A Framework for Intelligence

"So I want to be clear that intelligence is a really, as you well know, is a very complex issue. I’m not going to claim that I have the only appropriate definition or the best answer. I’m just going to give you my thoughts on it and the framework that I found useful in my work. I think we’ve, you know, can fully accept that there are other people with other useful definitions and so on.

So for me, some work that has to be done by any theory of intelligence is that it has to be able to help us directly compare and interact with what we now call diverse intelligences. So I’m not interested in theories that apply just to mammals or to mammals and birds or that break down when we have to think about octopus or insects or other things. I want a framework for intelligence that is going to handle all possible agents. This means not only the things we see in the phylogenetic tree here on earth, but novel synthetic biology constructs, artificial intelligences that we may build, either in hardware or software, potential exobiological agents, weird beings at other scales, including individual cells, subcellular molecular networks, uh, enormous things like social structures, and basically and perhaps the evolutionary process itself."

- Michael Levin (1969 - )
Michael Levin on Multi-Scale Intelligence and Teleophobia

Stillness

  

"When I am liberated by silence,
when I am no longer involved in the measurement
of life, but in the living of it,
I can discover a form of prayer in which
there is effectively, no distraction.
My whole life becomes a prayer.
My whole silence is full of prayer.
The world of silence in which I am immersed
contributes to my prayer."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Meditative Inseparability

"Now, of course, reality—from a philosopher’s point of view—is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me: what do I mean by reality? Am I talking about the physical world of nature, or am I talking about a spiritual world, or what? And to that, I have a very simple answer. When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept. So, in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that’s also a philosophical concept. And reality itself is not a concept. Reality is [imagine hearing Alan Watts striking a standing bell], and we won’t give it a name.

Now, it’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world. For example, in the real world there aren’t any things, nor are there any events. That doesn’t mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank. It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not—out there, as constellations—already grouped in the sky.

So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference. And meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. That is to say, that we become interiorally silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time, that is to say, we talk to ourselves."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Essential Lectures, Meditation

Arbitrary Divisions

"The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

True Quiet

"Ask the world to reveal its quietude —

not the silence of machines when they are still,

but the true quiet by which birdsongs,

trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms

become what they are, and are nothing else."

- Wendell Berry

(1934 - )