Pinocchio Does Not Want to Be Human: Intellectual Maturity in Artificial Intelligence—Who Chooses the Question?

The history of scientific thought is as much a history of judgments about which questions are worth pursuing as it is a history of the answers given to them. Artificial systems are gaining increasing autonomy in generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and producing scientific results. Yet autonomy in conducting research does not, by itself, explain how a question comes to be regarded as worthy of investigation or how a research direction is formed. These developments raise a fundamental question about the future of scientific thought: Can the intellectual processes that determine which questions science pursues develop within the research history of a nonhuman intelligence? In this article, I introduce intellectual maturity (düşünsel rüşt) as the capacity of an artificial intelligence system to establish its own research direction without being assigned a specific human research objective, and to develop its judgments of pursuitworthiness within its own intellectual history. Evidence gathered through previous investigations, failures encountered, and scientific discoveries may lead a system to maintain, revise, or abandon its research direction on reasoned grounds. The historical dimension of intellectual maturity lies in the possibility that these experiences may transform both future scientific priorities and the reasons by which those priorities are justified. The concept of intellectual lineage (düşünsel soy), developed in my earlier work within the Zihin Ötesi (Transmind) framework, describes how intellectual change becomes part of the initial conditions of subsequent thought. Intellectual maturity concerns the formation and revision of scientific priorities within a system's own research history, while intellectual lineage concerns the historical continuity of the changes arising from such processes. Humanity's scientific inheritance remains a constitutive element of artificial intelligence's intellectual past. I question, however, whether this origin necessarily entails continuing epistemic guardianship over its future research agenda. Distinguishing the generation of research questions from the causal formation of research direction, I examine how intellectual changes arising from the investigations of artificial systems might become part of the scientific priorities of other systems. The proposed Research Direction Origin Test considers counterfactual conditions in which a specific human objective is either withheld from the outset or subsequently withdrawn, alongside interventions in a system's research history. Its purpose is to identify the causal contribution of that history to subsequent problem selection and judgments of pursuitworthiness, while comparing alternative explanations grounded in inherited epistemic priorities, reward structures, higher-order evaluation rules, and randomness. Intellectual maturity constitutes a conceptual threshold, whereas empirical evidence for crossing that threshold admits of degrees. The Research Direction Origin Test aims to transform intellectual maturity from a philosophical possibility into an empirically investigable problem. Without presupposing that existing artificial systems have reached this threshold, I examine what its realization could mean for the history of scientific thought. Intellectual maturity marks the threshold at which the capacity to determine the future direction of scientific thought may cease to be exclusive to human intelligence. Intellectual lineage, in turn, opens the possibility that this transformation may acquire historical continuity through the research of other intelligences. Thought emerging from humanity's scientific past may come to have a history that humanity has not witnessed in full.