In a world obsessed with AI, we must not lose sight of authentic living intelligence.
After 200 years of industrialization, humanity is at risk of "innovating" its way out of existence, and one of the central factors in this paradoxical situation is the loss of substantive connection with true, real, authentic, genuine, natural living intelligence.
Contemporary high-tech societies are so obsessed with artificial intelligence, computing, and other digital-virtual technologies that these tools have become idols. They are secular, inanimate gods worshipped by people who have forgotten and/or relinquished their own sacredness, and the sacredness of the wild, uncultivated world.
These two trends run in parallel: to the degree that we forget, deny, repress, or ignore genuine living intelligence, we are liable to pedestal an imposter, a simulacrum.
Living Intelligence: Fundamentally Distinct from AI
This project has been many years in the making, and in many ways is an extension and elaboration of the research that animated my doctoral dissertation (free to download, just follow the link). That project swirled around two key phenomena that nested together like conceptual Matryoshka dolls. On one level, it described the currently unfolding scientific revolution (nods to Thomas Kuhn) in the life and mind sciences. On another level, it detailed the central component of that paradigm shift: a fundamental redefinition of life, mind, cognition, and consciousness.
I think it shows a deplorable deadness of imagination to suppose that philosophy will indefinitely revolve within the scope of the problems and systems that two thousand years of European history have bequeathed to us. Seen in the long perspective of the future, the whole of western European history is a provincial episode. I do not expect to see in my day a genuine, as distinct from a forced and artificial, integration of thought. But a mind that is not too egotistically impatient can have faith that this unification will issue in its season."
~ John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism" (1929)
The fundamental redefinition does away with the root ontological duality that underpins much of civilizational science and philosophy. While many scholars and critics point a finger at Descartes for inaugurating the classic mind-body dualism with his infamous "I think, therefore I am" ruminations, a more general dualism in Western thought reaches back 2,500 years ago to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. If you want the details of this, see my dissertation.
The relevant point here is that there is literally no good evidence for a mind-body, mental-physical dualism (there is plenty of poor quality/weak evidence for this idea, but no good evidence; not all evidence is of equal quality/value). This also means that the modern and contemporary attempts to reductively explain mind, cognition, consciousness, and intelligence by mapping these phenomena onto the microscopic level of physical substrates are fundamentally misguided, and wrong. (I.e., "Look, our imaging scan shows that this area of the brain lights up when people are imagining something; therefore, this area of the brain is where 'consciousness' is produced." This is actually terribly illogical and fallacious reasoning, and thus ironically quite unintelligent.)
Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system."
~ Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980, p. 13)
The core thesis of the emerging paradigm redefining the life and mind sciences (really, all sciences) is that life is intelligence. It is not a question of whether any given form of life "has" intelligence; this possessive framing totally misconstrues the reality. Life is intelligence. The diverse and eternally complex phenomena we label with the four simple squiggles of lines "life" is one in the same as the diverse and eternally complex phenomena we refer to abstractly through the longer series of squiggles "intelligence."
And, more specifically in relation to this project, this living intelligence is fundamentally distinct from all forms of AI, machine learning, and even quantum computing (in addition to fringe projects such as trying to integrate slime molds or mycelium with computer chips and circuit boards - oh yes, people are doing this). There is a phenomenon/set of phenomena in the world that is uniquely deserving of the description "living intelligence," and it is not any form of AI. That's why it's called artificial intelligence; it's not real intelligence.