The Campaign For Real Intelligence
AI hype and reality is confusing, but also an opportunity
“For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake
To read the headlines, you would think that intelligence is about processing information, solving problems and collecting data. But it’s not.
Real intelligence is about understanding, richness and the shining beauty of life; there should be a campaign. It shows up not primarily as answers but as sharp wit, not as facts but an alive, dynamic, on occasion surprising wisdom. Moreover, intelligence is not private, as if springing from bone-encased skulls, but shared. It is not a product of calculation but perception.
The growing presence of AI is, therefore, a moment to reappraise capacities such as sympathy and imagination, yearning and love, as well as discover how intelligence is not only a human possession but enlivens and sustains all things.
Put it like this: for too long, unexamined materialism has tyrannised our lives. That worldview underpins runaway consumption and widespread psychological distress - feeding fear and panic about AI now because it limits people's capacity to see other than machine-like activity even when organic vitality is right before their eyes.
Listen in
Listen to my friend Pauline Rudd, Emeritus Professor at the University of Dublin and receiver of the prestigious Torbern Bergman Aware for Analytical Chemistry. She describes how she first encounters the intelligence of the biochemical molecules with which she works.
Listen to another friend, Benedict Pollard, founder of Mighty Fine Oaks, conservationist, and Fellow of the Linnean Society. He describes his deep relationship with trees, and oaks in particular, as he relates to and receives from their intelligence.
One thing is immediately clear: intelligence is not algorithmic, for all that algorithms can be tools that intelligent human beings can powerfully use.
Etymological moment
The roots of the word “intelligence” can help, too. Indeed, etymologies highlight another form of intelligence, that of words.
The Latin, intellegere, is a compound of two words: “inter” meaning between and “legere” meaning to collect, gather, or read. So “intelligence” carries undertones of receiving, sifting and, importantly, attuning. The origins of the word imply an active engagement and interactive participation or, to put it another way, you and I aren’t islands of intelligence amidst seas of stupidity, but we can collaborate with intelligences that surround us and contribute to that ecology.
A distinction is useful, too; the difference between intellectus and ratio, as medieval writers used them, is worth remembering. Ratio was the logical, step-by-step struggle to work things out, whereas intellectus was intuitive understanding, shared in some measure with all creatures, and experienced as a direct and, strangely, effortless - if typically not immediately clear - perception of truth. Beauty and goodness are accompanying guides.
Amplification
Intelligence is knowing about life based on experiencing and undergoing, not just studying and inspecting; it involves a capacity to respond to the present and to be porous. Intelligence may be implicit or explicit, embodied or cognitive, deducted or intuited, and whilst accumulating information and sorting data undoubtedly helps, intelligence itself is about trusting feeling and following insights. It is about feeling the pull of 1 plus 1 leading to 2.
To deepen your intelligence therefore involves self-confrontation, self-reconfiguration and self-transcendence. The focus is not on highbrow abstractions, as if the analytical philosopher or computer programmer had a monopoly on intelligence. Emotional intelligence and the capacity to learn from lived relationships are equally vital because, at base, intelligence is about a familiarity with what Iris Murdoch called the “fabric of being”. Trees and molecules do that one way; we humans can grow in a conscious alertness to the ways in which we resonate with the reality around us.
Other facets of intelligence are emerging here. For instance, intelligence is about utilising what psychologists call intention: the ability deliberately to turn the mind’s eye towards this or that object or idea, as opposed to unthinkingly reacting to whatever input strikes us. Pauline Rudd intimated molecules do that, too; their behaviour may be approximated by an AI but they themselves are other.
Alternatively, intelligence is about realising that whilst we can make interior choices, good choices typically take practice, which is why intelligence is linked to spiritual exercises, such as meditation, and is associated with being wise - and is not much to do with sheer calculating power.
Character traits
Virtues are integral to a full appreciation of intelligence, as well. These are the personal habits and traits, which can also be transmitted by institutions and communities. Virtues guide us towards what is good by enabling us increasingly to participate in what is good, as it is found within and around us.
Which is to say that virtues facilitate intelligence because they help disclose more of reality. The virtue of humility is central to this increase, although it needs to be understood properly because it is not about self-abnegation or about putting yourself last. Rather, it is about an unbounded receptivity so as to be filled with more.
In The Divine Comedy, Dante likens humility to the sea because the sea’s lowest place means that everything flows into it. The sea can, therefore, be said to be intelligent because of how it embraces and accepts, without reserve: knowing everything. Similarly, the properly humble person grows in intelligence by being open to things and coming to know of all things, whether good or ill.
