Symbiotic
Intelligence
Glossary

We are developing a glossary of the terms that underpin Symbiotic Intelligence, laying the groundwork for a conceptual shift in the way we think about life and Intelligence.

Sporing

The current emphasis on Machine Learning (ML) within AI highlights a technology that generates predictions by attempting to replicate its training data. These algorithms not only exclude future change but also amplify pre-existing biases in their training.

The indeterminate motion of sporing functions as a critique of ML’s predictive stasis. Indeterminacy is not a random movement; the movement of spores is intimately connected to the mushroom's ecology: the weather, wind, temperature, and humidity. We believe the indeterminacy of spores is the key to emergence.

Symbiotic Algorithms  

Symbiotic algorithms stand for both narrative imagery and an attempt to rethink Machine Learning at the code level. They challenge the dominance of 'survival of the fittest' narratives in the popular AI imagination and within the code structures of evolutionary and genetic algorithms. Symbiotic algorithms recognise the importance of ecological encounters, in which entities form, perform, and develop AI. This challenges the prevailing aggressive, extractive, domineering, and destructive environment that is overly focused on systems' notions of winning and losing, profit and loss, etc.

Hyphae

Hyphae inspire decentred, non-deterministic, non-hierarchical organisation. The vast network of hyphae transforms into a mycelial network through branching and fusion. This mycelial network has no command centre and functions as a decentralised, distributed collective network of hyphal tips.

It is a non-deterministic system, as the outcome is not predictable based on the initial conditions and the rules governing the system. The intelligence of mycelium is composed of its environs and substance, introducing indeterminacy and uncertainty that make it impossible to precisely determine the system’s future state.

Mycelium Time

Mycelium Time refers to a spatio-temporal, non-linear network that has no beginning or end, where the past never ends, and the future is already active. Mycelium Time continues to be active in the linkage that projects an anticipation based on the past into the future, which is fed back to create the composition of the now (the present). It is a multi-temporal linkage network in which every mark is a collective mark that entails the long process and memory of history and future simultaneously, allowing the marks within the visible domain to emerge.

Circulation of Information

Circulation or/and rhythm is the movement and spreading or distributing through a system(s). Circulation establishes patterns and repetitions that create a certain knowledge, and in this sense, circulation itself functions as a channel of truth and reality.

Sporing can be seen as the symbiotic, non-linear circulation of information in a non-deterministic system. A dynamic and unpredictable dissemination of information influenced by its ecology and manifest as a topological surface. Sporing allows for multiplicity and multi-temporality to take place in any given moment.