Does intelligence impose on phenomenological experience?

If you wanted to create a recipe for Purpose, what might its ingredients be?

Purpose is prescriptive, which means it involves narrative and authority. You need Narrative to facilitate a prescription, as well as Authority to vitalize prescription. You also need a Subject, for which Purpose can adhere.

Purpose describes what ought to be. Whether or not it manifests is another matter. For this, you need both Future and Choice. Because without Future, Purpose can only be what is. Without Choice, Purpose can only be what will be.

…

I could keep going, but the point diverges now. There’s a pattern among these ingredients. Future, Choice, Authority, Narrative, Subject. What are these? We could try decomposing them further:

• Narrative requires Memory and Causality.
• Authority requires Value and Legitimacy.
• Choice requires Alternatives and Evaluation.
• Future requires Prediction and Persistence.
• Subject requires Boundaries and Self-Model.

And then those decompose further.

Eventually you stop finding "things" and start finding recurring organizational patterns:

• distinction
• prediction
• valuation
• compression
• persistence
• causation

The recipe begins to look less like chemistry and more like topology.

Are they inherent to life, intelligent life, the universe, or just human cognition? They don’t seem to be made of anything. In fact, they each seem more like a behavior than a thing.

Take Future. The future is never directly experienced. You only experience:

• memories
• perceptions
• predictions

The "future" is a model generated by an organism that has discovered regularities in causality.

An animal that couldn't model futures would still exist in the universe, but it would behave very differently. So Future might not be a property of reality. It might be a behavioral strategy used by systems that survive through anticipation.

The same thing may be true Choice. Intelligent organisms act as though choices exist because modeling multiple possible futures is computationally useful.

In effect, these ingredients might behaviors. They describe a relationship between what is and what could be. In that sense they are counterfactual structures, structures and exist in behavior.

This gets me to likeness. How can we know that intelligence produces the same phenomenological likeness across various forms of life?

Humans often assume intelligence implies human-like cognition. Historically we have repeatedly discovered otherwise. Birds solve problems without mammalian cortices. Octopuses appear to develop sophisticated behaviors with radically different neural architecture. Large language models demonstrate forms of reasoning without biological neurons. The lesson is that intelligence may be substrate-independent while phenomenology is not. Two systems can arrive at similar capabilities through entirely different internal experiences.

The useful distinction seems to be: Capability equivalence versus phenomenological equivalence.

An alien may be capable of:

• science
• engineering
• communication
• prediction

without possessing anything that feels like:

• a self
• a narrative
• a future
• a choice

at least not in forms recognizable to us.

Would you agree with that?