The Basics
In a society obsessed with machines and computers...
...we must reclaim our living intelligence.
Artificial "intelligence" is being forced into every aspect of life, but it is not actually intelligent. To use technology intelligently, we must rediscover real, living intelligence.
~~~
Living intelligence is fundamentally different than all forms of artificial intelligence and computation (even quantum computers), but the language used to describe these technologies might mislead you into thinking otherwise: "artificial intelligence" is a marketing term, not a technical description. And, to the degree that we confuse and conflate AI with real, authentic, genuine, natural, wild living intelligence, we will be liable to use these technologies unintelligently - a paradox rife with ironic dangers and real risks.
After 200 years of industrialization and thousands of years of development of what Lewis Mumford calls the "Megamachine," most of society has lost touch with living intelligence - in themselves, and in the world around them. Today, our species faces a constellation of challenges and threats that could very well lead to our extinction. Technology will not save us from this situation. It might even accelerate our demise. But, if we can reconnect with the innate intelligence that courses through our bodies like rivers through forests, and which permeates the entire natural world, we can discern how to use technology in a life-engendering, rather than life-undermining, manner.
And besides all that, living intelligence is vastly more interesting than AI, and life is way more fun when we live like the animals we are and not the machines and computers we aren't.
So, on whatever level this may speak to you and hold relevance for your life, here are some basic facts about living intelligence that have been lost in contemporary society's pathological obsession with machines, computers, and gadgets with small, two-dimensional screens.
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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). Conceptual cognition is secondary to, and derivative from, the primary, qualitative realm of cognition.
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.
This basic truth was understood and promoted by both John Dewey, the American pragmatic psychologist/philosopher, 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 (a vague, ambiguous metaphor if there ever was one) in a tangible sensing of our environment, our thinking incorporates data from the empirical world that all symbolic cognition references only indirectly.
Living Intelligence is Inherent in Life, Not a Property of Brains or Nervous Systems
Said simply: It is not that only some forms of life, like dolphins, are intelligent and other forms of life, like worms, are not. Rather, the more accurate statement is that life itself is intelligence. The set of line squiggles "l-i-f-e" and the longer set of squiggles of lines "i-n-t-e-l-l-i-g-e-n-c-e" refer to the same phenomenon. Intelligence is not a "property of" certain life forms, it simply is life as such. Saying that a given form of life "has intelligence" is like saying a given type of tree "has wood" or "has woodiness." This is silly. Trees are wood; that's just what they are. In like manner, nobody talks about a lake as "having water." A lake is water in a certain form, just like all other bodies of water are water in a particular form or configuration.
This is how we need to think about life and intelligence. Intelligence is what life is. Just as there are many diverse types of wood from many diverse types of tree, there are many diverse types of intelligence. All bodies of water on Earth are the same water, transformed and recycled through global climatic currents and events. Just so, all forms of life on Earth are the same intelligence, manifest in a diversity of forms and configurations.
"Under no circumstances is a biological phenomenon defined by the properties of its component elements."
~ Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living
In a similar vein (see what I did there), cognition cannot be reduced to or conflated with neurological activity. The privileging of brain activity in 20th century cognitive science is more reflective of the historically contingent socioeconomic influence of the cybernetics movement than it is an accurate analytical designation. Obviously, the brain plays important roles in cognition, but to equate mind or cognition with brain/nervous system activity is like equating the sociocultural phenomenon of driving with the chemistry of fuel combustion in a car's engine. Driving is a complex, social-relational phenomenon incorporating economic, political, cultural, historical, geographical, mechanical, industrial, scientific, technological, symbolic, occupational, and ideological factors. None of that can be understood by looking at how the pistons of an engine work. Likewise, cognition refers to a complex set of relational phenomena emerging from fields of non-linear interactivity incorporating literally every aspect of human biology and sociology. Neural activity is just one small aspect of this.
Contrary to popular misbelief, the brain is not our primary organ of knowing. The brain has no direct perceptual access to reality, and it feels nothing. It is totally dependent on the rest of our body to tell it what's going on and what the world is like (both the gut and the heart send more information to the brain than the brain sends to the body). This is not new knowledge. In 1917, in his essay "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" in his book Creative Intelligence, John Dewey reminds us that "the brain is primarily an organ of a certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world." One hundred years later, this is confirmed by cognitive science and neuroscience:
"Since ancient times, the human mind has been understood as a collection of mental faculties for thinking (cognitions), feeling (emotions) and volition (actions, and in more modern versions, perceptions). These categories come not from biology, but from the philosophical concerns about truth, beauty and ethics that anchor Western theories of human nature. But the human brain did not evolve to think or feel or see. Several decades of research points to a different hypothesis: ...metabolism and other forms of energy regulation may be at the core of the human mind, regardless of whether a person is thinking, feeling or perceiving."
~ Barrett, Quigley, and Hamilton, "An active inference theory of allostasis and interoception in depression," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B Biological Sciences (2016) 371 (1708): 20160011.
The key idea to remember here is that:
"Cognition and the operation of the living system [are] the same thing...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."
