Living Intelligence is Primarily and Mostly Qualitative

If you want to quantify it, 99% of human cognition is non-conceptual, qualitative sensing. This is the literal basis of sentience, of which all forms of AI are completely devoid. "Sentience" derives from the Latin sentientem, which means "feeling." Computers do not feel. They operate purely through abstract, symbolic, quantitative information. Even if a machine can "sense" environmental conditions like temperature, humidity, force, light, sound, etc., it interacts with these phenomena purely through an abstract, symbolic representation of those phenomena, in the form of quantitative information. There is utterly no qualitative sensing occurring.

In contrast, living intelligence is fundamentally, pervasively, and ultimately qualitative in nature. Descartes was wrong; it should have been: "I sense, therefore I am." Everything Descartes ever wrote was a conceptual report of an originally non-conceptual experience. The same is true for everyone else. Indeed, even if you find yourself disagreeing - conceptually - with these statements, there is an accompanying feeling of incongruence while reading these words that gives rise to your logical/abstract/conceptual dissent (assuming you are still in touch with your embodied sentience, and have the courage and honesty to acknowledge that as the basis of all your thinking; if you aren't so in touch, you have become highly mechanized through years of cognitive conditioning within an industrial-mechanical-computational social milieu, thus demonstrating the need and impetus for this whole project).

This means that to "make sense" of anything on this website, you must literally sense the meaning through your tangible embodiment, your direct experiencing of these phenomena, and not merely try to logically or abstractly understand these ideas exclusively on the conceptual level. Hence the page on Experiential Education: this is vital and necessary for "understanding" living intelligence in any legitimate, robust sense of the term.

This basic truth was understood and promoted by both John Dewey, the American pragmatic psychologist, and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Chilean biologists and neuroscientists, who each independently developed a theory of deep life-mind continuity, embodied cognition, and the autopoietic theory of life.

Dewey, in his 1930 essay "Qualitative Thought," writes that:

"The foregoing remarks are intended to suggest the significance to be attached to the term 'qualitative thought.' But as statements they are propositions and hence symbolic. Their meaning can be apprehended only by going beyond them, by using them as clues to call up qualitative situations. When an experience of the latter is had and they are re-lived, the realities corresponding to the propositions laid down may be had."

Later, in 1992, Maturana and Varela offer the same disclaimer (in more straightforward language) in their book The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding:

"Nothing we are going to say will be understood in a really effective way unless the reader feels personally involved and has a direct experience that goes beyond all mere description." (emphasis added)

Without this tangible, embodied sensing of the phenomena all these words are describing -- where such direct experiencing is how we literally "make sense" of reality -- we can argue indefinitely about the conceptual analysis of these phenomena. But human living intelligence is 99% non-conceptual, so by simple math, if you try to understand living intelligence purely or primarily abstractly-conceptually, you will necessarily fail to understand it.

*Note: this is not to say that conceptual thought is meaningless or useless; it is to say that it rests upon non-conceptual, qualitative experience as a primary mode of sentient experiencing of reality. In no way whatsoever is this an "anti-intellectual" stance or theory; it is actually the most robustly intellectual approach possible, because by grounding our "higher" intellectual operations in a tangible sensing of our environment, our thinking incorporates data from the empirical world that all symbolic cognition references indirectly.

Life is Intelligence

Still, to this day, you'll occasionally see news headlines saying something like "Are Plants Intelligent? Study Sheds New Light on Plant Abilities to Adapt and Respond to Diverse Stimuli" (or something of that nature).