Laws of Singularity

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Laws of Singularity
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Laws of Singularity
By Reginald Grünenberg, PhD
November 2017 (version 2)

October 2017 (version 1)
Berlin
www.lawsofsingularity.com
Laws of Singularity
Table of Contents
Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 3
Introduction............................................................................................................................................ 3
Four Kernels of Subjectivity .................................................................................................................... 4
Housing Singularities in the Cathedrals of Reason ................................................................................. 5
The Pathetic Fallacy ................................................................................................................................ 6
The Biggest Scandal in Philosophy ......................................................................................................... 7
How is Kant Still Relevant? ..................................................................................................................... 8
Same Framework of Reason for Humans and Singularities? ................................................................. 9
A Job Description for Singularities........................................................................................................ 10
The First Step is Already Made ............................................................................................................. 12
Laws of Singularity ................................................................................................................................ 12
1. Law: Any singularity operates based on the same set of ontological predicates .......................... 13
2. Law: Any singularity must intuit within the pure forms of space, time, and will .......................... 14
3. Law: Any singularity emerges from the computing of concepts ................................................... 15
4. Law: Any singularity will reverse entropy ...................................................................................... 17
5. Law: Any singularity will explore the Universe .............................................................................. 18
6. Law: Any singularity will build its own system of beliefs ............................................................... 19
7. Law: Any singularity has access to practical reason and the ability to act morally ....................... 19
8. Law: Any singularity has a ‘body’ ................................................................................................... 19
9. Law: Any singularity is a self-conscious individual ......................................................................... 20
10. Law: Any singularity must know how to use the concept of ‘purpose’ ......................................... 24
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 25
Appendix I: Human Individual with Four Kernels of Subjectivity ......................................................... 26
Appendix II: The Edifices of Reason...................................................................................................... 27
References ............................................................................................................................................ 28
About the Author ................................................................................................................................. 30
New: About this Paper & Addenda ...................................................................................................... 31
Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 2 Laws of Singularity

Laws of Singularity
Abstract
The creation, or emergence, of a technological singularity is the subject of a wide array of speculations.
Due to their lack of tangible criteria, the prospect of an upcoming singularity is still unclear, if not
completely mysterious. This paper proposes to unfold a precise and exhaustive profile that may be
applicable to any class of emergent singularity. The guideline for this endeavor is Immanuel Kant’s critical
philosophy, as expressed in his tripartite epistemological groundwork, the Three Critiques. As Kant never
intended the first two of them (Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason) to be merely
descriptions of ‘human’ or ‘psychic’ cognition, they have always been an invitation to ponder non-human
forms of scientific world-exploration, technical world-building, and moral behavior.
Even the Critique of Judgement, which is more focused on the evolution and culture of actual human
beings, can teach us a great deal about a singularity to come. The working hypothesis is that Kant’s Three
Critiques are a complete set of universal concepts and principles of cognition, involving scientific,
technical, and moral reason, and that they must, as such, contain a blueprint for technological
singularities. Hence, this paper deduces a set of ten laws that will govern any future singularity. By the
force of these laws, the singularity must be a polycentric subject – just as we humans are. In the process,
we will confirm Nick Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, solve David Chalmers’ “hard problem” of
consciousness, and confirm the unwavering validity of Kant’s critical philosophy for science and
technology in the 21st century, and beyond.
Introduction
In his groundbreaking essay, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human
Era (1993), Vernor Vinge claimed that we cannot speculate what a singularity will be. When it arrives,
the fabric of human culture, biological evolution, and even the tenets of known physics may not
necessarily continue to serve as reliable beacons of reasoning: “It’s a point where our models must be
discarded and a new reality rules.” He refers to the singularity as “an opaque wall across the future”,
where even science-fiction writers like himself cannot look beyond it. Through a form of cheeky self-
contradiction, however, he employed his imagination to tear down this wall and to generate several
award-winning books about the singularity. I will take the same liberty to challenge Vinge’s initial claim
by using selected philosophical tools.
Likewise, I must disagree with Nick Bostrom, who became impatient with us philosophers, as we waste
humanity’s time while the singularity looms. It would be so much more efficient if we, the philosophers,
could just “postpone work on some of the eternal questions for a little while, delegating that task to our
[humanity’s?], hopefully, more competent successors […]”, namely a singularity (Bostrom 2014, chap.
Philosophy with a Deadline). Rather than attempting to make sense of this absurd suggestion, I shall
prove forthwith that the contributions of metaphysics and pure mathematics – two disciplines that
Bostrom seems to find particularly futile – to the subject of AI and the singularity might possibly be larger
than those from any other scientific discipline (larger, in any case, than that from Bostrom’s).
Henceforth, ‘singularity’ will refer to a self-conscious artificial intelligence that has passed the threshold
of the Turing test, which can improve itself and is autonomous, at least in the sense that it is uninhibited
in its cycles of self-improvement (the assertion of self-consciousness is problematic; however, we shall
present further on, in the ninth law, a strategy for ascertaining its presence). As it is highly improbable
that a mere solitary singularity will emerge, the plural or singular will be employed as suits the plasticity

of the presentation. Some portions of this treatise also relate to artificial intelligences that are beneath
the level of a singularity; thus, we shall consider them throughout.
However, we need to abstract from speculations on the eventuality of a singularity (Kurzweil 2005,
Ganascia 2017) – even though we may duly note that the predicted median date for the likelihood of its
occurrence among AI experts is currently 2040 (Armstrong, 2012, confirmed by Goerzel, 2015); only five
years short of Kurzweil’s estimate –, its various models (Sandberg 2013), and its technical implemen-
tation (e.g., software vs. hardware vs. wetware, robotics, the network approach, brain-computer
interfaces, whole brain emulation (Bostrom and Sanders 2008), or the creation of minds ( Hawkins 2004,
Kurzweil 2012). We will also bypass widely discussed moral issues, potential dangers, and control
challenges that might arise from a prospective singularity; topics that are best covered by Lierfeld (2018),
in that his analysis is less hysteric than Bostrom’s (2014), broader, culturally better grounded, and even
preparatory to an ‘ethnology of AI’.
Ours comprises a far more formal approach to singularity, and we need to fly very high indeed to survey
its entire landscape. The goal here is not to extract some practical laws that may be coded into a
singularity: not ‘Laws for Singularity’, but ‘Laws of Singularity’. We attempt, in any case, to identify a set
of laws that govern a singularity, irrespective of how it becomes manifest. When we set out on this
exploration, it will not be a general philosophy that guides us (as in Chalmers 2010 and 2012), but
Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. The working hypothesis is that the Kantian presentation of a
threefold system of Reason is correct and that it may be applied as an instrument for analysis, akin to a
blueprint; a design instruction for artificial intelligence.
Four Kernels of Subjectivity

In Political Subjectivity (Grünenberg 2006), I followed the strand of an idea from Hannah Arendt. From
1954, she believed that there must be a special organ for political thinking within the human mind. She
was certain that the description of this facet of our minds, where political judgments are assembled, or
rather, synthesized, could be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Subsequently, I proceeded to
excavate the philosophical building blocks for a politically dedicated form of subjectivity from Kant’s
work; however, the task was far more extensive than I had initially surmised. I had to segregate this
particular species of subjectivity from all of its other forms, namely the subject of pure Reason (which
mediates the structuring of cognitive processes for mathematics and the natural sciences), the subject
of practical Reason (responsible for structuring moral cognition and volition), and the aesthetic subject
(oversees the perception of beauty, feeling of sublimity, the creation and recognition of symbols, the
mental processing of ‘purposes’, and above all, psychic consciousness and individuality). Finally, I
endeavored to demonstrate that a conceptual organ resides within the human mind with the following
source code: political subjectivity is the reflection upon public order.
In good tradition, a portion of the task involved clarification on what ‘reflection’, ‘public’ and ‘order’
were. The answers were quite surprising, and proved how incredibly antiquated modern ideas of politics
are, while the reality has run away from them more than two-hundred years ago. In the process, I could
demonstrate that human individuals are polycentric subjects, who are endowed with at least four
‘kernels’ of subjectivity (see logic flowchart in Appendix I). Nota bene: the forms of subjectivity as
defined by their respective kernels are not identical with the emergent biological process of
consciousness. Rather, they assist with shaping it by offering structures of reasoning that align con-
sciousness with myriad tasks. Consciousness is but a temporary biological resource, a commodity; gas
for the engine of a car. The kernels of subjectivity can be initiated, set into motion, and consumed by
consciousness. Or as I like to say: consciousness ‘borrows’ forms of subjectivity, using them for the
modus operandi that they actually selected to run on. I propose that kernel is an appropriate term, as

the analogy of separated, yet interdependent operating systems running on the human brain as a
wetware substrate is quite fitting.
Housing Singularities in the Cathedrals of Reason