~ Maturana & Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, xvi-xvii; 13
In summary: intelligence isn't a "property of" life any more than wood is a "property of" trees or water is a "property of" lakes. Trees are wood; lakes are water; life is intelligence.
The Brain is Not a Computer (and the body is not a machine)
Twentieth century psychology and cognitive science were dominated by a computational paradigm tied to the emergence of the cybernetics movement that coincided with the rapid rise of military-industrial science supported by the parallel development of the modern research university in the first half of the century. This history is far too complex to easily summarize here, but the significant point is that this influence of cybernetics and industrial, computational, and mechanical thinking left an enduring legacy on the psychological and cognitive sciences that persists today.
The problem is, these influences have misled generations of researchers and clinicians into believing that the human body is essentially a biological machine and that the mind/brain is a biological computer. These metaphors obscure far more than they reveal, however. (For detail on the body-mechanical idea, see the Biotensegrity project page.)
Thankfully, as I discussed in my doctoral dissertation, the life and mind sciences are in the midst of a comprehensive paradigm shift that moves us away from these fundamentally faulty ideas. The core of the emerging (yet also ancient) paradigm is an autopoietic process ontology that fundamentally redefines life, mind, cognition, perception, communication, and even evolution.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Chilean biologists and neuroscientists, were the first to systematically and formally describe an autopoietic theory of life/cognition (in their book Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living). In a similar book written for a general audience, they emphasize that
"The popular metaphor of calling the brain an 'information-processing device' [i.e. computer] is not only ambiguous but patently wrong."
~ The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
Unfortunately, this brain/mind-computer metaphor persists both in mainstream, lay thinking and in the thinking of experts and researchers. For example, in 2025, during his acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate at the University of Toronto, machine learning (aka "AI") pioneer and co-founder of OpenAI Ilya Sutskever claims that "the day will come when AI will do all the things that we [humans] can do...because the brain is a digital computer...so why can't a digital computer, a digital brain, do the same things?"
Ilya emphasizes this multiple times, as if simply repeating a false idea somehow makes it true. "How can I be so sure? How can I be so sure of that? The reason is that all of us have a brain, and the brain is a biological computer. That's why. We have a brain, the brain is a biological computer. ...This is the one sentence summary for why AI will be able to do all those things. Because we have a brain and the brain is a biological computer."
There are multiple, complex issues with this idea, so I can't discuss everything here. But just remember this: calling the brain or mind a "biological computer" is a metaphorical move, not a technical, scientific definition, and a mountain of high quality evidence from hundreds of scientific fields and disciplines, amassed over the past century, has thoroughly undermined this idea. We can call a pickup truck a "mechanical horse," but this is obviously a mere metaphorical description, not a scientific description. There are a handful of ways that the brain can be likened to a computer, but the vast majority of neurological functions -- and the core nature of the brain -- are fundamentally distinct from machines and computers.
"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
~ Emerson M. Pugh, PhD, IBM research engineer
Living Intelligence is Holistic, Systemic and Relational, not Individual
"Those who talk most of the organism, physiologists and psychologists, are often just those who display least sense of the intimate, delicate and subtle interdependence of all organic structures and processes with one another. The world seems mad in preoccupation with what is specific, particular, disconnected in medicine, politics, science, industry, education. In terms of a conscious control of inclusive wholes, search for those links which occupy key positions and which effect critical connections is indispensable. But recovery of sanity depends upon seeing and using these specifiable things as links functionally significant in a process. To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing never finished process. Until we have a procedure in actual practice which demonstrates this continuity, we shall continue to engage in appealing to some other specific thing, some other broken off affair, to restore connectedness and unity – calling the specific religion or reform or whatever specific is the fashionable cure of the period. Thus we increase the disease in the means used to cure it."
~ John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)
"Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language."
~ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933)
"Under no circumstances is a biological phenomenon defined the properties of its component elements."
"The greatest hindrance in the understanding of the living organization lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties; it must be understood as a unity."
~ Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980)
As the quotes above declare quite emphatically, it is impossible to understand living phenomena by looking at the "parts" of any living system, such as an organism, ecosystem, society, or planet. This probably sounds strange to many people. Do we not understand human biology by looking at how cells, and the parts of cells, function? Of course: we understand how those parts work on the level of those parts. What such analysis does not provide is an explanation of how an organism works as an emergent unity.
In contrast, everything a car does can be explained by an analysis of its parts. Every part serves a specific function, and its function is linearly connected to whatever sub-system of the vehicle it serves in (e.g., the pistons in the engine; the torque converter in the transmission; the muffler in the exhaust system, etc.). The phenomenon of a car being driven on a street is readily and comprehensively explained by an understanding of how all the parts work together. There is no mystery here.
The situation is fundamentally different for living systems because living systems, by definition, are ontologically emergent. This means that the structural and functional unity of a living system entails a form of organizational coherence that arises from non-linear activity, which is why they are not just an "algebraic sum," as Alfred Korzybski observed in 1933 (quote above).
