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, wild, authentic, genuine, natural living intelligence.
Contemporary high-tech societies are so obsessed with artificial intelligence, mechanization, 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 at the core of this paradigm shift can be summarized in this: Mind is not inside the head; we are inside mind. I came up with this phrase as a simple way to convey the essence of
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 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.