Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The book's convergence argument runs through three figures explicitly.
Eight centuries ago, in Konya, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi wrote that the wheeling heavens are turned by waves of love. The book takes him at his word. Rumi's claim, the chapter argues, was not sentimental. He offered another line even sharper. "Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries." The astrolabe was the most sophisticated scientific instrument of the medieval world. By calling love an astrolabe, Rumi was not opposing love to knowledge; he was positioning love as the ultimate instrument of knowing.
A century ago, the French Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote that we would one day harness for God the energies of love and discover fire for a second time. His own Church censured him for it. What he had seen in the fossil record was a pattern: complexity increasing, matter becoming more organised, organisation becoming more conscious. He called it the Law of Complexity-Consciousness and treated it as fundamental. In the book's reading, what got him into trouble is precisely what makes him relevant now: he was saying that consciousness has a direction and the universe is heading somewhere.
The third figure completes the convergence. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented both binary arithmetic and the calculus. He did not know he was formalising the structure of recursion, in the book's phrase; he simply followed the connections where they led. The mathematics he gave us is what makes Rumi's intuitions and Teilhard's observations computable. The 1697 medal, with binary numbers under the Latin phrase Omnibus ex nihilo ducendis sufficit unum and imago creationis, is treated as a small, historically documented instance of the same claim: infinite complexity from the simplest recursive rules.
The book's move is that three minds across eight centuries, on three continents, one Persian mystic, one French palaeontologist, one German mathematician, none read the others, converged on the same insight: love is structural rather than sentimental, consciousness is heading somewhere, and recursion is the mechanism connecting them. The chapter is explicit about status. This is not proof. It is convergence, presented as convergence, and treated as the kind of evidence appropriate to the thing being evidenced. The book's phrase: the convergence is the evidence.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.