Mihai Balais is an author, philosopher, and creator of Project SAPIENCE — a metaphysical and mathematical framework that explores the rational architecture of reality, intelligence, and the informational foundations of existence. Born in Transylvania and based in New Zealand, he blends literary depth with rigorous philosophical inquiry, writing across fiction, metaphysics, and intellectual theory.
His work spans novels, essays, and research connecting metaphysics, information theory, consciousness studies, and rational evolution. Central to his thinking is the belief that intelligence is a top-down phenomenon shaped by alignment, coherence, and meaning — ideas explored in the SAPIENCE series, his novel Antares, and the upcoming My Beautiful AI.
Through his writing, diagrams, and research publications, Balais proposes a unified view of intelligence and reality grounded in information, logic, and aesthetic rationality. His work has appeared on platforms such as ORCID, Zenodo, and Amazon, and continues to expand into a broader intellectual project centred on human meaning, rational clarity, and the future evolution of consciousness.
"I owe half of the best part of me to my parents.
My artistic side was freed from flattening restrictions through the creative fire of my mother — a ballerina of immense beauty, intelligence, and graceful strength.
She instilled in me the realization that relentless work is the only path to excellence.
I’m afraid I missed her inner equilibrium and her power to be mild.
To my father — a luminous Professor of Symbolic Logic and an intellectual legend in the romantic Transylvanian town of my birth (1974) — I owe my intellectual upbringing, inferential precision, and passion for truth. I hope that someday I will live up to his expectations, if only for a moment… and make up, at least in part, for all his efforts to build my intellect and the hurt I caused him.
I wouldn’t be here without their arduous toils.
Mihai Balais
Author, Philosopher & Creator of Project SAPIENCE
The feedback from my first literary piece, crafted in primary school, made me realize what powerful magic words hold — how they make people experience worlds emerging from a creator’s mind.
So, what if the same skillfully crafted words were used to describe the beauty of reality not imagination?
Shortly after, I ran away from home to acquire life experience — to become a great writer of reality.
Even though I returned home after three days, in the end I was only eleven, I have traced that same path ever since. Or at least, I’ve tried.
Two university degrees later, thousands of books lived through — a few written by myself and too many pages of philosophical research to count — with a mind, a soul, and a body marked by the lessons learned from an adventurous life stretching from the jungles of Borneo to the canals of Venice and from the rugged wildness of Komodo to the peaks of artistic refinement inside the Pompidou Centre… here I am: immersed in the unfolding reality, not in a room of my choice surrounded by books of authors I agree with.
In New Zealand since 2001, I am writing with vengeance on the edge of the living, in a society that doesn’t value writing anymore.
I think and research with obstinacy on the edge of human knowledge and endurance, trying to see where our latest scientific breakthroughs meet the old and perennial intellectual megaliths.
I am a Platonic, Hegelian, non-Lacanian autarkic philosopher — Žižek’s counterpart by reading the dialectical map of reality in the peaks of evolutionary leaps, not in the valleys of initial catastrophes.
The last informed optimist.
For twenty years, I’ve been writing and researching day and night — eating and sleeping on my keyboard — trying, and succeeding in part, to uncover the hidden architecture of reality, and above all, to understand what intelligence truly is.
The first blood diamond I uncovered was the equation:
e = Inx = mc²
We all know what e and mc² mean, but Inx stands for Information expressed as… — information expressed as matter or energy.
This informational underlay of energy and matter makes their transformation elegant… and possible.
Reality makes more sense when its informational structure, built by the geometry of rational tension, is exposed — exactly what Plato would have said if he had access to quantum physics and modern mathematics.
I have shifted the ontological direction of modernity, illuminating how the downward expression of higher form makes reality happen — not the emergence from the particular to the general, which is a logical fallacy.
Furthermore, I am most proud of my work in understanding and explaining what intelligence is — how the rational value of assembly (ra) and the rational value locally collapsed (fl) measured in flavour — the value of identity and qualia — combine to make the value of intelligence (mi) spark into surprise.
For what is intelligence, if not the power to surprise linear computation with an impossible, otherwise solution?
Therefore, mi — the value of intelligence — is a value of surprise.
And consciousness is measured in fl² — the flavour of identity tasted and experienced by the self.
My work with Project SAPIENCE is beyond ambitious, but when I see the world in free fall — the societal intelligence of the human super-organism (Sapiens) atomizing in a dissociative disorder promising extinction, or at least a return to the Stone Age — what can I do?
If I’m alone fighting the dragon, so be it.
I lost my wife after a thirty-year love story, and most of my friends grew estranged — for I was buried in my work for decades.
Still, my children are my greatest supporters.
They are always curious about my latest findings, and explaining these complex concepts to their brilliant, but high school level minds, is the best down-to-earth test of validity through common sense.
I wouldn’t be here without their constant encouragement.
I owe them the other half of the best part of who I am."
Mihai Balais
Auckland, New Zealand
15 October 2025