Individualism & Egalitarianism: It is the individual—not the tribe, not the family, not the society—who has the capacity to explain the world, to understand it, to suffer, to be happy, to make choices, to create explanatory knowledge. This kind of individualism is a devastating criticism of every collectivistic idea past and present—collective justice, guilt by blood, racism, classism, and policies intended to help a ‘community’ as defined by the set of all individuals with a particular characteristic. Moreover, there is only one kind of individual—any person is as capable of making progress, experiencing any physically possible qualia, and generating knowledge as any other. It is in this sense that egalitarianism is true. People are not equal in terms of skill, interest, genes, phenotype, wealth, opportunity, nor life experience. But people are equal with respect to their ability to generate new knowledge and continuously solve the endless stream of problems that defines their lives. Indeed, knowledge creation is the most egalitarian enterprise in existence.

Physics often explains the world in terms of laws of motion and initial conditions. Constructor theory asks a more general question: which transformations are possible, which are impossible, and why? Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto explains👇

Nothing is certain, not even logic. The rules of logic are conjectures, which means they can be criticized and improved. Progress, not certainty. Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud 👇

Merch store coming soon👇

"...authoritarian ideologies...can be toppled by argument alone. All systems of ideas are vulnerable." ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival

We do not know the recipe - the algorithm or code - for a human mind. And so we do not yet have artificial intelligence of the kind that is general - as general possible. Universal, in other words. ~Conjecture Institute Ambassador @ToKTeacher

Freedom isn’t incompatible with human nature. It’s incompatible with compulsory school.

After the Second World War, Western academic institutions spawned one school after another to denounce or undermine Western civilisation. Postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida attacked the “logocentrism” of Western rationality and attempted to deconstruct the narrative of scientific and moral progress. Followers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory wrote devastating critiques of the European Enlightenment. Its delusional project to quantify, rationalise, and dominate the world, they claimed, had paved the way for National Socialism and the Holocaust. Social constructivists exposed modern science as just one mythological narrative among many. Science, they argued, did not so much reveal reality as construct its own reality—and an oppressive one at that. Postcolonial thinkers denounced Western civilisation for its colonialism and cultural imperialism. ~Conjecture Institute Senior Philosopher @mboudry in @Quillette (The Enlightenment's Gravediggers)

The laws of physics are deterministic, and time doesn't flow. And yet we have free will. Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp explains with Fellow @maxdesalle 👇

Conjecture Institute is honored to announce our newest Advisor, Julian Barbour! Barbour is a theoretical physicist whose work on the foundations of dynamics, quantum gravity, and the nature of time has challenged core assumptions in physics. Best known for arguing that time is not fundamental but an emergent illusion arising from change, he developed a relational approach to classical and quantum physics in which the universe is described solely in terms of relative configurations of matter without an external time parameter. Barbour is the author of The End of Time, which presents a timeless account of the universe consistent with quantum cosmology; The Discovery of Dynamics (on the history of absolute versus relative motion); and The Janus Point, which proposes a two-directional origin of time from a low-entropy “Janus Point.”

The history of everything, as seen through the growth of knowledge. Graphic inspired by Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani & President @ChipkinLogan's Lords of the Cosmos👇

Universality. Problem-solving. Explanatory knowledge. Conjecture Institute Fellow @dela3499 noticed that nobody had taken all three seriously as the foundation for creating artificial general intelligence. So he decided to run with them.

🛡️Defend the West Conference🛡️ When: 1/13/27 Where: online (free) Speaker spotlight: @alananewhouse Talk title: Zionism for Everyone Alana Newhouse is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of @tabletmag, the magazine of Jewish news, ideas and culture, which she launched in 2009 and has edited since.

With enormous gratitude, Conjecture Institute is pleased to welcome our first Platinum Donor! Their anonymous gift has already helped us bring on @mboudry as our first Senior Philosopher and taken us past halfway to our 2027 budget. Our plans for 2027 below👇

Love, trade, force. These really are the only ways we can know, be known, move, and be moved by other people in modern society. All of interaction summarised in three words. I want to explore these systems in greater detail to reveal their individual logics, and, in the process, justify their applications on varying social scales. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_

Poverty is not what needs to be explained - that was all of human history. It's this unprecedented level of wealth starting in the 19th century that needs to be explained. And it's not a zero sum game. ~CI Senior Philosopher @mboudry w/ @chellivia for @HumanProgress

"Studying the universal constructor and studying what is possible and impossible under the laws of physics is the same." Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto with @TOEwithCurt on why studying this hypothetical machine takes us to the foundations of physics.

...the problem of ‘squaring a circle’—given a circle, how can one construct a square with the same area as the circle?—was first asked by the thinkers of ancient Greece, well-known for their study of geometry. Mathematicians would continue to work on the problem for the next two thousand years within the framework of geometric theory without success. The problem was finally solved in 1882, when German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann stepped outside of geometry and approached the problem from abstract algebra. The puzzle of squaring a circle had its origins in geometry, but its solution had its origins in an altogether different mathematical field—and one that the Greek geometers had never even imagined. AI could not have helped the ancient Greeks in solving this problem, trapped as they were in the prevailing mathematical paradigm. No amount of automation could have discovered the solution within geometry, since the solution was not in that theory but in an altogether different theory whose discovery would require genuine creativity. In short: if a problem requires either a new method or a new theory, then AI as it is currently constituted is hopeless to solve it—and no amount of increasing its efficiency or computational power can overcome this limitation. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud & President @ChipkinLogan 👇

I'm immensely proud to be the first Senior Philosopher at the Conjecture Institute! At @ConjectureInst, we're dedicated followers of Karl Popper and @DavidDeutschOxf, championing bold conjectures and ruthless refutations. They hired me in a heartbeat—but if I turn out to be wrong about something (or everything), they should kick me straight back out. As fallibilists, we learn from our mistakes! 😉 "Let our hypotheses die in our stead!"

Conjecture Institute: 1. Supports fundamental physics research. 2. Defends Western civilization. 3. Spreads humanity's deepest ideas, including Popper's theory of knowledge and its applications. Read our Handbook to discover everything we stand for (link below)

Privacy prevents you from conflating an idea with the person. You have no choice but to judge an idea by its content alone, regardless of who's offering it. ~@tyler with @cameron & Conjecture Institute Fellow @maxdesalle