Put another way, it is impossible to evaluate the relevance of facts or factors of which you are ignorant. The Unknown, however orderly in its own nature, always appears as seemingly random perturbations of the Understood (our established ‘world model’ comprising what we have gleaned in the fields of experience - what we know, or, rather, what we think we know).
Chance is a logically absurd concept - “the cause of things is an acausal principle” - it merely denotes the operation of elements beyond our ken, of which we are ignorant. Similarly loaded is the concept of chaos - things seem chaotic when you do not understand what is going on. Conversely, if one identifies an order in a pattern of events, then it has to be said that pattern is in the eye of the beholder. That an eye for significance is the one that notices a coincidence was Jung’s usually misunderstood point in his essay on Synchronicity - the subtitle of which is Jung’s joke about an acausal principle.
Recognising a known pattern of events in what is currently happening is a powerful function of intelligence - and a major component of stupidity! The difference between stupidity and ignorance is that the stupid think they know - when they don’t. To know that you are ignorant is the first step towards intelligence.
Pattern-recognition requires ratification - the hypothesis must be tested.
The rational component of intelligence is verifiable, can be explained to oneself and to others and can be understood. Of course, we have to acknowledge that rationality itself is a culturally dependent variable - both in terms of what is considered significant in the first place and how the experience is presented to be ratified or discounted. As Laurens van der Post has pointed out, if a European blames some misfortune on the operations of witchcraft, he may well be presenting symptoms of mental disturbance; whereas an African from a culture in which witchcraft is accepted as a rational explanation of otherwise inexplicable bad luck might be behaving absolutely normally - perhaps merely moaning on as usual.
It is my thesis that it is the need for mutual verification of insight that is the evolutionary motor driving the human development of language and other cultural symbolisation - ritual, ceremony and so on.
As social creatures, we judge intelligence in others by their ability to respond appropriately to our words and our unspoken feelings. In the human pack, an intelligent fellow is one who makes sense to the others.
Individual intelligence, no matter how far- or deep-seeing, is only effective when translated into collaborative action. Being right must show itself in beneficial consequence, as well as in believable prediction - Mother Nature doesn’t pussyfoot around. Intelligence is for real and unforgiving, be it at individual or group level - the tribe abides or moves on or it dies, one by one.
To get where you’re going, you’ve got to start from where you are. Trouble is, you don’t know where you are until you know where you’re going! Intelligence consists in seeing - in having the capacity to acknowledge and evaluate - what isn’t there.
What do we mean when we attribute intelligence to someone (or some system)? If we know how to recognise intelligence, perhaps we can learn how to be more intelligent ourselves. Conversely, why do we have difficulty in acknowledging intelligence in non-human form? If we understand the intelligent organisation of biochemical and ecological systems, does that not enable humans to interact with, or participate in, these systems with more beneficial consequences?
This is, indeed, the crucial issue. We have to eschew the assumption that the world is a tabula rasa just waiting for the arrival of homo sapiens (i.e. intelligent man) to get things organised and sorted out.
A man who behaves with such assumptions towards women is rightly condemned as a sexist exploiter, stupid, ignorant and violent. Ecology is a feminist issue. And the normal atrocities which feminism opposes are, in the end, produced by simple ignorance institutionalised into exploitative social systems.
Like morality and science, intelligence addresses reality as it actually is, in the knowledge that everything is connected to everything else. To deal with someone as a mere thing, a sexual object with no life or rights or needs of its own, is a failure to see the real person, a failure to relate with intelligence and humanity, a refusal of grace.
Similarly to be condemned is the inability to recognise the implications of the fact that we are not a separately constituted kingdom from nature; that everything human belongs to an ecological system of which humanity is one integral exponent; that we are dependent for our physical, mental, social and spiritual livelihood on the comprehensive integrity, yes, the intelligence of that system! If religion represents the human attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the holiness of life, then science has proved the immanence of intelligence in living systems and hinted at the transcendent plenum of the global aggregate - a Being worthy of worship in truth. Responsibility and reverence go hand-in-hand.
This is not casual anthropomorphism - in fact, in our quest for intelligence we have to be wary of limiting ourself by assumptions deriving from purely human adaptations. Some of these are accidental or cultural (such as the importance of verbal articulation - of being able to give a coherent account of yourself in social discourse); others are inherent in the hegemonic niche of a technological dominant species (such as acceptance of moral and practical responsibility for the integrity, balance or continuity of the whole ecosystem).
