
Slide 1 / 20
About the book
What if the secret to perfect reasoning isn't in what you know, but in your radical willingness to assume nothing at all?
For twenty-five centuries, we have built a world of incredible complexity on foundations philosophers declared to be thin air. The Münchhausen Trilemma has stood as an unbreakable deadlock: all knowledge eventually collapses into infinite regress, circular logic, or arbitrary dogma.
In The First Principle, Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and Intelligent Internet, names the fourth option the greatest minds of five traditions touched but never built on: MU, the epistemic zero. Assume nothing beyond what the constraints demand.
Not a doctrine added to your beliefs, but the refusal to add. A floor that proves itself because every attempt to deny it must use it.
Then he puts it on trial: Hume's problem of induction, Hume's guillotine, Goodman's grue, Gettier, the lottery paradox. The verdicts are not all victories. One trial leaves a permanent scar. Another ends in silence, and the silence is the strongest result in the book.
In the Intelligence Age, the stakes are existential. We are building machines that reason. MU offers four independent tests for judging any reasoner, carbon or silicon.
The paper
Intelligent Epistemology.
The formal paper behind the book: the same fourth option derived in full, with the numbered results the book points to where they stand.
The First Principle is the reader’s tour. Intelligent Epistemology is the derivation: every claim the book grades as proved opens onto a numbered result here, and the interactive edition lets you follow each step.
For those who check.
The book grades its own claims and prints the date on which the boldest of them comes due. Follow the argument as it meets the world, and bring your disagreements.
Also from Intelligent Internet
The Last Economy
The First Principle gives us a way to reason. The Last Economy explains the transition that reasoning has to meet: what happens when intelligence becomes abundant and our economics still prices it as scarce.