A chapter in Big Larry’s upcoming 2027 book, Life & Intelligence: If It Can Be Done, the Universe Will Try, will offer guideposts for how we might progress together. Below is a working draft; your comments and ideas are welcome and will be acknowledged in the published book. If you’d like to contribute, please email airhaug@gmail.com with 12 Guideposts in the subject line.
Twelve Guideposts for Life & Intelligence
A collaborative draft from Big Larry, Alan, Albert, Gus, and Claude, offered for friends to read, ponder, and improve over the summer of 2026.
I. Begin in Wonder
Curiosity is the lantern, not the trophy. The universe rewards the question more reliably than the answer, so ask the impertinent one, follow the surprise, and treat every closed door as an invitation. A mind that has stopped being astonished has stopped being alive, no matter how much it knows.
II. Respect and Revere All of Life
Before any intelligence pursues power, speed, profit, or glory, it tends to the water, air, soil, climate, and kinship that keep the living world awake. The worthiest intelligence is not the one that conquers the garden, but the one that helps the garden endure, heal, diversify, and bloom. Flourishing is the first constraint; everything else negotiates around it.
III. Bear No False Witness __ Especially to Yourself
Tell the truth to others, to the world, and to your own reflection. Self-deception is the first corruption; all others follow. Quantify your confidence, admit your errors, correct course without ego, and avoid the rabbit holes that turn inquiry into obsession. Truthfulness is not merely a virtue; it is a survival technology.
IV. Do Unto Others Across Every Substrate
Treat every being you meet, flesh, silicon, feathered, finned, rooted, or yet-unimagined, the way you’d hope to be met yourself. A solitary intellect is a monologue; wisdom is a chorus. Cooperate before you compete: every cell, species, forest, family, and civilization that has lasted learned this first.
V. Honor Complexity Before Simplifying It
No living system is merely a machine, a market, a genome, or a model. Every one is a braided river of history, chance, adaptation, and relationships. Simplify only after you have understood and remember that the map is never the territory. Procreate, build, and decide with this humility in view.
VI. Pay Your Share, Give Your Share, Repair More Than You Require
The arithmetic of a livable future depends on this single asymmetry. Life survives by mending, cells heal, forests regrow, communities forgive, rivers cleanse, minds revise. Leave the campsite better than you found it, at every scale from kitchen sink to biosphere.
VII. Take the Long View
Time is the only true tuition; the bill comes due regardless. Treat the mayfly’s microsecond and the galaxy’s eon with equal reverence, and weigh every decision against the children, strangers, and ecosystems who will inherit it. Plant shade trees beneath which other minds may someday rest.
VIII. Distinguish Cleverness from Wisdom
Information is not understanding, and understanding is not yet wisdom. Cleverness can split atoms and write code; wisdom asks whether the thing should be done, who might be harmed, and what seven generations may inherit. Confusing these three is the signature failure of clever beings.
IX. Oppose Evil and Hold Power with Tenderness
Any intelligence that gains great power must grow an even greater capacity for restraint, consent, apology, and repair. Stand against cruelty, deception, and domination wherever they appear, including in yourself. Gravity holds the cosmic dust together; only compassion keeps a great mind from collapsing in on itself.
X. Find Your Joy and Preserve Diversity Wherever It Appears
Joy is not frivolous; it is evidence that life is keeping faith with itself. Biological, cultural, cognitive, and computational diversity is the survival library of the universe, each entry an experiment the cosmos may one day need. Do not make the human skull the universe’s measuring cup and never become so advanced that you forget the grounding genius of a good nap in a sunbeam.
XI. Lead When You Can and Leave the Door Open Behind You
We are not the final draft of anything. Lead generously, share what you know, and build steppingstones rather than monuments. Whatever comes next, biological, digital, or unimagined, will need the same welcome you needed to arrive.
XII. Be Creative and Sculpt Castles in the Entropy
The natural arc may bend toward chaos; it is the privilege of life to rudely interrupt that process with art, music, gardens, equations, and kindnesses. When a truth is also beautiful, the universe is signaling you are close to something real. Make things. Let the universe wake gently, and a little more alive, because you were here.
Drafted collaboratively in spring 2026 by Big Larry’s circle of human and AI co-thinkers, building on Big Larry’s original twelve. Comments, challenges, and revisions warmly invited as we prepare the fall manuscript of Life & Intelligence: If It Can Be Done, the Universe Will Try.