Intelligence is, firstly, intentional - it is directed at achieving survival and development of the entity. It is adaptive - it has the ability to respond appropriately and successfully to environmental constraints and changes. The successful organism can be seen as a system engaged in reordering its environment in its own image. Its behaviour is strongly patterned and orderly and systematically directed at achieving individual and group goals.
It is characteristic of intelligent species that a high degree of explicit or implicit cooperation between individuals and groups of individuals is involved. We might say that group activities exhibit a higher degree of ostensible order than the activities of any given individual or sub-group. In other words, the individual’s behaviour may be more intelligent than might be assumed from studying that individual in solitude. There are clearly degrees in the autonomy exercised by individuals with respect to the coherence of the living group.
In some species, individuals seem to be fully hard-programmed or instinct driven - they exhibit little capacity for handling contingencies, persisting in unproductive behaviours rather than trying something else. Their function is as a mobile differentiated component of the group, nest, flock or cluster - no more independent than a muscle cell in a human body. We do not attribute intelligence to the muscle cell but rather to its function in the sustaining economy of the organism as a whole.
The perennial evolutionary trade-off between specialisation and adaptability comes into play here and is central to understanding the relationship of individual to collectivity, which is my theme. Adaptability is favoured by individual diversity, specialisation by collective uniformity. In genetics, potential is preserved by recessiveness, so that traits can be hidden where they are not favoured but remain in reserve in case of a change in circumstances favouring an alternative adaptation. Similarly, the group or social organism will always require some bridling or domestication of its individual components.
Small wonder that observers, coming from a culture that was, until recently, (well, at least as recently as this afternoon) incapable of perceiving intelligence in people of a different skin colour, might have difficulty in acknowledging the operation of intelligence in ecological systems. They may simply be too stupid, ignorant or conditioned by their own tribalist mumbo-jumbo to see it.
Intelligence involves the capability to optimise - to make the best of events and circumstances. This capacity is not just reactive but also projective - the intelligent system is able to set up circumstances so that events play out to its benefit, or to anticipate and limit the damage from unpropitious events. Like soldiers playing at war in a military exercise, the intelligent system may precipitate internal crisis in a seemingly environment-independent fashion, from time-to-time. The difference between paranoia and intelligence may be purely statistical - the paranoid perceives dangers in unlikely subjects, the intelligent in likely ones.
The proportion of intelligence which can be verbalised is extremely low - which does not impede the literary quest for the effective articulation of human experience! Words may function as symbols of something which can be known only in a intuitive/iconic way, but which may be just as verifiable between initiates. A tune may speak volumes about a native land or a lost love, a picture document the corruption of an entire system of government.
Intelligence is not just sensitivity to environmental stimulus - which is inherent in all living material - nor yet the ability to respond with appropriate behaviour (i.e. optimal for survival), although quantum leaps in such capability provide the basis for our intuitive stratification of mineral, vegetable and animal systems, each level exhibiting a further degree of freedom in adaptation to environmental change. True intelligence implies the ability to respond in advance of environmental crisis - one might almost say, to determine the future by choice.
Although this capability is, quite literally, a matter of extra-sensory perception, I do not intend to imply precognition as an attribute of intelligence. The critical difference between intelligence and clairvoyance is that the real thing deals in alternatives and possibilities (albeit it may be with a seemingly miraculous accuracy) whereas the fantasy is of knowing the logically absurd “one actual future”. Only what is already present can be actual - what is here.
Intelligence is the capacity to process what isn’t here as virtual, as if it were present when it is actually not. The crucial extra degree of freedom is this motility in imagination. This ability to move in a transcendent dimension is what permits the appearance of intelligent behaviour in living systems.
The Marxian adage : “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it!” represents the moral commitment of true intelligence, the religious cord that binds the active consciousness to its contents.
It is not enough to assert intelligence - it has to be proved by successful outcome. Intelligence is the recognition of truth and knowledge the certainty of unanimity. If intelligence, which is to say consciousness, exists at any level of creation, that is because the conditions for consciousness are universal. It is logically absurd to suppose otherwise - if mind is an epiphenomenon which can be discounted, then so are its conclusions.
Intelligence is participatory.
The world is thought, matter, energy, space, time, mystery, substance, meaning, measure, gravity, levity, imagination, virtual, real. All aspects are relevant if truth is to be unanimous - relative and incommensurate, integral and articulate. Intelligence is both immanent - the ground of all being, and transcendent - forever unknown in depth and extent, and beyond all reason.
The dignity of humanity is not that we are different as a species from all other species and genera, but that no aspect of life escapes us, no event so trivial that it is not of some significance to some human. To be conscious - to be aware - is to take on responsibility for reality in its totality. We have to account for ourselves, explain what we think we’re up to. We search for validity, feed on meaning. We are impassioned by compassion, strangers journeying through a strange land.
