“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Carl Gustav Jung
Following Jung then, we may state with a high degree of certainty that the fresh batch of AI’s currently suffocating every other thread of possible conversation have a mind (light tongue in cheek), since all of them seem to oscillate between sense and nonsense (guardrails and jailbreaks notwithstanding). The question of sentiency, sapience, and intelligence are therefore salient irrespective if presently Sydney or Bard or Claude or indeed ChatGpt exhibit the signs of (even infant) consciousness. They don’t yet, but that is beside the point. The point is that we are asking the question, and to my mind the fact that we are busy with the question, irrespective of our answers, be it strong negatives or tentative positives, is the issue.
It took humans many years to be convinced (and some still are not) that animals are consciously aware and have their own kinds of intelligence. Kinds of intelligence that are dissimilar to the kind of intelligence humans seem to display, still, displaying they are, and we are hard pressed to understand what exactly the intelligence is, of say, an Octopus, or an elephant, and maybe a forest or a mycelium. However, we do have a very strong suspicion that these intelligences are there, that they have purposes and more importantly qualia.
And they are different, different than us and ours.
Intelligence if so, is the ‘parole du jour’ and as such demands a reflection.
Moreover, it is my view that presently we are as a species in a period of transit, defined primarily by Metacognition — thinking about our thinking or more succinctly: awareness looking at itself. Intelligence reflecting itself.
It is our prerogative as sentient embodied systems, self-aware bio machines, to pursue intelligence whenever and wherever we find it
In this continuum of complexities, we call life, wonders never cease. And though not all wonders were created equal, it is our prerogative as sentient embodied systems, self-aware bio machines, to pursue the wonder that is intelligence whenever and wherever we find it. If for no other reason than the fact that we are self-describing both as a species and as individuals as intelligent creatures (agents). And we are, because of our very nature of self-reflection moved to explore our own nature, and if so intelligence.
That is the reason we have during the millennia of human cognitive cogitation spent so much energy of thought, of mind, of action and of experience to make sense of this most controversial capacity, understanding.
For we believe that we are what we are because we are intelligent creatures endowed with a sense of agency and sapience, emotive power, and inherent sagacity.
In short, our intelligence demands of us to understand the world and us in it. Intelligence demands to understand itself, at times it is called consciousness, at times, conscious self-awareness, reflection or simply thought.
To my mind that is the very essence of the emotional endeavor of the human, to self know, as an individual, as a species, as a form of life.
To reach beyond the confines of the moment and create meaning.
For this we use intelligence.
This intelligence, a multiplicity in essence and an amalgam in nature, is many.
There are many kinds of intelligence, and though the word itself is an invention of our kind, the term is applicable in a wider sense to all forms of life. We may not be able to define it precisely, though we certainly try, but we do have some sense of the broad-spectrum to which the term can be applied.
The fallacious clarity provided by the dictionaries is useful for casual usage but not for the general understanding that is necessary in this case.
A fuller, broader, wider ranging and expansive explication is needed.
To answer the existential questions with which we are faced we need in fact a new kind of thinking, a fresh methodology of cognition and an insight into a new worldview that will provide a platform for furthering our species evolution.
Intelligence, I believe, is the cornerstone of just such a worldview.
There are many ways to understand intelligence, and in many contexts, issues of problem solving, capacity of reasoning, adaptability to new environments, learning from experience, pattern recognition, judgment exercising, imagination, originality, artistic and abstract perception, complex interpretation and so on, are all possible interpretations, definitions and usages of the concept.
But in this essay, I wish to concentrate on non-obvious aspects of intelligence that are seldom packed together when analyzing intelligence, human or otherwise. That is why I have titled this essay engaging in the remarkable for I see these traits and indicators as indeed remarkable and utterly fascinating, especially if we look at them from the standpoint of intelligence.
Playfulness
“Time is a game played beautifully by children. “(Heraclitus, Fragments)
The first (and to my mind most critical aspect of intelligence) is playfulness. Playfulness (and its derivative spontaneity) is probably one of the most underappreciated and over-contextualized qualities that define an intelligent agent. Playfulness is the actual ‘real’ hallmark of the ultimately adaptable mind. It is the quality performance of real time change in relation to changes in environments and inputs. It is a fundamental transformative quality of the mind, dealing both with the unpredictability of life and nature but more importantly with the uncertainty, ambiguity, and overall fuzziness of other minds.
Playfulness can be said to be the actual performance of the mental emotional flexibility required for an intelligent agent.
Playfulness correlates also with higher intellectual and academic achievements (see: Being playful and smart? The relations of adult playfulness with psychometric and self-estimated intelligence and academic performance-> link)
Cooperation
“I speak of the skill of working together, the technique of crossing the arbitrary lines of land, craft, and status, because we must learn more from each other than the simple fact that none of us can stand alone and survive!”