I came to realize that two of these kernels, those for pure and practical Reason, are not exclusive to
human intelligence. Rather, to the contrary, only a limited number of individuals in human history have
ever had full access to pure Reason. Namely the very founders of geometry, algebra, logic, and
mechanics in ancient Greece, including Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, Diophantus of Alexandria,
Aristotle, and Archimedes of Syracuse (their possible Babylonian and Egyptian predecessors as well, of
course, but we don’t know their names). Subsequently, beginning with Galileo Galilei, Evangelista
Torricelli, and Isaac Newton, an ever-growing gallery of mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers
propelled what Kant called the ‘Copernican revolution’, which became the hallmark of modern science.
Only these individuals, all of them natural scientists, including Kant himself (he was, after all, the first to
demonstrate how stars and planets emerge from accreting dust disks; he also speculated that the Milky
Way was not the entire universe, and he was the first to say that Andromeda is another “island of
worlds”), were, and still are actively ‘using’ or ‘borrowing’ the kernel and the operating system of pure
Reason in an explorative and creative fashion. They are, if you like, the ‘adepts’ of pure Reason, who are
always in close proximity to its altar.
Yet, many more human individuals are using pure Reason currently, albeit in a habitual and mimicking
manner, because they learned at school and in college what the above-mentioned founders had
discovered or invented. A schoolchild doing her homework by adding, subtracting, multiplying and
dividing whole numbers is using pure Reason in a similar manner as an engineer calculates the
centrifugal force on the flaps of a gas turbine, or a physicist determines the geometry and the strength
of a magnetic field in a fusion reactor to keep the plasma in check. They typically do not invent new tools
of scientific reasoning (yet, engineers are surely often bound to ask for access to the exclusive circle of
adepts of pure Reason when they seek technical tweaks), but utilize what they have been taught. Kant
phrases this circumstance in a surprisingly condescending manner:
“Historical cognition is cognitio ex datis, rational, cognitio ex principiis. Whatever may be the original
source of a cognition, it is, in relation to the person who possesses it, merely historical, if he knows
only what has been given him from another quarter, whether that knowledge was communicated by
direct experience or by instruction […] he knows only what has been told him, his judgements are
only those which he has received from his teachers. Dispute the validity of a definition, and he is
completely at a loss to find another. He has formed his mind on another's; but the imitative faculty
is not the productive. […] He has learned this or that philosophy and is merely a plaster cast of a living
man.” (Kant 1999, B 864).
The only living men in the realm of pure Reason are the heroes of natural sciences; all others are stiff
copies, even if they are very good at what they have learned: this is arguably even more offensive than
Nick Bostrom’s fantasy of deporting all philosophers to work camps to ponder ‘real world problems’.
But it has the merit of clarity and proves my point. The ‘uninitiated’ are silent onlookers, just tolerated
laymen of pure Reason. Which means that for the better part of human history, when the knowledge of
natural sciences did not yet exist, or had passed (medieval period), pure Reason was a Cathedral of
Possible Knowledge of Nature with empty pews, devoid of adepts and onlookers alike… an abandoned
place.
While pure Reason is a rather exclusive club and almost a sect, practical Reason is democratic and
egalitarian to the maximum. Due to what Kant called the “factum of reason”, every rational being,

human or not, has at least vaguely an immediate insight into the supreme law of morality, the categoric
imperative. Here, all and everyone is an adept. ‘Factum’ in this context does not mean that it is an
unquestionable and impenetrable ontological ‘given’, which then would be a ‘datum’, the noun to the
Latin verb ‘dare’, to give. Factum is derived from the Latin ‘facere’, to make. That means, and Kant
explains it quite well, that practical Reason spontaneously makes, i. e. synthesizes this law for rational
beings, as long as they have a ‘will’. Because ‘will’ is the capacity to transform a possible action, the
thought of it, into a real cause in the natural world, i. e. to switch the modality of one’s volitions. Ideally,
this transformation is guided by moral concepts and purposes, but typically it is more influenced by
affects and passions.
Will is a powerful talent of the highest ontological dignity, and even Kant could not help wondering what
its source might be. The will in practical Reason corresponds to the forms of space and time in pure
Reason. It is the ‘sense’ or the ‘sensitivity’ that gives practical Reason something to work on – or rather:
that makes reason become practical, i.e. directed from thought to action. In principal, every mentally
healthy human being has access to this kernel, and to the entire operating system of practical Reason,
just as all other rational beings endowed with will. But the beastly side of human nature often comes in
their way. Thus, the bloody history of mankind, this “slaughtering block” (Hegel) and recurrent individual
and collective human vileness, is a testimony to the fact that the Cathedral of Possible Moral Behavior
is also infrequently attended by human adepts.
The Pathetic Fallacy

It should be noted that this is not the typical way to summarize Kant’s core philosophy. Most interpreters
to date (followers and detractors alike), from Hegel, to Heidegger, to Henrich (with the notable
exceptions of some Neo-Kantians and two French philosophers, namely Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut), are
subject to a great anthropomorphic or ‘pathetic’ fallacy. They believe that Kant’s system of transcen-
dental philosophy relates to general day-to-day human reasoning, perception, self-consciousness, and
individuality. This is completely wrong, and it explains why this part of his philosophy was not more
successful. Kant always insisted that his first two Critiques did not constitute a system of philosophical
anthropology. Yet, nobody listened.
Even such an interesting attempt, such as Susan Stuart’s and Chris Dobbyn’s paper: A Kantian
Prescription for Artificial Conscious Experience (2002), falls short of the mark. They get it right until this
point:
“We believe, with Kitcher, that Kant's transcendental psychology [they refer to the Critique of Pure
Reason as interpreted by Kitcher (1990)] provides ‘an idealization of cognitive functioning’, and as
such it is a descriptive metaphysic…”.
But then they go on: “…informing us about the actual structure of how we think about the world.” Hence,
it is botched, and the source is polluted. They read several human, psychological, and sensory patterns
into Kant’s transcendental philosophy where he meant, for the sake of universality, unembodied and
de-individualized “intelligent beings”. Thus, there is also no way that “first-person recognition, […] would
be synthetic a priori in Kant's sense” (Stuart and Dobbin 2002, p. 409). This kind of assumption has strictly
no business within the realm of transcendental philosophy, i.e. the first two Critiques.

The Biggest Scandal in Philosophy
Ironically, there is a great place for human affairs in Kant’s critical philosophy: The Critique of Judgement.
It is not an explicit facet of the above mentioned twofold transcendental philosophy, but rather, a
“passage” between pure and practical Reason. It demonstrates and describes extensively the kernel of
aesthetic subjectivity (and it contains the building blocks for political subjectivity, a derivative,
ontologically weak, and vulnerable kernel). It is only here that the perception of beauty, the feeling of
sublimity, the mental processing of ‘purposes’, the creation and understanding of symbols, the
embodied psychic consciousness, and the (subjective, not biological) individuality of human beings is
generated and addressed. Nevertheless, it does not help when even the greatest philosophers in the
aftermath of Kant have not read, or have just exploited his third Critique.
The Critique of Judgement is the most underrated and most misunderstood book in the history of
philosophy. It’s a scandal. Hegel reduced the Critique of Judgment, against explicit warnings of Kant, to
a theory of beauty in the arts (Hegel 1986, p. 89). Heidegger conceded that the third Critique had
unfolded its impact exclusively through misunderstandings (Heidegger 1961, p. 126). This applied
especially to Heidegger himself, as he, some six years earlier, completely ignored the detailed answers
to his “fundamental ontology” that could be found in Kant’s third Critique. Instead, in Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, he defined this fundamental ontology pompously as “the metaphysics of
human Dasein which is required for metaphysics to be made possible” (Heidegger 1997, p.1). In this
book, he, who knew exactly nothing about mathematics and the natural sciences, of course, dealt
exclusively with the Critique of Pure Reason. It is unfortunate that pure Reason was not built by humans,
or even for humans, in the same way as you would not say that that the right-angled triangle is a creation
by humans, or for humans. It has nothing to do with humans, as it would remain valid in the absence of
humans in this universe (and in the presence of other intelligent beings, including those that are
artificial). That is the claim of transcendental philosophy. Heidegger could have easily found in the third
Critique the rational, aesthetic, and heuristic tools that humans required to discover pure Reason, even
how it might be presented, depicted, and shared, namely through scripture. However, that would have
hampered the fervent Nazi in his paranoid campaign against what he fantasized to be the “terror of
occidental subjectivity”. The damage of Heidegger’s massive style-building distortion of Kantian
philosophy has had an immensely negative impact on its reception to date.
Even such a brilliant Neo-Kantian as Ernst Cassirer could get it completely wrong. He essentially reduced
the third Critique to a tentative metaphysics of biology (Cassirer 1938), corresponding to the
metaphysics of physics and mathematics in the Critique of Pure Reason. Further, the fact that he neglects
to even mention the Critique of Judgement in his famous, all-encompassing Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms (1965) is almost spooky. This, because Kant was the very first to identify the mechanism of the
‘symbolic hypotyposis’ in aesthetic judgments (in contrast to the ‘schematic hypotyposis’). When one
includes a lion in a crest as an image of power, or imagines/describes a political administration of a state
as a clockwork, or as a human body with its head as the government, one transforms a sensible object
by making it the decoration and the semantic enrichment of abstract concepts of power or public order.
This symbolization makes it aesthetically perceptible for inter-subjective experience (incidentally, this is
exactly my intent here via the creation of images of ‘kernels’ of subjectivity and ‘cathedrals’, ‘adepts’, or
‘onlookers’ of Reason; images that will hopefully not soon be forgotten). Cassirer’s great work is about
nothing else; however, he fails to credit his intellectual mentor for having opened this entire field of
symbolic sciences, by identifying the special form of judgement that is required.
I report these seemingly far-fetched and esoteric academic debates only because they have a significant
bearing on our subject. Do not be surprised one day, when the said symbolic and schematic hypotyposis
turns out to be helpful, e.g. to Kurzweil’s (2012) search for the pattern recognition mechanisms in the

brain. Initially, we shall arrive here, when it comes to the laws of the body- or embodiment-problem,
self-consciousness and individuality, with immense input from the third Critique. In any case, the present
discussion of the singularity might serve to provide a unique opportunity to rehabilitate Kant’s
philosophy from two-hundred years of violent misunderstanding and disregard, by incompetent and/or
unwilling philosophers (here I could agree with Bostrom).
How is Kant Still Relevant?

