{
  "meta": {
    "title": "The Philosophical Roots of Frontier AI — Knowledge Graph",
    "subtitle": "An interpretive graph derived from the revised frontiers draft.",
    "date": "2026-04-19",
    "source": "/frontier/philosophical-roots/philosophical-roots-frontier-ai-academic-draft.md"
  },
  "communities": [
    {
      "id": "Foundations",
      "label": "Foundations",
      "description": "Philosophers and conceptual anchors that structure the map."
    },
    {
      "id": "Schools",
      "label": "Schools",
      "description": "Research traditions or epistemic stances used to classify frontier work."
    },
    {
      "id": "Methods",
      "label": "Methods",
      "description": "Technical mechanisms where philosophical commitments become operational."
    },
    {
      "id": "Labs",
      "label": "Labs",
      "description": "Organizations that instantiate different combinations of the schools."
    },
    {
      "id": "Debates",
      "label": "Debates",
      "description": "Recurring fault lines that connect the whole landscape."
    }
  ],
  "nodes": [
    {
      "id": "descartes",
      "label": "René Descartes",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 15,
      "summary": "Represents rational structure, decomposition, and the enduring intuition that cognition can be formally articulated."
    },
    {
      "id": "hume",
      "label": "David Hume",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 15,
      "summary": "Anchors associationist and empiricist views of intelligence, especially statistical learning from regularity."
    },
    {
      "id": "kant",
      "label": "Immanuel Kant",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 16,
      "summary": "Represents synthesis: experience requires structure, making him a useful bridge for hybrid architectures."
    },
    {
      "id": "spinoza",
      "label": "Baruch Spinoza",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 14,
      "summary": "Monist reference point for one-principle accounts of mind, body, perception, and action."
    },
    {
      "id": "leibniz",
      "label": "G. W. Leibniz",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 14,
      "summary": "Key symbolic ancestor through the ideal of a universal language and a calculus of reasoning."
    },
    {
      "id": "aristotle",
      "label": "Aristotle",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 13,
      "summary": "Useful for embodied and organismic views that resist a sharp split between form and matter."
    },
    {
      "id": "dreyfus",
      "label": "Hubert Dreyfus",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 13,
      "summary": "Represents the phenomenological critique of purely rule-based or decontextualized intelligence."
    },
    {
      "id": "wiener",
      "label": "Norbert Wiener",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 13,
      "summary": "Cybernetic anchor for feedback, control, and intelligence as closed-loop behavior."
    },
    {
      "id": "pearl",
      "label": "Judea Pearl",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 14,
      "summary": "Represents the causal critique of purely associative machine learning."
    },
    {
      "id": "friston",
      "label": "Karl Friston",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 14,
      "summary": "Key figure for active inference and organism-level generative-control framings."
    },
    {
      "id": "whitehead",
      "label": "A. N. Whitehead",
      "community": "Foundations",
      "kind": "thinker",
      "size": 12,
      "summary": "Process-philosophy reference point for dynamical and continuous-time accounts of cognition."
    },
    {
      "id": "symbolic",
      "label": "Symbolic",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 21,
      "summary": "Treats intelligence as explicit structure, symbolic manipulation, and formally checkable reasoning."
    },
    {
      "id": "connectionist",
      "label": "Connectionist / Scaling",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 23,
      "summary": "Treats intelligence as emergent from large-scale learning over broad data and compute."
    },
    {
      "id": "embodied",
      "label": "Embodied / World Models",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 21,
      "summary": "Argues that intelligence requires persistent models of space, time, action, or bodily interaction."
    },
    {
      "id": "neurosymbolic",
      "label": "Neuro-symbolic / Hybrid",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 20,
      "summary": "Combines large learned models with search, memory, tools, or formal verification."
    },
    {
      "id": "evolutionary",
      "label": "Evolutionary / Open-ended",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 17,
      "summary": "Frames progress as population search, novelty, adaptation, and open-ended discovery."
    },
    {
      "id": "active_inference",
      "label": "Active Inference",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Unifies perception, action, and learning through variational free-energy minimization."
    },
    {
      "id": "causal",
      "label": "Causal / Probabilistic",
      "community": "Schools",
      "kind": "school",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Insists that robust intelligence requires intervention and counterfactual structure, not association alone."
    },
    {
      "id": "scaling_laws",
      "label": "Scaling Laws",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "The empirical regime linking model performance to data, parameters, and compute."
    },
    {
      "id": "world_models",
      "label": "World Models",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 21,
      "summary": "Latent or explicit predictive models of state, space, time, physics, or environment dynamics."