Anne McCaffrey, Dragonquest
The second kind of intelligence I wish to define as fundamental to the understanding of an intelligent agent is cooperation.
There is no doubt in my mind (and many others) that cooperative behavior plays an important and critical part in the evolution of intelligence. Cooperation is said to be one of the most obvious traits of the human mind, and effectively of any intelligent agent. The skill set required for cooperation is both complex and intricate, it requires both trust and acceptance, allowance, and projection.
Cooperative behavior is a necessary condition for the rise, sustainability, and development of an advanced community of minds, a culture and indeed civilization. Cooperation and collaboration have one huge lever to pull, the ethical issue. This it does via the intelligence of empathy.
Empathy
To my understanding, empathy is a subcategory of the ‘theory of mind’ concept by which we acquire the capability to ascribe senses and sensations, emotions, and mental states to an ‘other’. Whether it is at core a simulation or an innate capability that develops is a different question, but to my mind it is a crucial form of intelligence.
My main emphasize here is that empathy is the actual performative capability, an intelligence, that allows a mind embodied to ‘feel’ an ‘other’. Without empathy the above cooperation and collaboration between multiple entities would not have been possible.
Imagination
“Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
Victor Hugo
Imagination is considered as that capability of minds that can create images in the mind that have no input via the sense organs. Imagination may very well be the original sense in which and by which we have self-described as intelligent agents. Moreover, it is highly likely that at core, imagination is the basis for all the creativity capacity of intelligent agents.
Imagination is to my mind an intelligence, a kind of ability that taps into the idea of an a- temporal simulation. It is a-temporal in as much as it carries from the past (using our memories) into the future. In short imagination has the potential to muster resources that are not present in the moment (the moment of perception).
The fact is that human minds can extrapolate and recombine novel ideas, sentences, stories and construct in the mind’s eye (notice that even that simple metaphor uses the intelligence of imagination to convey its meaning) a reality that is both different than immediacy and can influence immediacy, in this sense it carries causality.
Imagination as a kind of intelligence can simulate the un-perceived. Simulating the unknown via imagination is the actual performance of this intelligence. The critical importance of imagination cannot be overstated for it is via the intelligence of imagination that we deem options and possibilities as actualities.
Intelligence then…
Beside pointing at ourselves and stating that this is intelligence we cannot answer meaningfully, what precisely is intelligence. The main buffer for this being that intelligence refuses to be pinned down into a too narrow definition and so we are left with playing the game of infinite approximations.
The ‘more or less’ version of what intelligence is therefore requires of us a flexibility of mind and ambiguity of meanings that at times will seem even to ourselves as self-contradicting, though I would argue that these are the very foundations of what intelligence is.
We are simply, ‘not simple’ and so must contend with a capability to self-awareness and agency that is mostly opaque to our own reflection capability. Nevertheless, we do play the game of definitions even if all attempts are both incomplete and always approximate.
To my mind Intelligence is both a multiplicity and a unified principle, depending on the fashion and manner of the description and its possible uses (metaphorically like the wave-particle duality). General intelligence as the unified approach is called, is a very useful concept and can be justified empirically, but not in all cases. To apply the concept to an extended reality that is not only logic-verbal orientated but social and artistic, digital, and cultural as well we need a wider ranging acceptance that certain types of abilities and talents are in fact also kinds of intelligence.
Intelligence if so, is not only the ability to solve problems but also and maybe more importantly the ability to generalize through first principles into a coherent comprehension of the world and us in it. But that above vague definition is still far from what is needed when coming to terms with the hyper complex situation of our minds.
It is not only the case that we are good at reasoning and masters of adaptation to environments and changing circumstances, but we also have at our disposal a much deeper sense yet.
This sense I am pointing at involves the deepest aspirations of the mind or put differently the sense of that which is beyond the limitations of thought, of consciousness and time, of body and of nature itself.
The sense of the sublime.
In contrast to many great philosophers that locate the sense of the sublime in the realm of aesthetics (or in contradistinction to aesthetics) it is my view that the sense of the sublime is a form of intelligence. A fundamental attractor of the mind. This attractor, a core experience of awe and wonderment, respect and astonishment is to my eyes that which motivates our lives both as individuals and as a civilization to push the boundaries of our existence beyond and above mere survival into the sublime.
That sense, I believe, is the source of our curiosity and its consequences: innovation and novelty, invention, and speculation. It is the same kind of intelligence that unifies us and allows us to create, both gods and superior works of art, both spaceships and poetry, fictions, and artificial intelligence, philosophies, and sciences.
A non-conclusion — for this is only an initial foray into the explosive field of intelligence, an inevitability really since we are busy creating the next evolutionary paradigm. Though AGI is far from being at play, we are nevertheless on the first steps of a new pathway of understanding, one led by the AI revolution into our own meta-cognition.
soon to be continued…
Thank you for reading.
