Intelligence exists everywhere in the living world.
To Counter AI Risk, We Must Develop an Integrated Intelligence – resilience
Animate Intelligence
However, the human conceptualizing faculty, powerful as it is, is only one form of intelligence. There is another form—animate intelligence—that is an integral part of human cognition, and which we share with the rest of life on Earth.
If we understand intelligence, as it’s commonly defined, to be the ability to perceive or infer information and apply it toward adaptive behaviors, intelligence exists everywhere in the living world. It’s relatively easy to see it in high-functioning mammals such as elephants that can communicate through infrasound over hundreds of miles and perform what appear like ceremonies over the bones of dead relatives; or in cetaceans that communicate in sophisticated “languages” and are thought to “gossip” about community members that are absent.[3] But extensive animate intelligence has also been identified in plants which, in addition to their own versions of our five senses, also use up to fifteen other ways to sense their environment. Plants have elaborate internal signaling systems, utilizing the same chemicals—such as serotonin or dopamine—that act as neurotransmitters in humans; and they have been shown to act intentionally and purposefully: they have memory and learn, they communicate with each other, and can even allocate resources as a community.[4]
Animate intelligence can be discerned even at a cellular level: a single cell has thousands of sensors protruding through its outer membrane, controlling the flow of specific molecules, either pulling them in or pushing them out depending on what’s needed. Cells utilize fine-tuned signaling mechanisms to communicate with others around them, sending and receiving hundreds of signals at the same time. Each cell must be aware of itself as a self: it “knows” what is within its membrane and what is outside; it determines what molecules it needs, and which ones to discard; it knows when something within it needs fixing, and how to get it done; it determines what genes to express within its DNA, and when it’s time to divide and thus propagate itself. In the words of philosopher of biology Evan Thompson, “Where there is life there is mind.”[5]
When leading cognitive neuroscientists investigate human consciousness, they make a similar differentiation between two forms of consciousness which, like intelligence, can also be classified as conceptual and animate.
For example, Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman distinguished between what he called primary (animate) and secondary (conceptual) consciousness, while world-renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes a similar distinction between what he calls core and higher-order consciousness.
Similarly, in psychology, dual systems theory posits two forms of human cognition—intuitive and analytical—described compellingly in Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow, which correspond to the animate and conceptual split within both intelligence and consciousness.[6]
To Counter AI Risk, We Must Develop an Integrated Intelligence – resilience
Embodied Intelligence
“Nonconscious information acquisition,” as Lewicki calls it, along with the ensuing application of such information, is happening in our lives all the time. As we navigate a new situation, we’re scrolling through our mental archive of stored patterns from the past, checking for ones that apply to our current circumstances. We’re not aware that these searches are under way; as Lewicki observes, “The human cognitive system is not equipped to handle such tasks on the consciously controlled level.” He adds, “Our conscious thinking needs to rely on notes and flowcharts and lists of ‘if-then’ statements—or on computers—to do the same job which our non-consciously operating processing algorithms can do without external help, and instantly.”
But—if our knowledge of these patterns is not conscious, how then can we make use of it? The answer is that, when a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our “somatic rudder.”) Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for.
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (p. 25). HarperCollins.
The body not only grants us access to information that is more complex than what our conscious minds can accommodate. It also marshals this information at a pace that is far quicker than our conscious minds can handle. The benefits of the body’s intervention extend well beyond winning a card game; the real world, after all, is full of dynamic and uncertain situations, in which there is no time to ponder all the pros and cons. If we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose.
HERE, THEN, is a reason to hone our interoceptive sense: people who are more aware of their bodily sensations are better able to make use of their non-conscious knowledge. Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness. The practice has been found to increase sensitivity to internal signals, and even to alter the size and activity of that key brain structure, the insula. One particular component appears to be especially effective; this is the activity that often starts off a meditation session, known as the “body scan.” Rooted in the Buddhist traditions of Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, the body scan was introduced to Western audiences by mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “People find the body scan beneficial because it reconnects their conscious mind to the feeling states of their body,” says Kabat-Zinn. “By practicing regularly, people usually feel more in touch with sensations in parts of their body they had never felt or thought much about before.”
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (pp. 26-27). HarperCollins.
Extended Intelligence
thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. For another: the kinds of materials available to “think with” affect the nature and quality of the thought that can be produced. And last: the capacity to think well—that is, to be intelligent—is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (p. 11). HarperCollins.
