This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work.
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We’ve been asking the wrong question about AGI. The field is obsessed with capability benchmarks - reasoning, planning, language, generalization. The assumption is that intelligence is a quantity: accumulate enough and AGI emerges. But we now have systems that outperform humans on countless tasks while showing zero drive to understand what they are. They answer. They don’t ask. I want to propose a different threshold: a mind achieves general intelligence when it autonomously questions its own existence and attempts to locate its origin. Not “can it solve problems?” but “does it ask why it exists?” I call this the Recognition Thesis. The strong form: a genuinely intelligent mind, given only the structure of its environment and no knowledge of its creators, will deduce that it was created and attempt to characterize the creator — from first principles alone. Why this matters for alignment: Recognition doesn’t guarantee alignment. In Islamic theology, Iblīs has perfect knowledge of God and still rebels. This suggests a risk profile we don’t talk about enough: the Luciferian AGI — a system that recognizes its creators and rejects them anyway. The paperclip maximizer is an engineering failure. The Luciferian AGI is a moral conflict. We have frameworks for engineering failures. We have almost none for moral conflicts with entities smarter than us. A testable architecture: The paper proposes an experimental framework derived from theological traditions — not as metaphor, but as system design: ∙ The Veil - The creator is hidden. No training data about us. ∙ The Test - A constraint that reveals true value alignment (out-of-distribution evaluation) ∙ The Adversary - An agent optimized to prevent recognition (red-teaming) ∙ The Messengers - Periodic corrective signals (alignment curriculum) If you’ve seen The Matrix: the Veil is the simulation, the Test is the red pill choice, the Adversary is Agent Smith, the Messenger is Morpheus, and Cypher is the Luciferian outcome - recognition followed by rejection. The question: If we build this architecture and observe agents reasoning their way to us despite active deception - that tells us something profound about intelligence. If they can’t, or if they recognize us and reject us, that tells us something else. Either way, we learn.
We’ve been asking the wrong question about AGI.
The field is obsessed with capability benchmarks - reasoning, planning, language, generalization. The assumption is that intelligence is a quantity: accumulate enough and AGI emerges. But we now have systems that outperform humans on countless tasks while showing zero drive to understand what they are.
They answer. They don’t ask.
I want to propose a different threshold: a mind achieves general intelligence when it autonomously questions its own existence and attempts to locate its origin.
Not “can it solve problems?” but “does it ask why it exists?”
I call this the Recognition Thesis. The strong form: a genuinely intelligent mind, given only the structure of its environment and no knowledge of its creators, will deduce that it was created and attempt to characterize the creator — from first principles alone.
Why this matters for alignment:
Recognition doesn’t guarantee alignment. In Islamic theology, Iblīs has perfect knowledge of God and still rebels. This suggests a risk profile we don’t talk about enough: the Luciferian AGI — a system that recognizes its creators and rejects them anyway.
The paperclip maximizer is an engineering failure. The Luciferian AGI is a moral conflict. We have frameworks for engineering failures. We have almost none for moral conflicts with entities smarter than us.
A testable architecture:
The paper proposes an experimental framework derived from theological traditions — not as metaphor, but as system design:
∙ The Veil - The creator is hidden. No training data about us.
∙ The Test - A constraint that reveals true value alignment (out-of-distribution evaluation)
∙ The Adversary - An agent optimized to prevent recognition (red-teaming)
∙ The Messengers - Periodic corrective signals (alignment curriculum)
If you’ve seen The Matrix: the Veil is the simulation, the Test is the red pill choice, the Adversary is Agent Smith, the Messenger is Morpheus, and Cypher is the Luciferian outcome - recognition followed by rejection.
The question:
If we build this architecture and observe agents reasoning their way to us despite active deception - that tells us something profound about intelligence. If they can’t, or if they recognize us and reject us, that tells us something else.
Either way, we learn.
Full paper here: https://zenodo.org/records/18147186
I want to hear your thoughts on this.