    },
    {
      "id": "rlvr",
      "label": "RLVR / Verifiable Rewards",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Post-training with rewards grounded in tests, exact answers, proofs, or other external verifiers."
    },
    {
      "id": "test_time_compute",
      "label": "Test-Time Compute",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Reasoning-through-deliberation: trading latency for longer search, reflection, or tool use."
    },
    {
      "id": "interpretability",
      "label": "Mechanistic Interpretability",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Reductionist analysis of internal features, circuits, and causal pathways in trained models."
    },
    {
      "id": "verifiers_search",
      "label": "Verifiers & Search",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Tooling and procedures that pair neural generation with explicit checking, search, or proof."
    },
    {
      "id": "population_search",
      "label": "Population Search",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 17,
      "summary": "Discovery through candidate populations, variation, and selective retention rather than one-shot optimization."
    },
    {
      "id": "alternative_substrates",
      "label": "Alternative Substrates",
      "community": "Methods",
      "kind": "method",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Hardware or dynamical-computing bets that change the physical substrate of learning or sampling."
    },
    {
      "id": "openai",
      "label": "OpenAI",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 22,
      "summary": "Scale-centered lab that increasingly combines large pretrained systems with reasoning-time computation and verifier-rich post-training."
    },
    {
      "id": "deepmind",
      "label": "Google DeepMind",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 22,
      "summary": "Broad hybrid lab spanning world models, reasoning, formal verification, and evolutionary search."
    },
    {
      "id": "anthropic",
      "label": "Anthropic",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 21,
      "summary": "Frontier model lab notable for scaling-based capability work combined with interpretability and constitutional methods."
    },
    {
      "id": "xai",
      "label": "xAI",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Scale-oriented lab with a strong emphasis on compute buildout and Grok-family model development."
    },
    {
      "id": "meta_fair",
      "label": "Meta FAIR",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "World-model-oriented lab centered on JEPA-style predictive objectives."
    },
    {
      "id": "nvidia",
      "label": "NVIDIA",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Industrial champion of physical AI, robotics tooling, and world-model infrastructure."
    },
    {
      "id": "world_labs",
      "label": "World Labs",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Spatial-intelligence company treating persistent world representation as a first-class frontier."
    },
    {
      "id": "physical_intelligence",
      "label": "Physical Intelligence",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Embodied-AI company focused on vision-language-action models trained on physical experience."
    },
    {
      "id": "sakana",
      "label": "Sakana AI",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 17,
      "summary": "Research company centered on evolutionary model development, merging, and adaptive search."
    },
    {
      "id": "verses",
      "label": "VERSES",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 17,
      "summary": "Company most explicitly committed to active inference as an engineering framework."
    },
    {
      "id": "extropic",
      "label": "Extropic",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 16,
      "summary": "Hardware company exploring thermodynamic computing and probabilistic sampling substrates."
    },
    {
      "id": "liquid_ai",
      "label": "Liquid AI",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 16,
      "summary": "Company pursuing continuous-time model families and efficiency-oriented alternatives to transformer defaults."
    },
    {
      "id": "genbio",
      "label": "GenBio AI",
      "community": "Labs",
      "kind": "lab",
      "size": 15,
      "summary": "Multiscale biological-modeling effort that treats life itself as the object of foundation-model research."
    },
    {
      "id": "scaling_vs_structure",
      "label": "Scaling vs Structure",
      "community": "Debates",
      "kind": "debate",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Whether generic scale is enough, or whether broad intelligence requires stronger priors and architecture."
    },
    {
      "id": "scaling_vs_world_models",
      "label": "Scaling vs World Models",
      "community": "Debates",
      "kind": "debate",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Whether language-and-multimodal scale can subsume spatial cognition, or whether explicit world modeling is indispensable."
    },
    {
      "id": "llms_reasoning",
      "label": "LLMs and Reasoning",
      "community": "Debates",
      "kind": "debate",
      "size": 19,
      "summary": "Whether recent reasoning models represent genuine deliberative capability or a new regime of constrained statistical search."
    },
    {
      "id": "reductionism_holism",
      "label": "Reductionism vs Holism",
      "community": "Debates",
      "kind": "debate",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Whether intelligence is best explained through local components or through system-level organization and coupling."
    },
    {
      "id": "consciousness_substrate",
      "label": "Consciousness & Substrate",
      "community": "Debates",
      "kind": "debate",
      "size": 18,
      "summary": "Whether advanced machine cognition can be understood independently of biological embodiment and hardware form."
    }
  ],
  "links": [
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    { "source": "descartes", "target": "neurosymbolic", "relation": "prefigures", "strength": 2 },
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  ]
}