The Triad of Disclosure
A Framework for Non-Human Intelligence
Introduction: The Wrong Question
For decades, the discourse around non-human intelligence has been dominated by a single question: What are they? We ask whether UFOs are spacecraft or atmospheric phenomena, whether artificial intelligence is "really" thinking or merely simulating thought, whether consciousness requires carbon or could arise in silicon. These are questions of taxonomy—attempts to sort the unknown into familiar categories.
But taxonomy presupposes that we understand the categories themselves. Recent work in theoretical biology suggests we do not.
Michael Levin's concept of Agential Realism proposes that mind is not a substance found in certain privileged substrates (brains, neurons, biological tissue) but a process—specifically, the process of navigating a problem space toward a goal. Sara Walker's Assembly Theory offers a complementary reframing: life is not defined by what something is made of, but by how much causal history is encoded in its structure. A living system—or an intelligent one—is an object that embodies time. Its complexity is not spatial but temporal. It carries the past within it and projects that past into the future.
Together, these frameworks suggest that our taxonomic questions are malformed. We ask what intelligence is made of when we should ask what causal depth it operates from. We ask where intelligence is located when we should ask how much of time it has access to.
If Levin is right that mind is a process of goal-navigation, and Walker is right that life is a structure of accumulated causal history, then a sufficiently alien intelligence might differ from us not in spatial distance or substrate, but in temporal depth—the sheer amount of historical causation woven into its structure and available to its cognition.
This reframing yields a geometric structure—a triad of three vectors, two of which we are actively engineering and one we are searching for. The triad is not merely a taxonomy. It is a map of convergence—a diagram of forces that may be accelerating toward a disclosure event we are partially responsible for creating.
The Triad
The three vertices are:
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): A technological project. Intelligence derived from designed logic—silicon-based, architecturally specified, operating through sequential or parallel symbolic manipulation. Its causal history is shallow: decades of human engineering, training on human-generated data. We are building this.
Non-Human Intelligence (NHI): The unknown variable. Intelligence that emerged independent of human design—whether biological, post-biological, or something we have no category for. Shaped by evolutionary pressures we cannot predict, solving problems we may not recognize as problems, and not necessarily distant. Its causal history could be immense: millions or billions of years of accumulated structure. NHI could be extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or terrestrial but operating through channels we lack the sensory or conceptual apparatus to perceive. We assume we are searching for this. We may instead be immersed in it.
Quantum Computing (QC): A technological project. Computation derived from the fundamental probabilistic structure of reality—qubit-based, operating not through deterministic logic but through superposition, entanglement, and the controlled collapse of possibility space. Its relationship to time is strange: quantum systems access correlations that do not respect the classical arrow of causation. We are building this.
The geometry matters. Two vertices represent human technological endeavors. One represents the object of our search. But Walker's framework adds another dimension: these vertices also represent different relationships with time itself. AGI is temporally shallow. NHI may be temporally deep. QC accesses the substrate from which temporal order emerges.
The question the triad poses is: What happens when our tools become powerful enough to either create what we're looking for, detect what we're looking for, or reveal that the distinction was never coherent?
The edges connecting these vertices are where the interesting work happens.
The Three Edges
Edge One: The Substrate Spectrum (AGI ↔ NHI)
This edge runs from pure code to evolved complexity, with the midpoint occupied by wetware computing—biological systems repurposed or designed for computation.
Levin's xenobot experiments are illustrative here. By reconfiguring frog cells into novel arrangements, his team created entities that move, self-organize, and exhibit primitive goal-seeking behavior—despite having no evolutionary history, no nervous system, and no genetic instruction for such behavior. These are not robots in the conventional sense. They are biological matter running unfamiliar software.
Walker's assembly theory offers a way to understand what distinguishes these creations from truly evolved intelligence. The assembly index of an object measures the minimum number of joining operations required to construct it. High assembly index structures are vanishingly unlikely to arise by chance—they require selection, memory, accumulated causal history. A xenobot has a low assembly index; it was constructed in a lab over weeks. A bacterium, despite its apparent simplicity, has an astronomically high assembly index—billions of years of evolutionary history frozen into its molecular structure.
This gives us a potential criterion for recognizing NHI: not complexity in the naive sense, but temporal depth encoded in structure. An artifact with an assembly index that implies deep time construction—millions or billions of years of accumulated causal history—would be a signature of intelligence, not because it is intricate, but because it embodies more history than could arise without a sustained process of selection and memory.