"Non-linear" activity ultimately refers to "quantum" phenomena, which cannot be fully predicted, controlled, or calculated quantitatively. Richard Campbell summarizes this nicely:
"The reason why non-linear interactions are so important is the way they work to bind together cohesive entities with properties and powers which cannot be deduced from those of their components. ...Non-linear interactions produce higher-level entities out of lower-level components by generating a stable system through similar processes of dispersing energy interactions at the component-level across the whole system. As a result, it becomes computationally impossible to follow the detailed component-to-component energetic interactions. That is why non-linear interactions yield genuinely emergent entities with significantly different properties and powers.
The critical difference is between those systems whose cohesion produces aggregative effects and those whose cohesion is produced by dynamical bonds which have non-aggregative, non-linear effects. Combinations of the latter kind bring into being new quantum field organizations, with novel properties. The key point is that the fusion involved produces new unified wholes, with causal powers which cannot be derived by simply referring to the separate causal powers of its elements, considered apart."
~ Richard Campbell, The Metaphysics of Emergence
This is why I emphasize (as I did in the first point on this page, "Living Intelligence is Qualitative") that to "understand" anything about living intelligence, mind, and cognition, you must have a non-conceptual, qualitative experience of the phenomena you are exploring. The conceptual dimension of cognition (like this sentence) is linear. If you read the words of these sentences out of order, they won't be meaningful, because a very specific, linear ordering of concepts is necessary for them to make sense. But life and mind are characteristically non-linear, so to the degree that you try to "understand" non-linear phenomena through linear forms, you will fail -- not because you aren't smart enough, but because that's just silly. It's like trying to see something in the dark, or hear a faint sound while wearing earplugs next to an airplane runway. The medium just doesn't suit the message.
Said differently, the very phenomenon of life is something that obtains, exists, functions, and changes on the level of a unified whole. This means that everything in human cognition and intelligence -- perception, communication, metabolism, thinking, analysis, feeling, moving, breathing, expressing, etc. -- involves the entirety of our organism, full-stop, no exceptions. There is literally no human activity or function that only uses part of our body~minds. For example, it is not just the feet that walk: the entire organism walks. It is not just the lungs that breathe: the entire organism breathes. It is not just the brain that thinks: the entire organism thinks. And so on. There may be focal points of various types of activity localized in various areas, organs, tissues, and systems of the body, but ultimately, nothing is excluded from anything else. Literally nothing.
This will be difficult for people conditioned by the ideology of the Megamachine to accept and understand, because for hundreds of years now, North Atlantic (i.e. "western") science, philosophy, and medicine has operated within a paradigm fundamentally characterized by a reductionistic, materialistic, linear, mechanical model of reality - i.e. ontology. But ironically, the sciences themselves now demonstrate emphatically and undeniably that such a model/ontology is fundamentally wrong. Living systems are ontologically emergent through non-linear/quantum interactivity that extends not only beyond the physical boundaries of a given system but also across time. (The diachronic-temporal aspect of living phenomena is a whole extra set of complexities that science is just beginning to appreciate and understand. Perhaps I will speak to this at some point, but for now that is beyond the scope of this overview.)
All of this means that living intelligence is also something that exists and functions on the level of an entire system, not any individual part within a system. As I detail in my discussion of "Interotelligence," the intelligence of organisms is primarily a matter of their ability to adaptively and sustainably manage the complex patterns of energy flow that constitute them as living beings. "Interoception" is the intelligent ability-process-capacity of sensing environmental (internal and external) energy demands and fluctuations and responding to them in such a way that the organizational coherence of the self is sustained. This intelligence is not a "property of" the brain -- it is a constellation of abilities, functions, capacities, and processes distributed throughout literally every cell in the body. Hence, "Interotelligence."
This principle applies to all scales and orders of living organization, from single cell to multicellular organisms to social systems to ecosystems and to planets such as Earth. Intelligence is a question of how any given system as a whole is functioning. As such, it is a question of the adaptive abilities and actions of a system relative to the needs of that system relative to the demands and resources presented to that system by the encompassing environment. Intelligence is not a simple matter of a single "quotient" (in the traditional sense of a person's IQ - "intelligence quotient") measured by a test of abstract and conceptual cognition. Plenty of people with high IQ scores are remarkably ineffective and unintelligent in other aspects of life. Intelligence is vastly more complex than what any given test can assess, evaluate, or measure. Ironically, it is quite unintelligent to think that intelligence is so simple!
Intelligence is Relational
Given that intelligence is holistic-systemic, it is therefore also relational. Systems are networks of relations. Not just connections between distinct parts, but inclusive networks of multidimensional relational events. Literally everything humans do, all aspects and dimensions of cognition, are relational events. Everything we think, feel, perceive, communicate, desire, imagine, remember, touch, move, and create is a relational experience. Nothing is truly isolated. In fact, even the concept of isolation is a relational concept: isolated from what? Reality is networks of relations, full stop. This means that intelligence is also a relational phenomenon, and again not a "property" of discrete "parts" of a system.
