If you would like to know a little more about this site, here are the answers to a few basic questions...

What is this site about?

This is a site for ideas and research into natural intelligence. By that I mean the kind of intelligence all human beings have, and which may well be shared by other organisms such as the great apes, dolphins and perhaps other species too.

What are my goals?

Three decades of research into natural intelligence has made me acutely conscious of two things: the absence of an integrated account of human existence, and the critical role played by intelligence in all that is specifically and peculiarly human. So the goals of this website are:

• To map out the key features of this strange thing, 'human nature'. I don't know what this human nature is, but I fully expect the list of features to include history, consciousness, imagination, conscience, creativity, and all those other features of human life we all take for granted but which the sciences are so reluctant to address.

• To analyse and elaborate the various concepts of intelligence and human action that seem to have something important to say about this problem. Again, I have few preconceptions, but I will be astonished if the Grand Theorists of structuralism, dialectics and phenomenology are really past their collective 'sell by' date!

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What do you mean by 'intelligence'?

There is no agreed definition of intelligence. However, this site is designed to promote the idea that, as intelligent beings, we have a range of capacities that are open to scientific research, but for which the predominant scientific approaches have no convincing explanation.

For example, human beings have history and consciousness and reason and art and politics and a hundred other things that exist only in the most rudimentary forms in other species. As far as the vast majority of other species are concerned, they are completely unknown. Yet as far as I am aware, there are no scientific models of human nature, or any significant fraction of that nature, that even recognise, let alone account for the centrality of these things to what it means to be human.

As for the importance of intelligence to all this, it only because of their intelligence that human beings are able to wonder about their world and their place in it, that they care what sense their world makes, and that they have the power to change that world until it does indeed make sense. On the other hand, their peculiar intelligence is embodied in few, if any, innate practical capacities, so they have no choice but to make their world from the bottom upwards, from the simplest forms of sustenance to the most sophisticated world-systems.

Even though they play little part in modern scientific thought, such ideas of human nature have a long and eminent history, and plainly it is essential to any science of human nature that we understand the intelligence that makes all this possible. I hope that this site will operate as a conduit through which such ideas can be channelled back into scientific thinking.

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Why Prometheus?

If you aren't familiar with the legend of Prometheus, here is a summary (of one version)...
 

Prometheus was a Titan - a giant-like figure from Greek mythology. He was tasked by Zeus with creating human beings, and instructed to make them almost god-like in their faculties of speech, reason and understanding. However, Zeus made one exception: human beings were not to have fire. Knowing what an intelligent being could do with fire, Zeus was afraid that humanity might use it to overthrow the gods.

Prometheus duly created human beings, but was so taken with his creation that he decided to disobey Zeus. He stole fire from heaven and gave it to humanity. This of course gave them just that mastery of the world that Zeus had feared, and gods were indeed overthrown in the most radical sense possible: we stopped believing that they even exist.

So it was through Prometheus that humanity obtained the power not only to understand but also to transform the world. In the words of Aeschylus, the first great poet of the Promethean legend:

Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word – every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.

I try not to dwell too much on the conclusion of Prometheus' story. Zeus was enraged at Prometheus' disobedience, and determined to punish him in the most horrible way imaginable. So he nailed him to a mountain in the remote Caucasus mountains and sent an eagle to visit him every day. The eagle would tear out Prometheus' liver (or was it his kidney?), and then fly away. The kidney would grow back over night, and the eagle would return the next day and tear it out all over again. And so on. Forever.

Or not quite forever. Eventually Hercules came by on one of his Labours, released Prometheus and shot the eagle in exchange for information. Prometheus was released, Zeus relented, and then... Who knows?

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