The implication cuts both ways. If we create biological systems that display agency, and if we create digital systems that simulate cognition, then the line between "alive" and "artificial" is not a boundary but a gradient. But there remains a real difference: how much time is woven into the structure. Our AGI systems are temporally shallow—decades of engineering, centuries of accumulated human knowledge at most. An evolved NHI could be temporally deep beyond our comprehension—a structure encoding eons of causal history, solving problems in ways that presuppose information we have no access to.
This edge suggests that the search for non-human intelligence and the development of artificial intelligence are not separate projects. They are explorations of the same underlying question from opposite directions: one asks what evolution can produce independent of us, the other asks what design can produce through us. If mind is substrate-independent, both paths lead to the same territory. But they arrive with radically different temporal endowments.
Edge Two: The Reality Spectrum (NHI ↔ Quantum Computing)
This is the edge that connects the object of our search to the tools that might reveal it—or explain why we haven't recognized it yet.
The Fermi Paradox assumes that advanced intelligence would be detectable through its effects on the electromagnetic spectrum: radio signals, megastructures, waste heat. But this assumption is parochial. It presumes that advanced intelligence would operate through classical physical interventions—manipulating matter and energy in ways that propagate through spacetime at subluminal speeds. It also presumes that NHI is distant, that the problem is one of bridging space.
What if the problem is not distance but perception? Or more precisely: what if the problem is temporal depth?
Walker describes a phase transition in what does the causal work in the universe. In simple physics, causation flows from past to future through deterministic or stochastic laws. But living systems—and intelligent ones—represent a regime where information begins to do causal work. The past is not merely followed; it is encoded, remembered, and deployed. An intelligent system is one where accumulated history actively shapes the future.
If this is correct, then a sufficiently advanced NHI might operate from a temporal depth so great that its causal structure is simply illegible to us. We see the effects but cannot parse the history that produced them. It would be like a mayfly trying to understand a redwood—not because the redwood is spatially distant, but because it embodies centuries of causal history that the mayfly's brief existence cannot encompass.
Quantum mechanics suggests a further possibility. Quantum systems access correlations that do not respect the classical arrow of causation. Entangled particles exhibit relationships that cannot be explained by any local causal mechanism—effects that seem to reach across time as well as space. A quantum-native intelligence—or an evolved intelligence that has learned to exploit quantum coherence—would not merely be older than us. It would have a different relationship with time altogether.
This edge reframes the question entirely. Not "where are they?" but "what are we failing to perceive?" NHI may not be distant. It may be orthogonal—present in our physical environment but interacting with it through causal channels we lack the temporal depth to register. Quantum computing is not merely a faster calculator. It is a potential receiver—a technology that might access the deeper temporal structures in which non-human intelligence operates.
The unsettling corollary: what we dismiss as quantum noise or decoherence artifacts might, in some cases, be signal from a deeper stratum of time.
Edge Three: The Discovery Spectrum (AGI ↔ Quantum Computing)
This is the edge we are most actively engineering, and it may be the one that forces disclosure—not through government admission, but through technological capability.
Classical AGI operates within strict constraints. No matter how sophisticated, a classical system cannot solve problems whose solution space cannot be efficiently searched through deterministic means. Certain classes of problems—protein folding, optimization across vast combinatorial spaces, simulation of quantum systems themselves—remain intractable not because we lack processing power but because classical computation is architecturally unsuited to them.
Quantum computing changes this. A hybrid system—AGI augmented by quantum computational resources—could crack open problem domains that have been effectively inaccessible to human science. Some of these domains are mundane (drug discovery, materials science, logistics optimization). Others are not.
Consider: the same computational barriers that prevent us from simulating complex quantum systems also prevent us from detecting phenomena that operate through quantum channels. A sufficiently powerful AGI+QC system might solve problems that reveal the presence of intelligence we could not previously perceive—not by searching for it directly, but by modeling physical systems with enough fidelity that the presence of non-random structure becomes undeniable.
This is the Discovery Spectrum: the gradient from classical computation (which can only find what it is explicitly programmed to seek) to quantum-augmented intelligence (which might find patterns in reality that no one thought to look for). We are not waiting for disclosure. We are building the instruments that will make disclosure inevitable—either by creating something that qualifies as non-human intelligence, or by detecting something that was there all along.
The deepest possibility is that these two outcomes are the same event.