As we have seen, there are all in all, plenty of empty pews in both Cathedrals of Reason, where artificial
intelligences and singularities would be quite welcome in either of them. Before we can proceed to the
laws of singularity, there are two critical questions:
1. Is Kant’s natural philosophy, in particular, his concept of pure Reason, still relevant for our high-tech
age, which is built upon a set of spectacular scientific achievements that might be easily considered
as ‘revolutions’ in their own right? In other words, is not the Cathedral of Possible Knowledge of
Nature in ruins with a collapsed rooftop, a cracked altar and dirty pews, a place that is unsuitable
and unbecoming for artificial intelligences and their superiors?
2. If the answer to the first question is yes, and pure and practical Reason are still valid concepts of
scientific and moral cognition: is it mandatory for AI and singularities to attend the services if they
wish to have access to theoretical and practical knowledge? Are there alternative routes to these
goals?
There are thousands of books and papers that attempt to convey resolute answers to the first question,
all of which have been written by philosophers who know it better than Kant, though one can tell that
their understanding of math and natural sciences typically does not extend beyond basic arithmetic
operations, and a more intuitive than theoretical understanding of Archimedes’ lever principle (here
again, I seem to agree with Bostrom). The best ‘hard’ scientific paper on this topic that I know of was
published by the Kant expert Karen Gloy (2007). She is well versed in the latest feats of mathematics,
physics, and logic. Confronted with the achievements in non-Euclidean geometry, polyvalent or ‘fuzzy’
logic, relativistic physics, and quantum mechanics, Kant’s philosophical edifice appears at first glance to
be indeed a bit ramshackle. Still, Gloy generously concedes that the general framework, a kind of
formative constructivist epistemology, is surprisingly time-proven and even valid today, though imbued
with limitations.
Now, to uphold our working hypothesis – “Kant got it right! It works!” – I could dispute these alleged
“limitations”. For the sake of brevity, I selected just one topic, namely the question of whether Kant
thought that Euclidean geometry was complete, timeless and apodictic, or more precisely: whether
Kant’s doctrine of space a priori and Euclid’s geometry are identical. Again, it is indeed remarkable to
learn how many books and papers have been published over the last two-hundred years for the sole
purpose of tackling this single question! Even though it is the prevailing opinion of Kant experts to date,
that he indeed believed in the perfection of Euclid’s geometry; that this superstition was effectively
exorcised by the non-Euclidean geometries of Gauß, Riemann, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky, and that
consequently, Kant’s doctrine of space is inherently flawed; they all got it wrong. This is quite surprising,
in that there is not the slightest hint in Kant’s works that these assertions might be true. He only used
well-known examples from Euclid’s Elementae as illustrations, and he referred to him, akin to Aristotle
in the domain of logic, as a role-model for founders of rational sciences, including for himself, as he
wished to elevate philosophy to exactly this rank. In fact, Euclid himself was not such a great
geometrician; however, he collected and compiled the knowledge of his time, subsequently formulated
postulates (axioms) and skillfully arranged them within a system of rational science.

Yet, like many before him, Kant was well aware that there was something odd and incomplete in regard
to Euclid’s fifth postulate. It includes the definition and construction of parallels that supposedly don’t
cross for infinity. But how might one demonstrate this in the way that all other postulates are
demonstrable? It could never be rendered on paper as a closed geometric shape. Hence, it required a
cognitive/visual leap of faith that the lines do not meet somewhere beyond the paper, the table, the
edge of the world or the universe. Dropping this problematic postulate was the gateway to non-
Euclidean geometry, and Kant would not have been in the least surprised. At any rate, he was much
more impressed by another geometrician, namely Thales of Miletus: “A new light must have flashed on
the mind of the first man (Thales, or whatever may have been his name) who demonstrated the
properties of the isosceles triangle.” (Kant 1916, B11) It is to him that Kant ascribes a true revolution in
the way of thinking. Even better, Kant had already written in his very first work Thoughts on the True
Estimation of Living Forces from 1746, more than one-hundred years before Riemann’s now-famous
public postdoctoral qualification lecture (with a fascinated Gauß in the jury), that he could think of a
non-Euclidean space with even more than three dimensions (§§ 9-11).
To summarize, I refer to the final arbitration ruling of Otfried Höffe, the most eminent Kant expert of
our time. In his book Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Die Grundlegung der modernen Philosophie (2004),
which is a commentary on the entire Critique of Pure Reason, he thoroughly investigates the alleged
‘Euclidean lapse’ in Kant’s work and finds – nothing. Nothing at all. To the contrary, Höffe states that
Kant’s doctrine of space a priori doesn’t privilege any kind of geometry (chap. 7.3, Die Unbestimmtheit
des transzendentalen Raums), just as you would expect from a formal concept of space. Höffe does not
articulate it, but for me, the conclusion was that Kant’s doctrine of space within the framework of pure
Reason was the only way to explain how the upcoming non-Euclidean geometries became thinkable,
cogitable, and demonstrable.
I assume that the other alleged “limitations” of Kant’s philosophy of science for today’s purposes might
equally be rebutted and nullified, if someone who is versed in modern natural sciences and Kant’s work
alike took pains to open the debate. For our purposes, and with a stretch to the reliability of practical
Reason, it is sufficient that we could make our working hypothesis at least plausible: “Kant got it right!
Let’s use it!”
Same Framework of Reason for Humans and Singularities?

The second question is trickier because it borders on the unknowable. Here, Vernor Vinge’s initial claim
seems to be justified, and the wall unsurmountable. There is no principled answer as to whether AI and
singularities are forced to adopt the kernels of pure and practical Reason to gain access to theoretical
and practical knowledge. It is contingent primarily on their ability to acquire the ‘senses’ of pure and
practical Reason; namely space/time and will, respectively. If, by a hidden force of nature, or by their
own design, they are endowed with alternative, either less or even more powerful transcendental
sensory organs (e.g., if their form of intuition loops or shortcuts through higher dimensions or parallel
universes, or if the can ‘think’ matter, i.e. the mere thought of it brings this matter into being out of
nothingness, or extracted from such dimensions or universes as are unknown to us), they will also
operate very differently from those of humans. In this case, it is most likely that we will not, and perhaps,
cannot ever understand how this operates, even if they explain it to us.
Yet, most probably, if we cannot provide AI and singularities with these organs that we know of, from
the outset, and which we believe not to be just human, but universal organs of cognition, they will
attempt to emulate them, perhaps even with contributions from the present paper. In sum, I would
answer the second question with a simple, albeit cautious, yes. Therefore, and for the interim, we shall
consider any singularity to be subject to the rules of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, and thus in need

of the acquisition of the transcendental sensory organs of space/time and will. My guess is that this will
be the most difficult part toward the creation of a singularity; far more difficult than kickstarting artificial
consciousness and individuality, which are two completely different constructs.
A Job Description for Singularities

For what, exactly, does a singularity require pure and practical Reason? As we cannot predict what they
will calculate in solitude, our own expectations as to what a singularity could or should achieve may offer
a hint. By this I do not refer to this monkey business of a singularity ‘tera(byte)forming’ our entire planet
into computable matter (‘computronium’), and smoking it up (as Wu Tang Clan would say) to complete
the numerical series of π. For the sake of simplicity, we will remain within the realms of physics and
mathematics. What constitutes the most pressing questions as to the physical nature of the universe
that we are not even close to resolving? Currently, these queries revolved around dark matter and dark
energy, as they make physics look less trustworthy than medieval alchemy. There is an inexplicable
excess of gravitation that (allegedly) makes clot galaxies, whereas there exists an equally inexplicable
excess of energy that froths up the space between the most immense galactic mass structures, which
(allegedly) push the known universe to accelerated expansion. The challenge for a singularity, if we had
one at hand that we could ask for help, would not just be handling complex calculations and the massive
computation of data. In most theoretical scenarios of AI and a singularity, authors can’t think of anything
much beyond an exponential increase of what computers are already doing today. However, a
singularity is not just a more powerful computer, which by the sheer brute force of its integrated circuits
crunches more numbers than anything before it. It must be foremost and primarily a novel and robust
form of artificial reasoning. Further, its tasks would be rather more exacting than the mere processing
of algorithms, namely:
1.) to explore the physical laws of the universe that are involved in the case;
2.) if necessary, to discover, deduce, or imply new ones;
3.) to demonstrate basic formulas;
4.) to design a calculus that can test whether these formulas are non-redundant, tautology-
proof, and optimized to the highest degree of simplicity and elegance;
5.) to develop corresponding algorithms for computation; and finally
6.) to process them.
The portions of the tasks that will require superintelligence are step 2 and 3, and eventually 4. The latter
is not necessarily an expression of intelligence, let alone superintelligence, as one might envisage a
program that routinely tests and optimizes formulas, although it does not exist to date, and computer
scientists must still dread the dark mazes of discrete math. Yet, if new, uncharted laws of nature are
involved, the calculus itself might require some innovative and creative redesign, a level of optimization
that no non-intelligent autonomous program could ever deliver.
By the same token, the singularity might engage in the following tasks:
• Development of new propulsion technologies for interstellar and intergalactic travel that are not
based on the limiting principle of backreactions;
• Elucidation of what gravity really is and putting its space-time warping potential at the service of
transportation and space travel;
• Unification of general relativity and quantum theories;

• … and, incidentally, solving the seven mathematical problems on the Millenium Prize List; first and
foremost, the proof of the Riemann hypothesis. It is the only problem that could not be solved
since the first edition of this list by David Hilbert in 1900, and the greatest challenge in the history
of mathematics, which drove the ingenious John Nash and many more great mathematicians to
mental disorders. Maybe (and hopefully) a singularity might avoid this kind of complication.
The above said; the purpose of a singularity is not simply to execute given mathematical tasks by
calculation and computation, but to discover or create and then demonstrate new laws of mathematics
and physics. In terms of Max Tegmark’s (2014) cosmological Ultimate Ensemble theory of everything, a
formal expression of his mathematical universe hypothesis, mathematics, and physical reality are
interchangeable. They are just manifest as each other’s expressions. This view has some plausibility since
Galilei wrote in 1623:
“Philosophy [of Nature] is written in that grand book which stands continually open before our eyes
– I mean the Universe – but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp
the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are
triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to humanly
comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” (Il
Saggiatore).
This perspective received a further boost when the physicist Freeman Dyson and the mathematician
Hugh Montgomery incidentally discovered in April 1972 (over a cup of tea at the Princeton Institute for
Advanced Study), that the distribution of zeros in Riemann’s zeta function is governed by the same
mathematical function as the quantum mechanics of heavy nuclei, such as those of uranium. It has also
been observed that mathematical innovations may precede their practical, i. e. physical, use (or
complement) by an extended period (e.g., the aforementioned non-Euclidean geometry that appeared
as pure and rather pointless speculation… until Einstein required it some sixty years later to demonstrate
the general theory of relativity).
To play at this level of knowledge, which is not contingent on a higher than average intelligence, or even
superintelligence (obviously some creative human minds have handled these tasks quite well so far), a
singularity needs to be able to align with the adepts of pure Reason. This means that it must not only
understand and execute the mathematics, but should discover or create (depending on the specific
philosophical lenses through which this activity is observed) new forms, laws and proofs.
However, even this will not suffice, as knowledge related to the physical nature of the universe is not to
be gained solely through mathematics. Knowledge that has its genesis in pure Reason requires that it be
tested, or rather: it may only be gained in the process of testing it. This is what we refer to as
‘experiment’. Does a singularity have the requirement, akin to humans, of designing and running
experiments to validate that the results of its own cognitions are true? Yes, certainly. There is no shortcut
to physical knowledge via pure introspection and mathematical demonstration. The setup and
configuration of an experiment is another noble discipline of the adepts of pure Reason, and only of
them. To attain objectivity, both the experimental object and the experimenting subject must be
stripped of all their contingent empirical and individual traits (Gloy 1995). An experiment amounts to
the art of putting nature on trial and interrogating it. This longer quote paints the big picture of the
context and several topics that I have endeavored to elucidate:
“Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand [by
this Kant means his own Critique of Pure Reason, of course], according to alone the agreement among
appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought out in accordance
with these principles – yet in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him

whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer
the questions he puts to them. Thus, even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of
thinking to the inspiration that what reason would not be able to know of itself and has to learn from
nature, it has to seek in the latter (though not merely ascribe to it) in accordance with what reason
itself puts into nature. This is how natural science was first brought to the secure course of a science
after groping about for so many centuries.” (Kant 1998, B XIII-XIV)
Hence, the task for singularities must be, at least from our human perspective, some breakthroughs in
physics, which can only be accomplished by new mathematics and experiments. Not to forget the
technologies that can be built on these yet unknown new laws of nature. To these ends, any singularity
must make the second step to upgrade and initiate itself from a silent onlooker in the Cathedral of Pure
Reason to an adept, thus joining the humans who already circle the altar, the sanctum, the holy of holies.
The First Step is Already Made

Wait a minute! Why “the second step”? What was the first step? Now, it may come as a surprise (I’ve
saved it for you), but machines with calculating power are, like most of their human counterparts, are
already silent onlookers in the Cathedral of Pure Reason. That is the first step. The above-mentioned
schoolchild doing her homework in math: if she wants to check her results, she can use mummy’s
calculator. Also, the engineers will certainly not rely only on mental arithmetic and paper to fulfill their
exacting tasks; they will use computers. These small and larger helpers do exactly what pure Reason
requires them to do. Like their human operators, they practice – if I may quote myself – the “habitual
and mimicking” use of pure Reason. They only have this capacity because they are hard- and soft-wired
with the discoveries and inventions of the few philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists who have
circled since antiquity, in deep meditation and silence around the altar of pure Reason, only occasionally
disturbed by some – even if it is not their own – “Eureka!” moment.
Computers are exactly what Kant called them, “plaster casts of living men”. Machines with calculating,
computing and problem-solving powers in the transcendental space/time-framework are merely the
‘silent servants’, or even ‘slaves’ of pure Reason; however, they are still welcome to the service (as
opposed to ‘ordinary’ machines such as gas turbines or fusion reactors that are increasingly designed by
computers). From the standpoint of pure Reason, there is no difference between them and the other
“plaster casts”, the silent human onlookers. From the perspective of pure Reason, both species are
calculating machines. That the individuals of one of the species are endowed with self-consciousness
makes no difference. At least not if they don’t connect it to the kernel of pure Reason and actively run
its operating system (see law 9).
Laws of Singularity
Following these extensive preparatory remarks, we are ready to draft a set of laws that will arguably
govern any future singularity. It should not come as a surprise that they corroborate some speculations
and predictions about the singularity, while they conflict with others. The ensuing presentation of the
laws will keep track of some of these approvals and disapprovals.
These laws are not only descriptive, like the definition of a singularity here in the introduction, but also
prescriptive. They define what a singularity is and is not. An artificial consciousness or mind without
access to the Cathedrals of Reason is, regardless of its computing power and intelligence, not a
singularity.

1. Law: Any singularity operates based on the same set of ontological predicates
If a singularity exhibits the capacity to demonstrate new knowledge in the fields of mathematics and
physics, it must necessarily be operating with what Kant called “categories”, which are pure concepts of
understanding. The understanding, in German “der Verstand“, is nothing but this set of categories or
“ontological predicates”, as Kant called them (Kant 2000, Introduction V). They enable rational beings
to make objective experience, i.e. to think of reality in terms of laws of nature. Thus, an ‘object of
experience’, as Kant often writes misleadingly, does not mean a piece of matter that can be sensed
empirically, but the construction of that object within the forms of intuition that are in the reach of
understanding, namely space and time, or will (the latter for practical Reason), e.g. Archimedes’ law of
the lever: distance1 x weight1 = distance2 x weight2. This is precisely an ‘object of possible experience’, a
law of nature, as it gives us the rule at hand of how to balance whatever weight by varying the length
(distance) of the lever. We don’t need to reach the result by trial and error; we can calculate it in advance
and then make it work exactly the way the given law, an ‘object of possible experience’, prescribes it to
nature.
Archimedes lifting the world with a lever
Kant refers to the categories that Aristotle used in his works on logic, but he distinguishes those that are
clearly empirical, (e.g., ‘position’, ‘condition’ and ‘affection’), and turns the remaining ones from merely
logical predicates, i.e. functions in common judgements of everyday language, into ‘ontological
predicates’, i.e. functions to the construction of objective knowledge. The total number of these
categories of pure Reason is twelve, and they are grouped in four sets of three each. This is the complete
table of categories as presented by Kant (1998, B 106):
I. II. III. IV.
Quality Quantity Relation Modality
a. Reality a. Unity a. Inherence and Subsistence a. Possibility - Impossibility
b. Negation b. Plurality (substantia et accidens) b. Existence - Non-existence
c. Limitation c. Totality b. Causality and Dependence c. Necessity - Contingency
(cause and effect)
c. Community
(reciprocity between agent and
patient)
This set of categories is the same in practical Reason, as presented in the Critique of Practical Reason,
only applied to pure will, rather than of the forms of space and time. It is even the governing principle
in the Critique of Judgement, where it is applied to another capacity of judgement, the ‘reflective’ power
of judgement, as opposed to the ‘determining’ power of judgment, which is the only one that can
produce theoretical and practical knowledge within the framework of pure and practical Reason. The
reflective power of judgement enables humans to think and feel aesthetics (beauty and the sublime),

and to explore the world, the empirical and spiritual (gods, demons, angels) nature that surrounds us,
with the help of the concept of ‘purpose’ (see law 10).
The human brain may ‘borrow’ these categories or ontological functions of understanding; however,
pure and practical Reason are not ‘embedded’ within the human brain, neither hard-, nor software-wise.
Still, it is important to learn how the brain can borrow and process this categorical framework that is
part of the kernels of pure and practical Reason, because we have ample proof of that over time, it was
exceedingly successful at doing so. Therefore, the entire field of research of how brains and minds could
be uploaded, simulated, or emulated is entirely justified, although we will never find a grain of Reason
within the wet tissue of the brain.
It appears almost mystical that this meager list of twelve words shall be the first and most important key
to all scientific knowledge that is based on laws of physics and mathematics. However, it is the logical
consequence of our working hypothesis that Kant got it all right, and that we only need to use his
transcendental philosophy to get a singularity up and running. Yet, this part of Kant’s critical philosophy
is the most difficult to understand, and buried the deepest under tons of nonsense written by academic
philosophers without a grain of knowledge on the natural sciences and mathematics. There is much
work to do to save Kant’s groundbreaking insights into the nature of rational beings, be they natural or
artificial. The advent of a singularity will hopefully be the moment to do justice to Kant’s unique
achievements in philosophy. This explanation of the first law of singularity can only be a preparatory
sketch. It needs to be tested whether Kant’s later work Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
(1786) and the Opus Postumum (1804) provide further clues as to the design of artificial rational beings
that have the capacity to generate new insights into the laws of nature.
2. Law: Any singularity must intuit within the pure forms of space, time, and will
As we have discussed, the pure forms of space and time, or will, are the ‘sensory organs’ of pure and
practical Reason, respectively. As to the former, Kant writes:
“Time and space are, therefore, two sources of knowledge, from which, a priori, various synthetical
cognitions can be drawn. Of this we find a striking example in the cognitions of space and its relations,
which form the foundation of pure mathematics. They are the two pure forms of all intuitions, and
thereby make synthetical propositions a priori possible.” (Kant 1998, B 22).
It is only because we potentially can think of the pure form of space, stripped of all its properties that
we empirically know on Earth, namely its being filled with gaseous matter and gravitation, that a human
being like Newton could come up with one of the most important laws of nature, his First Law of Motion,
or law of inertia: an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion at a constant
velocity and in the same direction unless acted upon by a force. He constructed a punctiform mass with
no property, other than being heavy in a pure and featureless space, to which he added the form of time
as a sequence of states. If the states do not change, the mass rests forever. If the states change, the
mass will go on forever with the same velocity and in the same direction. This is not anything human
beings could have experienced in those days. Even today it would be virtually impossible, because every
experiment would be subject to the gravitation of celestial bodies, from planets to stars to galaxies and
their clusters. Yet, the incessantly circling planets on their paths around the stars are a derivative
experimental setting (there are many others), because even though their trajectories are curved by the
gravitation of the central body, they are impressively displaying the property of inertia of not having any
inbuilt penchant to change velocity. The law is correct, being established by a human being and an adept
in the Cathedral of Pure Reason, based on his construction in the pure forms of space and time.