This country, in which we are nevertheless at home, is the Terra Incognita - the world that is unknown, comprising the set of unpredictable outcomes.
The Unknown, insofar as it becomes known, loses its essential numinous power to change things beyond recognition. A mystery exposed becomes just another boring fact.
This is all to the well and good when the mystery was, say, the ætiology of a particular childhood disease, and factual understanding enables efficacious treatment. A problem solved becomes a technically trivial exercise in repeating proven procedures. Intelligence is, to be sure, embodied in the social knowledge implemented in hygienic measures, but there is no longer the creative intensity of discovery driven by the practical urgency of crisis which is the epitomé of what we mean by intelligence.
Intelligent enquiry is at least one order more integrative, more intense, than intelligent implementation of defined procedures, however effective. In literary archetype, it is the difference between Holmes and Watson. The egregious detective is always dealing with new unique problems, in contrast to the general practitioner, always dealing with the same old problems in new presentations. Holmes’ acute sensitivity to the unique features of every situation, and his nose for the truth at all costs, is contrasted with the cheerful affability and social propriety of Dr. Watson. Holmes stands for the creative individual intelligence, penetrating, logical and sceptical; Watson for the assurance of conventional wisdom.
All of which is to say that individual intelligence must always surpass collective intelligence in its acuity. However, this very sharpness or vividness of perception may be spurious - resulting from a kind of image enhancement whereby patterns of events are focussed and filtered by conjecture. Platonic idealism - the concept that preexisting ideas or ideal forms shape our apprehension of reality - rules the imagination. We only see what we can understand, or what we think we understand. Even Sherlock Holmes’ intelligence is limited to the solution of logical puzzles, he is mystified and bewildered by normal social intercourse.
Individual understanding can only be partial by the very restriction of individuality. It can only attain to objectivity by abstraction from the individual insight or perspective which gave it birth. In so doing, reflexively, it loses its objective foundation in the circumstances and imperatives of individual existence, and becomes all the more subjective, because unconsciously motivated and determined.
In Gregory Bateson’s formulation, a bit of information is a “difference that makes a difference”. The reception of intelligence - the perception of a significant piece of information - brings about a change in the state of the receptor. This change of state itself propagates a series of changes. From an external standpoint, the system may be seen to start to behave differently. Information overcomes inertia.
At the most elementary level, this is the degree of freedom of behaviour which distinguishes animate from inanimate systems. A classical Newtonian mechanical system continues in its path, or remains at rest, until it is affected by an external physical input of energy. A stone falling into the sun receives ample information - in a rising photonic flux at its surface and increasing internal perturbation of its atoms - as to the direction its path is leading, enough indeed to permit precise extrapolation of its impending fate. Its future is wholly implicit in its present state, but lacking any means to alter that state to change its path, all this information cannot be applied - it is operationally meaningless.
Intelligence is the application of information towards the optimisation of a system’s present and projected future state. Intelligence processes information and produces survival. It does not matter how complex a system’s reception of information, its intelligence is bounded by its ability to make effective behavioural responses to information input or received from its environment. The only information that is significant is data whose magnitude or trend can be changed through organismic action.
Adaptation, as such, can be seen at quite a simple thermodynamic level in the physicochemical dissipative structures analysed by Prigogine, such as the patterns of bubbles in a pan of water coming to the boil on a stove. As the environment changes, the body of water changes - it adapts to absorb the energy and dissipate the entropy produced in any thermodynamic process. Instead of exploding, the pan comes gradually to the boil and simmers away, depending on the flow of energy being applied.
Intelligent adaptation does not merely change its state to reflect environmental change, but rather seeks to maintain its internal state by changing its environment.
Gratuitous information, that you have no means of acting upon, is meaningless or, worse, inimical to survival. Information is what makes sense - actually, information is what makes more sense. Sense, or meaning or significance, develops both knowledge and intelligence in the process of learning and understanding.
Knowledge and intelligence are not quite the same thing. A being whose understanding was complete would have no need for information, since predictable data adds nothing to the stock of knowledge except when there is ignorance and the desire or need to learn. Conversely, intelligence is required to extract the maximum comprehension from minimum information. When the environment is rapidly changing, selection favours those who can “catch on quick”, who can make the necessary connections to make the most sense out of each snippet of information. Significance is contextual and integral, facts are meaningless in themselves. The value of a fact depends on the way it may be interpreted as a signal or signifier of wider trends, tendencies or catastrophes.