All intelligence is collective intelligence
The concept of ‘intelligence’ is a slippery one. It’s a human construct and, as such, privileges not only our own species, but those humans who at any given time have power and control over what counts as ‘intelligent’. There have been moves, especially recently, to ascribe intelligence to species that we don’t commonly eat, such as dolphins and crows.
But what about animals humans do eat? As a vegetarian I regularly feel guilty for consuming eggs and dairy; what kind of suffering am I causing sentient animals? But, I console myself, at least I don’t eat them any more.
A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, according to Emerson, but it is useful to have a consistent and philosophically-sound position on things. This article by Sally Adee is a pretty read, but worthwhile. It not only covers animal intelligence, but that of plants, fungi, and (of course!) machines.
A small but growing number of philosophers, physicists and developmental biologists say that, instead of continually admitting new creatures into the category of intelligence, the new findings are evidence that there is something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself. And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.
No plant, fungus or bacterium can sit an IQ test. But to be honest, neither could you if the test was administered in a culture radically different from your own. “I would probably soundly fail an intelligence test devised by an 18th-century Sioux,” the social scientist Richard Nisbett once told me. IQ tests are culturally bound, meaning that they test the ability to represent the particular world an individual inhabits and manipulate that representation in a way that maximizes the ability to thrive in it.
What would we find if we could design a test appropriate for the culture plants inhabit?
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Electrophysiological readings, for example, have for a long time revealed striking similarities in the activity of humans, plants, fungi, bacteria and other organisms. It’s uncontroversially accepted that electrical signals coordinate the physical and mental activities of brain cells. We have operationalized this knowledge. When we want to peer into the mental states produced by a human brain’s 86 billion or so neurons, we eavesdrop on their cell-to-cell electrical communication (called action potentials). We have been measuring electrical activity in the brain since the electroencephalogram was invented in 1924. Analyzing the synchronized waves produced by billions of electrical firings has allowed us to deduce whether a person is asleep, dreaming or, when awake, concentrating or unfocused.
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“The reality is that all intelligence is collective intelligence,” [developmental biologist Michael] Levin told me. “It’s just a matter of scale.” Human intelligence, animal swarms, bacterial biofilms — even the cells that work in concert to compose the human anatomy. “Each of us consists of a huge number of cells working together to generate a coherent cognitive being with goals, preferences and memories that belong to the whole and not to its parts.”
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“We are not even individuals at all,” wrote the technologist and artist James Bridle in “Ways of Being,” a 2022 study of multiple intelligences. “Rather we are walking assemblages, riotous communities, multi-species multi-bodied beings inside and outside of our very cells.”
Bridle was referring to (among other things) the literal pounds of every human body that consists not of human cells but bacteria and fungi and other organisms, all of which play a profound role in shaping our so-called “human” intelligence.
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If we can let go of the idea that the only locus of intelligence is the human brain, then we can start to conceive of ways intelligence manifests elsewhere in biology. Call it biological cognition or biological intelligence — it seems to manifest in the relationships between individuals more than in individuals themselves. […]
“The boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are at the very least in suspense,” wrote the philosopher Tobias Rees. Moving away from human exceptionalism, he argued, would help “to transform politics from something that is only concerned with human affairs to something that is truly planetary,” ushering in a shift from the age of the human to ‘the age of planetary reason.’”
Source: NOEMA
Image: Landon Parenteau