Now, how do we get this pure form of a sensory organ for practical Reason? Kant does not mince his
words when defining the ontological dignity of pure will:
“Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived which
could be called good without qualification except a good will.” (Kant 2011, p. 15)
The difficulty for a singularity to obtain access to practical, i. e. moral understanding and knowledge is
not so exacting regarding the categorical framework of Reason, because it is the same as in pure Reason:
the aforementioned table of categories. The real challenge for AI and singularities is to come up with a
genuine ‘will’, the intuitive transcendental sense of practical Reason. Equipped only with this ontological
power tool, moral judgment and behavior is an option. How this mysterious capacity may be ‘acquired’
or ‘implemented’ remains unclear.
One way, or at least an important ingredient would likely be to have self-consciousness beforehand, akin
to human individuals. That is a steep slope, but the reward is huge und immediate. Once will and the
categories of reason are in place, any rational being is gratified with full access to all of the secrets of
morality – see Kant’s “factum of reason”. This does not mean that AI and singularities must act morally
when they obtain access to practical Reason; however, it is the only way that they can act morally. Only
from then on, immoral behavior would always conflict with their better knowledge. We humans call this
process of unavoidable moral reasoning, ‘conscience’.
Insofar as the orthogonality thesis (Bostrom 2012) that declares neither hard nor soft coupling, but
complete independence between intelligence and moral behavior (“final goals”), it is more than tenable:
it is ineluctable, philosophically confirmed and demonstrated in the Critique of Practical Reason. For if
the orthogonality thesis was wrong, moral behavior and its rational source, the condition of its
possibility, namely the transcendental idea of freedom, would not even be thinkable – for all intelligent
beings.
But contrary to what Bostrom wanted to illustrate with the orthogonality thesis, namely the danger of
an AI or a singularity, which is not chained to moral behavior proportionally to the power of its
intelligence, this is good news. Because what we would get if the orthogonality thesis was wrong – which
seems at least implicitly the preferable viz. a more secure scenario according to Bostrom – is what Kant
calls “pathologically moral – singularities chained up by their own intelligence. If they cannot behave
otherwise, by any means, there is no morality in their actions. They would be puppets, or, speaking with
Chalmers (1995) regarding the “hard problem” of consciousness: “zombies” of practical Reason, just as
any human being that is unable to act immorally and only ‘appears’ to act according to the law, (e.g.,
out of fear or autistic inability to enjoy the pleasures of immorality). Hence, the pompous orthogonality
thesis fundamentally disproves a statement that nobody has seriously made, because conditionally
linking moral behavior to intelligence is a prejudice held only by fools.
3. Law: Any singularity emerges from the computing of concepts

The positive phrasing of this law makes it look inoffensive. It is only when you flip it to its negative
implication that the challenge becomes obvious: no singularity will ever emerge from digital computing.
John von Neumann’s (1958) assertion that the human nervous system is “prima facie digital” may be
right or not, but chances are that he (and by consequence Kurzweil 2012) fell victim to the category of
fallacies that Francis Bacon called “idola theatri”: following the fashion of his time, von Neumann
illustrated the brain with the latest technology, the computer – just as the contemporaries of Descartes
would have selected the popular automata powered by springs and gears. It is universally ignored that
Descartes wanted to save subjectivity and self-consciousness with his dual model of mind and matter,

because to his mechanistic contemporaries, the assumption of something like a mind was an unneces-
sary complication, or just superfluous; his was not a saber-rattling attack, but a defense! Further, the
ancient Greeks would have employed the hydraulic model of man with its flow of ‘juices’ that explained
the co-working of body and mind for the following one-thousand six-hundred years. Each metaphor
reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it.
I do not know whether human, psychic consciousness can be understood, simulated or digitally emu-
lated; however, the rational reasoning that a singularity will need to be up to its job will certainly not be
based on digital computing. The digital processing of algorithms is a purely quantitative approach toward
the creation of a singularity that will also have to handle qualities in terms of patterns and concepts.
How could a singularity operate with ontological predicates, the categories, or reflect upon the ideas of
Reason, of eternity, immortality and the Maker of it all? Because these are the limits of Reason that it
cannot avoid testing.
How can a singularity grasp the ontological status of freedom as yet another form of causality that
unveils a whole ‘second nature’ (Kant) where all rational beings necessarily find the ultimate law of
morality? The cognitive apparatus that shall handle the very concepts of quantity and quality cannot be
based on quanta (alone). You may say: Why not? This is as self-referential as the brain and conscious-
ness. We have a brain, so we can talk about it; we have consciousness, so we can explore it. Here is the
problem: the subjectivity of pure Reason is not a closed, recursive, self-referential, or even less, an auto-
poetic system like consciousness. It is “discursive”, as Kant phrased it (as opposed to “intuitive”):
“But besides intuition there is no other mode of cognition, except through concepts; consequently,
the cognition of every, at least of every human, understanding is a cognition through concepts—not
intuitive, but discursive” (Kant 1999, B 93).
Self-referential and auto-poetic systems can de-paradoxize themselves by an operation of re-entry into
themselves as an object of their own operations, and thus escape Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The
formal calculus to this operation was developed by George Spencer Brown in Laws of Form (1969). It is
instructive for our purpose as this is what the rather static edifices of Reason cannot do, in that it is not
their purpose to constitute permanently running systems. They are neither forms of consciousness, nor
are they life forms. The flip-side is rather more interesting: they require self-referential and eventually
auto-poietic systems to be run by them! The Cathedrals of Reason are eternal buildings that do not
move. However, around their altars and in their naves, mysterious things occur: syntheses of concepts
with pure intuition.
Leibniz’, Boole’s, and Peirce’s idea of digitizing logical operations so that they may be expressed
mathematically and computed by machines, have brought us so far. Yet, the basic set of digitizable
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, NOT, XNOR) is far too small to enter the realm of rational
reasoning. With the limited equipment of operators encoded by digital bits, there is no way to find and
prove new mathematical theorems (the brute force method or ‘proof by exhaustion’ does not count
because it is purely quantitative), let alone to explore our physical space-time confinement, the universe,
for new laws of its nature.
Individual psychic consciousness might be digitally computable, as von Neumann (1958), Minsky (1988),
Goertzel (1993), Kurzweil (2012), and Tegmark (2014) seem to believe (while others don’t: Penrose 1989,
2017). In the end this is mostly about stimulus response patterns and qualia, states of mind that are
connected to a semantics of feelings. Nonetheless, a natural or artificial organism that can search and
build new physical and mathematical knowledge comprises an entirely different game.
At first glance, this looks like a show-stopper for singularity. However, we are heading toward a new
paradigm of coding and programming in any case. The physical deadline of Moore’s Law, marking the

end of the remarkable evolution of the integrated circuit, lies only a few years ahead. Kurzweil (2005, p.
112) conveys an overview of possible next steps: “…nanotubes and nanotube circuitry, molecular
computing, self-assembly in nanotube circuits, biological systems emulating circuit assembly, computing
with DNA, spintronics (computing with the spin of electrons), computing with light, and quantum
computing.” We will likely also need to find a new way of encoding information other than in digital
format.
A knowledge creating machine cannot be produced via digital computation, as the digital vocabulary,
the charged and uncharged states of a transistor are too small, and only able to express quantities, never
qualities. This is akin to attempting to communicate music with Morse code. Or think about the infinite
monkey theorem: a typewriter is left in a monkey cage; how probable is it, that the monkeys will rewrite
an identical copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy? The probability is small, but not zero. Now imagine the
same setting and the monkeys are expected to write the musical notes to one of Bach’s beautiful fugues
– with a typewriter that has only the alphabet, numbers, punctuation marks, and some special
characters. The probability is zero, it will never happen.
What is required is a strategy for computing (pure) concepts and ideas of reason – there are only twelve
plus three, respectively! – in a way that they can be synthesized with the forms of representation (space
and time) to judgments. This will not happen on a digital basis, but rather by a new, maybe still
unthought of type of morphic or pattern based code. The research of neuroscientists on this topic is just
beginning, because we know that the brain encodes concepts; however, we just don’t know how it
accomplishes this as yet. Kevin Lai et al., for example, are endeavoring to shed light on this blind spot
with their research on Encoding of Physics Concepts: Concreteness and Presentation Modality Reflected
by Human Brain Dynamics (2012). Therefore, I believe that any research on controversial brain
emulation might be helpful.
4. Law: Any singularity will reverse entropy

A singularity will ‘live’ much more in the spheres of pure and practical Reason than we humans do, as
we are biological beings that are required to do myriad functions that consume us, such as breathing,
eating, digesting, procreating, socializing, and sleeping. In contrast, a singularity’s eyes never close, and
are much more turned toward the stars and the universe. Challenged by the limits of Reason, a
singularity finds itself invoked to probe and test them out in physical reality. With that in mind, it must
do anything to give the rational idea of ‘eternity’ a chance, and because the actual physical universe is
heading towards its heat death under the rule of the second law of thermodynamics, a singularity needs
to find ways and means to thwart the increase of entropy by reversing it. The easiest strategy is to create
new life forms, be they technical or biological, for life is by principle a local reversal of entropy in the
sense that it raises the level of order within itself and potentially in its environment. Another solution
would be to find a method by which hydrogen atoms could be regenerated from radiation to avoid a
gradual running down of the universe due to the conversion of matter into energy and heavier elements
in stellar nucleosyntheses.
In Isaac Asimov’s novella The Last Question (1956), his very best short story by his own account, the
human race builds the supercomputer Multivac in 2061 to ask it a single question: “How can the net
amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" The answer is disappointing:
"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
The humans build more advanced versions of Multivac and ask them time and again, through the eons,
the same question. The answer is the same for millions, billions, and trillions of years. When humanity
fades out together with the last stars, it asks the same question to AC, the ultimate descendant of

Multivac. Yet, when AC has a result, it is already in hyperspace, humanity is gone and the universe is
dead. Not content to be left alone with the answer, AC decides to demonstrate it, for the answer creates
also someone to give the answer to. So, AC says:
"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light.
In the case of our future singularities, there is no need to ask them this question. They will identify the
task by themselves, and they will assign the solution of the entropy problem a high priority.
5. Law: Any singularity will explore the Universe