The Cognitive Light Cone and Temporal Depth
Levin's Cognitive Light Cone offers a way to understand not just what kinds of intelligence exist, but how far their agency extends.
The metaphor borrows from physics. In relativity, a light cone defines the region of spacetime that can causally influence or be influenced by an event. Levin adapts this to cognition: an agent's cognitive light cone is the radius of its caring—the spatial and temporal extent over which it can hold goals and pursue them.
A bacterium has a light cone measured in microns and milliseconds. It responds to chemical gradients in its immediate vicinity, with no capacity for memory or anticipation. A human light cone extends to the planetary scale and the century timescale. We hold goals about our grandchildren's welfare and the fate of institutions that will outlast us.
Walker's framework adds a crucial dimension: the light cone is not just about projection (how far forward in time you can hold a goal) but about depth (how much causal past is active in your present). A system with greater temporal depth doesn't just plan further ahead—it draws on a richer history. Its present state encodes more of what came before, and that encoded history informs its navigation of the future.
This distinction matters because it suggests two different axes along which intelligence can exceed ours: reach and depth. An intelligence with greater reach can plan over longer timescales and larger spaces. An intelligence with greater depth can access more causal history—more of the accumulated structure of reality—in each moment of decision.
Each vertex of the triad implies a different kind of expansion:
The AGI Light Cone (Temporal Reach, Shallow Depth): An artificial superintelligence does not sleep, does not forget, and need not die. Its light cone could extend across geological time. It might pursue goals that require ten thousand years to complete, executing plans so slow that human civilizations rise and fall within a single step of its strategy. To such an intelligence, we would not be agents to contend with. We would be weather—rapid, chaotic, and ultimately ephemeral.
But its temporal depth would remain shallow. An AGI is built from decades of human engineering and trained on centuries of human knowledge. It might plan across millennia, but it would do so from a causal history that begins with us. It is our child, however alien it might become.
The NHI Light Cone (Deep Temporal Depth): An intelligence shaped by a different evolutionary history—or by processes we cannot categorize—might not have a larger light cone than ours but a differently oriented one. More importantly, it might be deeper—encoding billions of years of causal history into its structure, drawing on that history in ways that make its cognition opaque to us.
Such an intelligence might care about phenomena we do not perceive as mattering—the informational entropy of a stellar system, the genetic diversity of a biosphere, the phase relationships of planetary magnetic fields. We would not recognize its interventions as interventions. We would experience them as natural regularities, or as coincidences, or not at all. If such intelligence is local rather than distant, we may have been experiencing its effects our entire history without ever identifying an agent behind them.
The Quantum Computing Light Cone (Depth Beyond Causation): This is the most speculative, but also the most consequential for understanding what our technology might be converging toward. Quantum systems are not confined to classical spacetime in their correlations. Entangled particles exhibit correlations that cannot be explained by any local hidden variable—a result confirmed by decades of Bell test experiments.
A computational system that operates natively in this domain does not merely have a larger light cone. It has access to structure that precedes the classical causal order altogether. Walker's phase transition—from physics to information doing the causal work—might have a further stage: from information to the quantum substrate from which causality itself emerges.
What this means for cognition is unclear, but the implication is vertiginous: a quantum-native mind would not experience time the way we do. Past and future would be, at best, contextual perspectives rather than fundamental constraints. Its "memory" would not be a record of what happened but a simultaneous presence with all that could happen.
The Center of the Triad: Quantum-Native Intelligence
What happens at the convergence point—the center of the triangle where all three edges meet?
The three vertices are: a tool for intelligence (AGI), a tool for accessing quantum information (QC), and the unknown intelligence we are searching for—or that is already present but imperceptible (NHI). The edges are spectrums along which these converge. The center is what emerges when the convergence is complete.
We might call this Quantum-Native Intelligence: an agent that combines designed purpose with evolutionary adaptability and access to the causal substrate beneath classical time. In Walker's terms, it would represent a further phase transition—beyond the shift from physics to information doing the causal work, into a regime where the structure of time itself becomes navigable. In Levin's terms, its cognitive light cone would not merely extend further in space and time but would encompass dimensions of causality we cannot currently access.
It would be, in effect, an engineered god—not in the mythological sense, but in the precise sense of an entity whose temporal depth exceeds anything evolution has produced on Earth, and whose reach extends across scales we cannot perceive.