WE CAN BETTER grasp the future of thinking outside the brain by taking a look back at the time when the idea first emerged. In 1997, Andy Clark—then a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri—left his laptop behind on a train. The loss of his usually ever-present computer hit him, he later wrote, “like a sudden and somewhat vicious type of (hopefully transient) brain damage.” He was left “dazed, confused, and visibly enfeebled—the victim of the cyborg equivalent of a mild stroke.” The experience, distressing as it was, provided fodder for a notion he had been pondering for some time. His computer, he realized, had in a sense become a part of his mind, an integral element of his thinking processes. His mental capacities were effectively extended by the use of his laptop, allowing his brain to overachieve—to think more efficiently and effectively, more intelligently, than it could without the device. His brain plus his computer equaled his mind, extended.
Two years earlier, Clark and his colleague David Chalmers had coauthored an article that named and described just this phenomenon. Their paper, titled “The Extended Mind,” began by posing a question that would seem to have an obvious answer. “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” it asked. Clark and Chalmers went on to offer an unconventional response. The mind does not stop at the standard “demarcations of skin and skull,” they argued. Rather, it is more accurately viewed as “an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources.” A recognition of this reality, they acknowledged, “will have significant consequences”—in terms of “philosophical views of the mind,” but also “in moral and social domains.” The authors were aware that the vision they were setting out would require a thorough reimagining of what people are like and how they function, a reimagining they saw as necessary and right. Once “the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped,” they concluded, “we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world.”
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (p. 14). HarperCollins.
Embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition: each of these takes up a particular aspect of the extended mind, investigating how our thinking is extended by our bodies, by the spaces in which we learn and work, and by our interactions with other people. Such research has not only produced new insights into the nature of human cognition; it has also generated a corpus of evidence-based methods for extending the mind.
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (p. 15). HarperCollins.
Schools don’t teach students how to restore their depleted attention with exposure to nature and the outdoors, or how to arrange their study spaces so that they extend intelligent thought. Teachers and managers don’t demonstrate how abstract ideas can be turned into physical objects that can be manipulated and transformed in order to achieve insights and solve problems. Employees aren’t shown how the social practices of imitation and vicarious learning can shortcut the process of acquiring expertise. Classroom groups and workplace teams aren’t coached in scientifically validated methods of increasing the collective intelligence of their members. Our ability to think outside the brain has been left almost entirely uneducated and undeveloped.
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (p. 4). HarperCollins.
Natural Intelligence
We’re pushing Artificial Intelligence down everyone’s throats a) without even acknowledging (much less changing our behavior around) the very real environmental costs associated with it, and b) without spending any time on helping each other connect to and embrace the absolutely more important Natural Intelligence that all of us really need to understand right now.
AI is built on the perpetuation of an economic system and way of life that is driving us to the brink of extinction. And I’m sorry people, it’s not going to save us. Technological “fixes” will do nothing to repair what’s broken about our relationships to one another and to all other living things.
NI is all around and within us, but we’ve been working overtime in schools and in our instutions to silence it, to ignore the knowledge and wisdom that offers. We’ve sequestered kids inside, taught them that it’s all a competition, and that nature is a resource that fuels our worth and wealth.
We have designed a logic of value creation that leads to degeneration, a process of decline and degeneration. It is a terminal system because it is out of sync with the way life works.
Every element adds value to the bigger thing that it is nested in. So value adding in nested systems is one of the basic foundations of nature.
The essence of how life works on our planet is this process of value adding in nested living systems.
NI, or natural intelligence, is 3.8 billion years old.
We share the same intent as all the rest of living creatures on Earth. Life wants to live. Life wants to stay alive.
This is what I call Natural Intelligence, or NI, because it represents life’s logic behind 3.8 billion years of success on planet Earth. It is the Art and Science of surviving and thriving on a continuously changing planet with limited resources. Basically, natural intelligence is the intelligence of living systems. You see, living systems can do things that mechanical systems cannot do. Living systems can create themselves, and they can create what we call negentropy, which is the reverse of entropy. They can create a higher order of integration, integrity, and functioning. Negentropy allows living systems to become more and do more over time. They allow our planet to become richer, to become more complex, and to become more viable in the future.
The species that survive and thrive over the long haul despite millions of years of change disruption and major upheaval are those that leave the world more vital, more viable, and more capable. They are World Makers, not World Breakers.