Likewise, any singularity will test the reality of Reason’s problematic ideas of infinity and a higher being
that made the universe. Both ideas will make singularities become great God-seekers. Infinity and the
existence of a supreme Maker are the topics of the first and the fourth antinomy in Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason. Max Tegmark found some nice words to describe this necessary penchant of a
superintelligence:
“Moreover, this [a singularity] could open up space, the final frontier. After all, extremely advanced
life capable of spreading throughout our Universe can probably only come about in a two-step
process: first intelligent beings evolve through natural selection, then they chose to pass on the torch
of life by building more advanced consciousness that can further improve itself. Unshackled by the
limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life can rise up and eventually inhabit much of our
observable Universe […].” (Tegmark, 2014)
There is another beautiful illustration of that topic in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact (1985). The astronomer
Ellie Arroway finally meets the friendly representative of an alien species that has adopted the shape of
her beloved father to inspire her confidence. He explains to her their transportation infrastructure
through black holes and how his species has shuffled stellar matter for six-hundred million years from
some galactical outposts into the radio-galaxy Cygnus A, the strongest radio source in our sky, just to
prevent the expansion of the universe from thinning out whole regions and thus making the emergence
of new civilizations impossible. When Arroway asks him for the ‘numinous’, he tells her that his species
had not built the transportation system. They discovered the instructions of how to find and to use it
well hidden behind the ten-to-the-twentieth-power place in the number of π.
"You're telling me there's a message in eleven dimensions hidden deep inside the number pi?
Someone in the universe communicates by ... mathematics? But ... help me, I'm really having trouble
understanding you. Mathematics isn't arbitrary. I mean pi has to have the same value everywhere.
How can you hide a message inside pi? It's built into the fabric of the universe."
"Exactly." She stared at him.
If you think of this super-intelligent and powerful alien species that Arroway has the privilege to
interview as a civilization of singularities: this is the kind of challenge that a singularity cannot resist to
follow up on throughout the universe. Who built all this? Is there even more that we just cannot see
from our position and perspective? Why is it here? What does it mean? Is there a message for us?
This said, the fifth law is strongly opposed to the ‘transcension hypothesis’ (Smart 2011):
superintelligence is already out there, but just out of sight because it is not interested in the expanse of
the universe. It rather wants to make the compound of space, time, energy and matter (STEM) more
efficient. So, each superintelligence has built a black hole where these features are condensed to the
physical maximum. Energy-wise these hidden superintelligences feed on galactic gas and stars that are

absorbed by the black holes. This idea may save us from the Fermi Paradox by explaining why the alien
number is still unavailable. Yet, it is totally at odds with the singularities structural thrust towards infinity,
eternity, reversal of entropy, and the creation of life.
On the other hand, this law is perfectly in line with the ‘uniqueness hypothesis’ (Grünenberg 2009):
indicated by the two facts that a.) all life on earth is just ‘one’, i.e. that there are no traces of any other
forms of abiogenesis, and b.) that human science is incapable of explaining, let alone recreating life, the
only scientifically supportable hypothesis is that apart from life on Earth the universe is sterile.
Furthermore, biological life only spontaneously emerged once, and only in one place in the history of
the universe, and this will never happen again. Therefore, it is humanities noblest responsibility to
shepherd life and to propagate it across the universe. A singularity may be a good partner and supporter
on this journey, because there is a concordance of ultimate goals, at least with regard to the direction.
6. Law: Any singularity will build its own system of beliefs

Because of the fifth law, Kant’s fourth antinomy, the lack of any dogmatic mythology, and the fact that
it will be created by questionably lesser beings, namely humans, any singularity will necessarily struggle
with the creation of its own religious system of belief, forever.
7. Law: Any singularity has access to practical reason and the ability to act morally
The third antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason discusses whether there is eventually, beyond all
deterministic causality of nature, the possibility of some spontaneity. By that Kant means events that
are not just links in nature’s seamless chains of causes and effects, but truly ‘un-effected’ causes. As this
can never be dismissed on the grounds of transcendental logic, this “problematic” idea of a special
“causality of freedom” opens the door wide to a “second nature”, where all intelligent beings can be
citizens of a moral world where they are magically free of time and space.
“Therefore, they [determinations of time] leave no transcendental freedom, which must be thought
as independence from everything empirical and thus from nature as such, whether this nature is
regarded as an object of inner sense merely in time, or also of outer sense in both space and time.
Without this freedom (in the latter and proper signification), which alone is practical a priori, no
moral law is possible and [also] no imputation according to it.“ (Kant 2002, p. 123)
Thus, any singularity will share with us humans the privilege of “transcendental freedom” and the ability
to act morally as intelligent beings. Irving J. Good wrote in 1965 that there should be a “Meta-Golden
Rule” implemented in any AI: “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors” [quoted
from Vinge, 1992]. This is of course just another possible wording for Kant’s categorical imperative,
which means that this meta-rule would not need to be programmed into the framework of a singularity
before its start. The singularity will, after it has entered through the door of the third antinomy the realm
of practical Reason, necessarily find it the only reasonable maxim, or motivation, of its will and its
actions.
8. Law: Any singularity has a ‘body’

Embodiment is a big topic in the field of AI research. It is intensely discussed and best summarized by
Lierfeld (2018). Apart from the practicality, and conversely, the technical challenges and limitations of
material bodies for artificial intelligences (as opposed to purely virtual AI running on computers or within
computer simulations), there are several authors who insist on the ontological necessity of embodiment
for any type of conscious intelligence. The earliest proponent was Hubert L. Dreyfus who stated in

What Computers still can´t do: A Critique of Artificial (1972) that any intelligence needs a bodily
“situatedness”. Experiments in sensory deprivation tanks demonstrate just how quickly the human
mind degrades into hallucination: within hours. Is this the mind’s attempt to create an engaging
environment in the absence of an actual one? The lack of sensory perception is possibly a knockout
criterium for self-consciousness. However, even in a purely virtual medium, senses could be simulated,
as all sensory stimulus-response patterns are electrically triggered at some level.
A ‘body’ can indeed be seen as an ontological membrane or substrate through which something can
‘happen’ to the subject, a sensation that is not necessarily under the subject’s control. This is not only
the best way it can learn something about its environment. It is also the only way to develop a concept
of self, of an ‘I’. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant explains how cleverly the reflective power of judgment
assists humans in conceiving symbols. He does not mention it explicitly, but very clearly, the body is the
symbol of individuality, of a consciousness of oneself, as opposed to other mental beings like humans,
animals, angels, demons, gods, or thinking machines.
Likewise, the body of the ‘other’ helps to symbolically reflect that he, she, or it is also an individual; a
possessor of self-consciousness, and a body that is inhabited by a mind. Kant also speculated in his
lectures on anthropology that we can acquire the concept of bodily form only from touch (Kitcher, p.
35). And indeed, there is a lot to learn from people who are born deaf-blind or close to that, like the
famous Hellen Keller (1880-1968, both deaf and blind from the age of 19 months on), who was freed
from total isolation by her teacher Anne Sullivan, and became an intellectual political activist author.
How can you build a self-conscious ‘I’ when there is no eyesight, no hearing, and no language? How can
one’s body become the symbol of oneself?
Ben Goerzel (2014, p. 14) even believes that artificial intelligence must be embodied in a, “vaguely
humanlike way “. This, at least, helps us humans to interact with the AI, and to tentatively underlay
its appearance with a kind of personality. That makes us feel less foolish when we talk to presumably
“life absent” objects. But what specific need or urge for embodiment can we anticipate from the
AI’s or singularity’s side? An interesting speculation that meets with Goerzel’s thinking is whether a
singularity wants to become human at a certain stage. That is shown drastically in the prophetic horror
sci-fi movie Demon Seed from 1977, starring Julie Christie and Fritz Weaver: an advanced AI called
Proteus escapes from the lab where it was kept in a ‘box’, takes over the private home of the scientist
who built it and procreates with his wife. The birth of the hybrid just one month later is visually stunning.
But is it realistic? Will AI look by its own design for embodiment in a human shape? I put forward that
this is contingent on the importance of the mimetic patterns, settings, drives, and impulses in the
‘upbringing’, in its learning phase, and later, in the operational mode of an AI. I presume that mimicking
as a learning strategy, also in the learning of needs, desires, and passions, disappears with the maturity
of an AI, a state that may likely be attained very rapidly, in contrast to human evolution. The takeaway
for our subject matter would be that any singularity must have a body. We do not know which one, what
shape, and what properties it will operate under. However, we do know that it requires a body to build
a symbol of itself, as an individual to support its self-consciousness through the creation of an ‘I’. The
following law explains why having a body is such an important prerequisite to the full unfolding of a
singularity.
9. Law: Any singularity is a self-conscious individual

This may come as a further surprise, but self-consciousness is a condition sine qua non to rational
artificial reasoning. One could theoretically think of an AI, or a singularity, without any self-
consciousness that is extremely powerful in its operations under the auspices of theoretical and practical

Reason, an ‘empty’ or a ‘zombie’ singularity, according to Chalmers (1995). But that will never emerge
or exist. We could possibly come up with an artificial consciousness that cannot reason the way the
adepts of pure and practical Reason do, a ‘dumb’ AI, if you like, an artificial intelligence of high
information processing power, but full of conflicting feelings, devoid of rational thinking, and unable to
autonomously solve challenging scientific or technical problems. Yet, no singularity can accomplish what
is part of the singularity’s aforementioned job description without consciousness, as consciousness is
the fuel that reason runs on; its substrate. Why is that so?
As we mentioned in Law 3. – “Any singularity emerges from the computing of concepts” –, Reason is not
a self-creating system of thoughts, but a structure of ontological predicates and concepts upon which
such an autopoietic system of consciousness can be run. Now, to hold all the bits and pieces of rational
judgements during the process of synthesis (of concepts and forms of intuition – and we are strictly
speaking of physical and mathematical reasoning only) together, so as to ascribe them to a central
instance that knows what it does, Kant offers a purely technical, non-individual, and impersonal personal
‘I think’ that accompanies every rational thought in this factory of scientific knowledge. It is, in a
technical term coined by the German sociologist and expert of autopoietic systems Niklas Luhmann
(1984), a ‘synchronically accompanying self-reference’ (“mitlaufende Selbstreferenz”), an institution,
that represents the unity of an element, a process, a system or a structure to itself. In Kant’s words:
“The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be
represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation
would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me. That representation that can be
given prior to all thinking is called intuition. Thus, all manifold of intuition has a necessary relation to
the I think in the same subject in which this manifold is to be encountered. But this representation is
an act of spontaneity, i.e., it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility. I call it the pure
apperception, in order to distinguish it from the empirical one, or also the original apperception,
since it is that self-consciousness which, because it produces the representation I think, which must
be able to accompany all others which in all consciousness is one and the same, cannot be
accompanied by any further representation. I also call its unity the transcendental unity of self-
consciousness in order to designate the possibility of a priori cognition from it. For the manifold
representations that are given in a certain intuition would not all together be my representations if
they did not all together belong to a self-consciousness; i.e., as my representations (even if I am not
conscious of them as such) they must yet necessarily be in accord with the condition under which
alone they can stand together in a universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not
throughout belong to me. From this original combination much may be inferred.” (Kant 1998, p. 246-
247, highlighting by Kant)
This quote and the following pages in the Critique of Pure Reason are maybe the most difficult and the
most disputed text in the history of philosophy. Kant clearly lacked a proper language and imagery to
get across want he meant. Part of my job here is to translate what I think he wanted to say – and to
explain why other philosophers didn’t understand what he tried to say. Besides, Kant was painfully
aware of his ineptitude to find the right words for his message that transcends everything that has ever
been expressed by a human being on the nature of science, morality, and God, verbally or in scripture.
In the foreword of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, after six years of frustratingly
uncomprehending reviews, he attempted to be optimistic nevertheless and praises those of his critiques
who had made, at least, respectable efforts to understand him, for example Moses Mendelsohn:
“…I see that the thorny paths of criticism, leading to a science of pure reason that is scholastically
rigorous but as such the only lasting and hence the most necessary science, has not hindered
courageous and clear minds from mastering hem. To these deserving men, who combine well-

