The Cube Theory of Partially Grasped Concepts

According to LessWrong, many important concepts resist sharp boundaries—evolution, life, reproduction. Rather than abandon them as hopelessly vague, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes treating them as multidimensional spaces, or "cubes." The breakthrough: while a concept may exist on a spectrum, not all regions of that spectrum are equally interesting. For evolution, high fidelity of heredity, fitness dependence on intrinsic properties, and smooth fitness landscapes create conditions for genuine novelty. For collective reproducers, bottleneckishness, germ-line sequestration, and integration determine whether something counts as true reproduction. The framework shows that concepts can be simultaneously fuzzy and structurally illuminating—vague at the boundaries but rich with insights where interesting dynamics cluster. This lets us work productively with ideas that resist traditional definition, while still identifying the regions where meaningful patterns emerge.

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