Love is another key virtue for intelligence because love can detect what isn’t yet known and can even join with what will never be fully known: the mysteries of existence unveiled by what is desired as good, beautiful and true. Hence, at the culmination of The Divine Comedy, Dante doesn’t say he knows God, but that he has an awareness of commingling with the living pulse that is the fabric of being and freely, joyfully co-creating with everyone in it. The famous last line of the Paradiso celebrates this “turning with the love that moves the sun and the other stars”.
Love’s intelligence knows that the myriad things that exist are as many reflections of the ever-present originating light, as planets reflect the source-light of their star. There is, then, a broader direction of travel to test and pursue, too. Many have said that intelligence can lead to an appreciation of life sub specie aeternitatis – from the highest, divine perspective down.
Spiritually-speaking, this is the intelligence that understands that your being and my being and all being is one being. There are many types of intelligence – in us and other creatures, in so-called inanimate things, in celestial beings. But this variety points to a possibility: the understanding that your being and my being and all being is one being.
You might say that intelligence is fractal: a part reflects the whole because its life can only be yet another buzzing expression of life itself, in a dancing, radiating, intelligent unity.
Have a look - a quick practice
Take a moment away from reading and look around where you are, right now.
Pick one thing that draws you – maybe a tree, or a book, or the light, or a picture. Whatever.
Dwell with your choice momentarily. Become aware of its qualities, its presence, its impact. Maybe that is strong or soft, clear or obscure. Can you bring a word or two to describe it, maybe an adjective or is a colour or a feeling better?
Then, move your mind out a little into your choice and consider the intelligence it carries. Is its intelligence human or alien? Can you commune with that intelligence or is it strange?
Make a note of what you comes to you. That can help clarify and discern the experience - and support the development of a vivid, living sense of the nature of real intelligence.
IN OTHER NEWS FOR JUNE
Stories hold intelligence. A series of events in the first week of June, which I am helping to organise, will be exploring the wise, resourcing power of sacred stories. Do take a look.
2 June - Exploring sacred stories in a secular age, London - speakers include Linda Woodhead, Elizabeth Oldfield, David Smith MP - info here.
4 June - Exploring the sacred in human relations, Cambridge, info here.
5 June - Exploring the power of sacred stories, Oxford - speakers include David Bentley Hart - info here.
10 June - William Blake: The Imagination and Mysticism, is an evening I’m leading with the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred.
25-28 June - Listen to Charles Foster to get a taste of the Realisation Festival in June, where he and others will be speaking, and consider joining us.
And now relax to the latest Philosophy Slam! the podcast, with myself and Robert Rowland Smith riffing on sofas and numbers.
@Mark Vernon Mark, you really do share such wonderful work with the world. Thank you for the light you bring.
I remember the ratio/ intellectus distinction was something Mary Harrington invoked when she was critiquing the effective altruism movement - if I remember rightly, the phenomenology of individual experience seemed to be almost non existent, to the extent that news of abuses occurring within the group were met with gaslighting and shrugs. Ratio/intellectus is such a valuable distinction when we're trying to understand why utilitarianism and physicalism feel strangely *off*. We're trying to express the nuances of intellectus in a doggedly rational arena, and it seems such a quiet little voice amid the banging of the logical drum. This is profoundly tragic, given we know it can sing beautifully.
Also springing to mind is the chapter of Awake dealing with Blake's attitudes towards revolution, and the tendency of revolutionary politics to apply the blindfold of crude levelling, taking liberal to mean "socially inclusive" rather than "generously spirited." It seems the ratio demands a kind of deliberate suppression of curiosity, instinct, honesty, perhaps out of fear of some inner depravity (Cf. Harrington on EA).
When I read about Blake's definition of "liberal" I felt, I'm in agreement, but I can also think of some situations where liberalism as "generosity of spirit" gets perverted, by those whose disdain for the "socially inclusive" is due to a covertly ungenerous spirit - I was thinking of the kind of decadent, maverick politics of libertarians, or perhaps a kind of Nietzschean brutality, or a notion of tough love. Perhaps a kind of shadow intellectus... A landscape of moral relativism results in some head-scratching for the generous spirit. The suggestion in the piece you have written here, that the ability to wisely direct the intellect aided the discipline and habit of meditation, which serves a kind of hygienic (for want of a better word) function, complements Blake's intellectus-steeped idea of what it is to be "liberal".
I'm just wondering what hope there is for politics in its present from. How can the intellegence you describe find its way into the corridors of power? I hope, and dare I even suspect, a different kind of revolution is coming, and no blood need be shed.