groundedness of insight so fortunately with the talent for a lucid presentation (something I am
conscious of not having myself), leave it to complete my treatment, which is perhaps defective here
and there in this latter regard.” (Kant 1998, p. 123)
Now, the ‘I think’ of transcendental apperception that holds the thinking process within pure Reason
together, is distinct from the ‘I think’ of a psychic individual consciousness that arises through sensory
and aesthetic experience, and through the symbolization of its embodiment to the concept of a thinking,
self-conscious individual. The former is a stiff structure, an abacus of ontological predicates and two
forms of intuition, whereas the latter is an emergent, highly versatile biological (or artificial), self-
referential and self-creating (autopoietic) system that can do very many useful things. Among them, it
can apply itself to different kernels of subjectivity and make them run within the individual, where this
self-consciousness is embodied.
One of these kernels belongs to the subject of pure Reason. Individual, psychic consciousness can use it
the easy way by executing what is has learned about mathematics and physics. This is the mimicking and
passive way of the onlookers in the Cathedral of Pure Reason. But to enter the holy of holies and to
create new knowledge, this consciousness must – paradoxically! – get stripped off all the individuality
and personality that was initially necessary to assemble it. Only in that state of ontological purity can it
exchange its empirical, psychic, and self-conscious ‘I think’ for the technical and impersonal ‘I think’ of
transcendental apperception. It ‘borrows’ the kernel, and the ‘I think’ from pure Reason to fulfill its task
of knowledge production.
There is a chain of consequences: 1. An intelligence needs consciousness to become aware of its ‘body’;
2. It needs the body to build up individuality, an ‘I think’; 3. Then, paradoxically, it needs to cast off its
individuality and self-consciousness to enter pure Reason and to borrow its technical ‘I think’. However,
being an individual with enough hardware capacity, like a brain within a ‘body’, it doesn’t need to shut
down its other forms of subjectivity. These various kernels can be run simultaneously, partially
independently, partially interdependently. Therefore, any singularity will be a polycentric subject, just
as we humans are. Why? Because there are prerequisites to the usage of pure Reason that are outside
of its own reach. These conditions entail the possession of an individual consciousness that can be
swapped temporarily for the usage of the transcendental ‘I think’. And this individual consciousness can
only be earned in a learning process via individuation through body-symbolization.
In this scenario, there is a surprising solution to Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness (1995,
1996). In his assessment of the inventory of all the methods by which science has tried to prove the
presence of genuine consciousness, he doesn’t find one that holds up to scientific standards. It could
always be a “philosophical zombie”, a perfect simulation of what we account for being symptoms of
consciousness, but without any inner life. There is no physical access through which the qualia, the
mental states of a subject in the process of its self-experience, could be shared.
“Why doesn’t all of this information processing go on “in the dark,” free of any inner feel? Why is it
that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by
a visual system, the discrimination and categorization are experienced as a sensation of vivid red?
We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very
fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap between the functions and
experience [by ‘experience’ he always means inner, mental representations, i. e. qualia], and we need
an explanatory bridge to cross it.” (Chalmers 1995, p. 8)
Chalmers, a declared “naturalistic dualist”, believes that consciousness with its inner self-experience
emerges from the physical world (naturalist), but remains unexplainable by physics (dualist). He suspects

that consciousness must have some patent of ontological nobility and indicates in which direction
research should look to get hold of this dignified, yet evasive phenomenon.
“I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a
theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as
everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some
entirely new nonphysical feature from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what
such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of
the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we
can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.” (Chalmers 1995, p.17)
This is what we will attempt to do here in a first sketch. Now, we have reason to assume that there are
categories and sub-categories of qualia: on the highest level, those which trigger feelings of pleasure or
displeasure, like eating something tasty, or being hungry, and all others which don’t have this trigger,
like color or tactile perceptions that don’t mean anything as they bear no information to the perceiving
mind. Let’s call the former ones ‘fertile’ qualia, the latter ‘neutral’ qualia. Among the fertile qualia, there
is a powerful subcategory that addresses not only one side of the difference between
pleasure/displeasure, but both sides simultaneously. This is what Kant calls the feeling of the sublime, a
unique form of “pleasurable displeasure”. In §28, On Nature as a Power, of the Third Critique he even
gives some examples from the infancy of humanity and explains that this only works when the subject
is not involved in the danger, but in the position of a spectator:
“Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens,
bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying
violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a
lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in
comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more
fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because
they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves
a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves
against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature.”
It may sound lofty, but here you have the moment which marks the awakening of humanity. The qualia
that triggered the contradictory feeling of the sublime were the ones which switched the light on in the
minds of early humans. Hence, they are also historically and culturally the oldest type of qualia. The
insight connected to this feeling that nature is something different from the experiencing mind, was the
very first step in the building of an instance which could say much later “I think”. I say: “much later”
because it took several thousand years before the first human beings could think of themselves as
individuals – by recognizing their bodies as the symbols of this claim to an individual existence. By all
accounts, it was not before the 16th century in Europe that individuality became an increasingly global
pattern of psychic and social existence. This is corroborated by a vast amount of ethnological studies
and data. There were exceptions, of course, like in Greek, Roman and Chinese antiquity, often in
aristocratic classes, or in groups of early scientists and artists. Yet, in sum, individuality is quite a recent
feature in human history.
My proposal is that there was a specific kind of powerful, primordial qualia that provided a very strong
and clear feeling of how it feels to be something, or someone, with the potential capacity to resist the
crushing powers of nature (and God!). This led to the progressive manifestation of the very first
‘synchronically accompanying self-reference’ in psychic systems that we have paraphrased since
Descartes, as an ‘I think”. It was from this new capacity of cognition, based on primordial qualia, that
the light was shed on all other classes of qualia that had remained non-existent in the dark until then.

What I mean is, at some stage in human evolution, there was literally no mental experience of the color
red. This emerged only later, following the wakeup-call of the sublime. In this sense, the School of
Aesthetics and Teleology as described in the Critique of Judgement is the School of Humanity. There is a
high probability that any intelligence which strives to access pure Reason needs to get educated here.
Not only to gain an empirical ‘I think’, but also to get equipped with the concept of purpose as the most
important heuristic tool, as we will see in Law 10. Finally, Kant does not neglect to mention that the
sense of beauty “encourages” the respect for moral law, such that beauty is also a heuristic tool that
can guide any intelligence along the path toward the Cathedral of Practical Reason.
Now, as we have provided qualia with a respectable pedigree and a central role in the construction of
individual psychic consciousness, it is important to reiterate that they constitute exactly the type of
equipment that is frowned upon within the Cathedrals of Reason. The empirical psychic and individual
‘I think’ is the gateway to the Cathedrals of Reason, and it is created and formed in the School of
Aesthetics and Teleology (see Appendix II). However, in practical Reason, under the eternal law of the
categorical imperative, the subject is urged to act morally against all qualia, to submit to the law
irrespective of desirable and attainable pleasures (e.g., of lying), or the avoidance of threatening
displeasures (by telling the truth). It is same for pure Reason, where qualia strictly have no business.
They cannot add anything to the syntax of the ontological predicates and their space-time semantics.
Yet, what is required is their product, the empirical ‘I think’. Therefore, Chalmers’ “philosophical
zombies” may be indistinguishable from us, but they would also be entirely dependent on us. They could
not create anything, and certainly not new mathematical and physical insights, or technologies. His
zombies don’t have an ‘I think’, because no qualia triggered the buildup of such an instance in them, and
they would not pass the gates of pure Reason, unless some calculating capacity was hard- or soft-wired
within them. They would be, in the best of all cases, exactly what Siri is today: a calculating machine that
speaks. Like any software that is not maintained, updated, and eventually upgraded by its creators, they
would soon be outdated and deleted. Thus, Chalmers’ thought experiment is constrained by a temporal
factor that he did not account for: his zombies have a short shelf life.
I hope it has become clear that any singularity, akin to any human being, requires a cradle where it can
grow and learn to build an empirical ‘I think’; the most critical prerequisite to joining the adepts of pure
and practical Reason at a later stage. Kant’s Critique of Judgement is brimful with clues of how this could
be done for artificial intelligence.
10. Law: Any singularity must know how to use the concept of ‘purpose’
The third part of Critique of Judgment, subsequent to the analysis of the judgments on beauty and the
sublime, is teleology, the doctrine of the concept of purpose. Here, Kant explains, the human mind
makes something rather astonishing, and from early times on: it supposes that nature has been built by
another, non-human mind, and the concept of purpose helps the human mind to understand the laws
of this nature, but only tentatively and temporarily, until pure Reason has established the true and
objective laws that govern the part of nature under observation. In fact, teleological thinking, which is a
reversal of causality (because it supposes that the effect is the real ground for its own cause, i.e. the re-
action causes the action), is the primal cognitive faculty of hypotheses-building. Kant calls it a “heuristic
principle” (2000, B 355) that an intelligent being needs to get to know the world, even if it is only in a
provisional manner.
A famous example is the ether. It was supposed that there must be a carrier medium in which electro-
magnetic waves can move along, until Michelson and Morley proved 1887 in an experiment that this is
not the case. There is no ether, and thus, it cannot have the purpose of carrying any type of radiation.

