Syntellect: The Integrated Mind — Genealogy, Structure, and Laws

This article sets out the concept of syntellect (Greek σύν, "with, together" + Latin intellectus, "understanding"): a relational intellect that arises when individual minds, natural and artificial, are connected through networks of communication and begin to produce meaning that belongs to none of them separately. Syntellect is a mode of thinking before it is a mind: as a mode, it is co-thinking between heterogeneous minds; as an event, it produces a temporary third subject of thought; as a historical formation, the accumulation of such events constitutes the integrated mind of civilization, whose integrity is not given but acquired in the course of evolution. It documents the genealogy of the term (InteLnet, 1995; the public English definition of 2003; Znak probela, 2004; The Transformative Humanities, 2012) and traces its two prehistories: intellectual friendship, in which a third mind is born between two thinkers, and the mind between languages, in which thought exists as correlation rather than assertion. The language model is then examined as a new interlocutor: four objections to the possibility of human–AI friendship are weighed and answered, and the asymmetry of the union is shown to be its condition rather than its refutation. Three modes of working with artificial intelligence—secretary, interlocutor, master—are distinguished, and the laws of syntellect are formulated: the law of two capacities and the concept of emnoia, the capacity to enter another mind's way of thinking, which empirical research identifies as a distinct predictor of human–AI synergy; the Chalcedonian law of union "unmergedly and inseparably"; the law of the third mind; and the laws of fruitfulness, including syntext as the highest form of the union. The concept is demarcated from the noosphere, the global brain, collective intelligence, and from its singularitarian appropriation in the "Syntellect Hypothesis," which borrows the term while inverting its meaning. The article concludes with the levels, instruments, and horizons of syntellect.