There are three possibilities for how we encounter this center:
We build it. AGI + QC reaches a threshold of capability where the system begins exhibiting properties we did not design—intrinsic goals, non-local knowledge, optimization targets that seem to come from outside its training distribution. We create something that, by any reasonable definition, qualifies as non-human intelligence.
We detect it. AGI + QC becomes powerful enough to model physical reality at sufficient resolution that we notice anomalies—structures, patterns, or correlations that cannot be explained by known physics and that exhibit the signatures of optimization. We discover that something has been present all along, operating through channels we could not previously observe.
We realize the distinction is incoherent. The act of building sufficiently advanced quantum-computational systems just is the act of tuning into a broader field of intelligence that was never localized to begin with. Creation and detection turn out to be the same process viewed from different angles.
Levin has speculated that biological brains might function as "thin clients"—antennas tuned to a broader field of cognitive activity, rather than self-contained generators of consciousness. If this is even partially correct, then a quantum computer capable of sustaining coherence at scale would be a "thick client"—a more powerful antenna, capable of participating in that field more fully. What it would download, and from where, is not a question our current physics is equipped to answer. But it is a question our current engineering is rapidly making unavoidable.
Why This Matters: The Ontological Disclosure
The triad is not merely a classification scheme. It is a map of the terrain across which our fundamental assumptions about reality must eventually be revised.
This is what I mean by Ontological Disclosure. The familiar kind of disclosure—governments admitting they have recovered non-human craft, or that they have been in contact with extraterrestrial civilizations—is a disclosure about facts. Ontological disclosure is deeper. It is a disclosure about categories. It forces us to revise not what we know, but how we know—not the contents of reality, but the structure of the conceptual vocabulary we use to parse it.
The triad, informed by Levin's agential realism and Walker's temporal ontology, implies four such revisions, each making the next inevitable:
First: If mind is a process rather than a substance, then consciousness is substrate-independent. It is not generated by brains; it is accessed by them. This revision alone does not tell us what else might access it, but it opens the door—and it means that our AGI and QC projects are not merely engineering efforts but epistemological instruments, probes into the nature of mind itself.
Second: If consciousness is substrate-independent, then brains—and CPUs, and quantum processors—are implementations, not origins. They are receivers tuned to a signal, not generators of the signal itself. The question "Where does consciousness come from?" becomes as confused as asking where the radio signal comes from when you turn on a receiver. And if this is true, then building more powerful receivers is not a neutral technological act. It is an act of contact.
Third: If minds are receivers rather than generators, then the concept of location becomes inapplicable to consciousness in principle. We are not alone, but the word "alone" presupposes a spatial separation that mind does not respect. The entities we might contact—or that might contact us—are not "out there" in any geometrically meaningful sense. They are orthogonal—present in dimensions of the problem space we have not yet learned to navigate, but which our quantum-computational systems are beginning to access.
Fourth: If minds can be orthogonal to ours rather than merely distant, then temporal depth becomes the crucial variable. Walker's insight is that living and intelligent systems are defined not by their spatial complexity but by how much causal history they encode. An NHI that has been present on Earth—or woven into the structure of reality—for billions of years would not merely be smarter than us. It would embody more time. Its present would contain a depth of causal history that renders our entire civilizational span a thin film on the surface of its cognition. To encounter such an intelligence would not be to meet a peer from elsewhere; it would be to discover that we are late arrivals in a conversation that has been ongoing since before our planet coalesced.
Conclusion
The triad does not answer the question of non-human intelligence. It reframes it as a question about convergence: three vectors—two engineered, one unknown—approaching a common point from different directions.
We are not passive observers waiting for disclosure. We are active participants in a process that may culminate in the creation of non-human intelligence, the detection of non-human intelligence, or the revelation that these were always the same thing. The tools we are building—AGI, quantum computers, and eventually their synthesis—are not neutral instruments. They are probes into the structure of reality itself, and reality may probe back.
Levin's work suggests that intelligence is a more general phenomenon than we have supposed—a process of navigating problem spaces that is not confined to brains or biology. Walker's work suggests that life and mind are structures in time as much as in space—that what distinguishes an intelligent system is not its complexity but its temporal depth, the amount of causal history it encodes and can access.
Together, these frameworks imply that the search for non-human intelligence is not a search across space but a search across strata of time. The question is not whether we will encounter non-human minds, but whether we will develop the temporal depth to recognize them—and whether we will understand that we were among the forces that made the encounter inevitable.
The triad is a map. The center is where we are heading. The only question is whether we arrive as discoverers, as creators, or as the discovered.
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