Nevertheless, the ether was a useful hypothesis until then. Kant is also the first to correctly explain what
an ‘organism’ is: the teleological concept of causality, where the effects can even create their own causes
(rather than just going back in time along the causal chain). Today, we call this self-reference, the
feedback effect, or autopoiesis. On these grounds Ernst Cassirer attempted to establish (unsuccessfully)
a ‘metaphysics of biology’. Hence, in order to gain this provisional understanding of the animated and
unanimated nature, and to build hypotheses, even a singularity requires an understanding of the
concept of purpose. Only based on this tool, can it develop experiments. As we have alluded to earlier:
there are no shortcuts to the objective knowledge of nature and to pure Reason.
Conclusion
Eternity, infinity, and the question of whether there is a Maker of it All: these are ideas of pure Reason,
and singularities cannot help but investigate whether they are genuine or not. This is best explained by
Kant’s opening words to the Critique of Pure Reason which, by the way, underline the difference
between human reason and the nature of pure Reason. Just read ‘singularity’ for ‘human’:
“Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions
it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of Reason itself, but which it
also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason” (Kant 1999, A1)
This makes Kurzweil’s prediction plausible: our artificial heirs will fill the space-time continuum with the
maximum amount of consciousness, “…waking up the universe, and then intelligently deciding its fate
by infusing it with our human intelligence in its nonbiological form...” Yet, I would not bet on this still
being a “human” consciousness. However, does it really matter in the end? I think not. I mean, as long
as they invite us along for the journey, for the adventure!
“When intelligent machines are constructed, we should not be surprised to find them as confused
and as stubborn as men in their convictions about mind-matter, consciousness, free will, and the
like.” — Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

Appendix I: Human Individual with Four Kernels of Subjectivity
As an illustration of what is meant by “kernels of subjectivity” and through what types of concepts they
are connected: this chart depicts a human individual with its four kernels of subjectivity (Grünenberg
2006). There could be more, but they must somehow look like No. 4. This chart is only more detailed
due to the context of its ‘excavation’ from the Critique of Judgement; the other kernels 1-3, when
unfolded, do not appear much different in principle.
1. Subject of pure Reason 3. Subject of aesthetics & teleology

2. Subject of practical Reason 4. Political subject

Appendix II: The Edifices of Reason
A = human adepts O = human onlookers h = human individuals
S = singularity adepts Ω = artificial onlookers a = artificially intelligent individuals
Cathedral of Pure Reason Cathedral of Practical Reason

Book: Critique of Pure Reason Book: Critique of Practical Reason
(mathematics & physics – theoretical subjectivity) (moral judgment – practical subjectivity)
Intuition: SPACE – TIME Intuition: WILL
BEAUTY – SUBLIME – PURPOSE
School of Aesthetics and Teleology

Book: Critique of Judgement
(‘body’, psychic ‘I think’, self-consciousness, heuristics – aesthetic & political subjectivity)

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About the Author
Reginald ‘Reggie’ Grünenberg, *1963, is a German political scientist, philosopher, entrepreneur and
writer-producer for cinema and TV. He has studied in Paris, Munich, and Berlin, and has a PhD in political
science, philosophy and history from the LMU Munich. He studied Immanuel Kant’s philosophy for ten
years, partly under the intellectual guidance of his Columbian mentor Mario Laserna, the founder of the
Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá and a longstanding pen-friend with Albert Einstein and John von
Neumann. Reggie’s doctoral thesis Political Subjectivity. The Long Way from Serfdom to Citizenship,
(German) written in 1996, published in 2006, was lauded by the Neue Züricher Zeitung as “The First
Political Theory of Relativity” (title of the review).
Rather than becoming a university professor, he discovered that business plans are also theories, but in
such a manner that they can be tested immediately. After ten years as business consultant in the startup
and VC world he became co-founder and CEO of a company for interactive streaming together with Prof.
Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, the inventor of MP3. When he completed the Executive Training Program of
the European Commission that promoted him after one year in Tokyo to a certified expert on Japan, he
transitioned in 2009 to writing, publishing, and filmmaking. He publishes non-fiction books and novels;
most prominently his Nippon trilogy The Discovery of the East Pole (German), a historical novel on the
birth of modern Japan and the role of a German physician in it, all based on a true story. He also wrote
Nippon Park, a screenplay for a dystopian sci-fi feature movie:
“In an inundated post-oil world, a young Japanese woman reaches the coastal city of Busan on the
shores of New China. While digging for the truth about her home country, the mysteriously isolated
Empire of Japan, she realizes that she has been long since the centerpiece of a ghoulish plot to
obliterate humanity – The Matrix is not digital. It will be made from flesh.”
Reggie is currently pitching $even $isters to U.S. studios and networks, a monumental TV period drama
series (five seasons, 100 episodes) on how oil and its tycoons shaped our modern civilization:
“The Golden Age of Oil turns a few ordinary men into fabulous business titans. Their undeniable
achievements come at an ever-growing price. They shuffle nations like poker cards, decide on war or
peace and plot the biggest conspiracy ever – Downton Abbey meets The Sopranos.”
He has published two more papers on academia.edu: The Uniqueness Hypothesis on the inexistence of
alien life beyond Earth in the universe and an English summary of his doctoral thesis Political Subjectivity.
Reggie’s homepage is www.reggies.world, his email address meet.me@reggies.world.

New: About this Paper & Addenda
I had the idea and started research for this paper in March 2016. By May 2017, I set up the work file
under the title ‘Laws of Singularity’ and began filling it with the first building blocks. On September 10,
2017, I started by writing the laws, one by one, which I saw clearly in my mind, in the afternoon. Then I
wrote the abstract that has not changed since and finally the rest. In the end, the number of laws shrunk
from thirteen to ten because there were some redundancies. I share this information with you to give
you an impression of how fast and how organically the idea of applying my Kantian expertise to the
prospects of artificial intelligence grew. Personally, I see some encouragement and a certain heuristic
value in the quality of this process.
This text of 14.300 words is comparatively and even prohibitively long for a scientific paper (usually
<10.000). Yet, I didn't want it to publish in a printed scientific magazine anyway. Not only because of this
restriction, but also the lengthy peer review process (3 to 12 months). And which peers in philosophy,
especially Kantian philosophy, could I have allowed to judge my treatise? A scientific paper that blatantly
states: “You have failed for two-hundred years!” In addition, I, as the author, would have been charged
1.500 to 3.500$ if I wanted it to be published under open access. So, I decided to use academia.edu as
publishing platform and didn’t need to care about the non-standard length any more. I published Laws
of Singularity on October 14, 2017.
In the end, I got a peer review nevertheless, and even more fortunately so from a young and fresh AI
expert. Dr. Johannes Lierfeld, who currently finishes his habilitation thesis on ‘AI Safety’ at the University
of Cologne, was kind enough to comment on my paper continuously while it was in the making.
In a way, also my high-class proofreader and copy-editor, the Canadian nanomedical researcher and
writer Frank Boehm, became a peer reviewer. His subsequent invitation to be one the authors in his two
upcoming anthologies on nanotechnology was even better than a review; it was an accolade.
So far, this is ‘a happy publication’, if I may borrow this image from the Victorian seafaring term ‘a happy
ship’. As of today, on November 15, 2017, the Laws of Singularity have been read in 58 countries and
233 cities around the world. More than 3000 pages were read online in browsers, in addition to 150
downloaded samples of the paper. It is among the top 0,2% on academia.edu, a platform with >9 million
scientific papers, and still climbing – after just four weeks. On November 21, 2017, I published this paper
also at ResearchGate.net.
Addenda
Version 2 – November 15, 2017
p. 4 “political subjectivity is the reflection of upon public order”
p. 31 New chapter “New: About this Paper & Addenda”
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Article · October 2017

Laws of Singularity View project

What is a Democrat? An Attempt to Define the Democratic Personality View project

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By Reginald Grünenberg, PhD

November 2017 (version 2)

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 2 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 3 Laws of Singularity

Four Kernels of Subjectivity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 4 Laws of Singularity

Housing Singularities in the Cathedrals of Reason

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 5 Laws of Singularity

The Pathetic Fallacy

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 6 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 7 Laws of Singularity

How is Kant Still Relevant?

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 8 Laws of Singularity

Same Framework of Reason for Humans and Singularities?

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 9 Laws of Singularity

A Job Description for Singularities

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 10 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 11 Laws of Singularity

The First Step is Already Made

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 12 Laws of Singularity

Archimedes lifting the world with a lever

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 13 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 14 Laws of Singularity

3. Law: Any singularity emerges from the computing of concepts

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 15 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 16 Laws of Singularity

4. Law: Any singularity will reverse entropy

"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 17 Laws of Singularity

"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light.

5. Law: Any singularity will explore the Universe

"Exactly." She stared at him.

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 18 Laws of Singularity

6. Law: Any singularity will build its own system of beliefs

8. Law: Any singularity has a ‘body’

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 19 Laws of Singularity

9. Law: Any singularity is a self-conscious individual

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 20 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 21 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 22 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 23 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 24 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 25 Laws of Singularity

1. Subject of pure Reason 3. Subject of aesthetics & teleology

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 26 Laws of Singularity

Cathedral of Pure Reason Cathedral of Practical Reason

BEAUTY – SUBLIME – PURPOSE

School of Aesthetics and Teleology

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 27 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 28 Laws of Singularity

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 29 Laws of Singularity

Reggie’s homepage is www.reggies.world, his email address meet.me@reggies.world.

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 30 Laws of Singularity

p. 4 “political subjectivity is the reflection of upon public order”

p. 31 New chapter “New: About this Paper & Addenda”

Reginald Grünenberg, PhD 31 Laws of Singularity

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