All content © RJ Robinson 2002-8
by RJ Robinson (2005)
Abstract
The essential argument of The Birth of Reason is that all the central features of human nature arise from our intelligence. But although familiar enough as a psychological concept, the origins of intelligence remain as mysterious as those of life itself. And so it might, given that, in contrast to the usual accounts of intelligence in terms of a concatenation of language, tool use and other clever but unoriginal functions, intelligence as such is as original a structure as life as such, and requires just as original and profound an explanation.
The general argument can be summarised as follows:
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All the essentials of human nature and activity are the product of our intelligence. The originality humanists like to ascribe to human nature is neither secondary nor illusory, and it is only because we are intelligent that we are conscious, historical, rational beings, or that we have creativity, individuality or any capacity for truth or freedom. This shift is moreover more than merely a question of greater capacity or the simple quantitative extension of previous developmental processes beyond all previous limits: we do not have art or morality or politics or science merely because we have bigger brains. It is a qualitative shift, based on a radical break in structure and function from intelligence’s biological precursors and substrate.
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Intelligence is defined as activity that knows itself to be that activity and is that activity by virtue of that knowledge.
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Intelligence is made possible by the radical independence of its component structures from any particular type of functioning, and the synthesis of those structures into a single totality. As a result, not only can it apply any skill or insight to any problem or situation, but it can also reflect on its own activities and its own nature. As a result, so not only can intelligence generate original combinations but also develop new skills and insights – and thereby develop itself – in unlimited directions and to an unlimited extent. In other words, there is nothing intelligence must do, and nothing it may not – although whether any given intelligence actually can do any given thing obviously depends on a good deal more than such abstract capabilities!
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This situation can be starkly contrasted with that of the non-intelligent organism. Though often capable of considerable learning and flexibility, organic structures are constrained by the relative separation of their component structures from one another and the more or less fixed association of those structures with particular kinds of functioning. This not only limits their ability to make the best use of their powers and abilities but also precludes the free development of their (hypothetical) potential.
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Once it has come into existence, intelligence is as radically independent of its biological origins and substrate as the specifically living features of the organism are independent of any underlying chemistry. There is no chemical formula for mating or nesting, and there is no organic analysis of reason, history or consciousness. One might as well say that Einstein’s composition of the theory of relativity was caused by the physics of relativity.
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Despite its radical difference from any underlying biology, intelligence arose through ordinary biological processes, evolutionary and ontogenetic, and remains as irreducibly material as any rock or rose. These processes whereby this independence is achieved (which are not the ones to which scientists normally appeal in order to explain the origins of human nature) are explained in some detail.
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The (entirely real) continuities between biological and intelligent structures do not contradict this fundamental discontinuity. In part they arise from the present immaturity of human nature, in part from our strictly intelligent adoption of the same solutions as evolution. Nevertheless, the transitional position of the anthropoid apes and other marginal candidates for true intelligence no more renders intelligence biological than the existence of viruses makes life a chemical reaction.
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Given its independence of its biology, it is inappropriate – indeed quite pointless and wrong-headed – to continue to seek biological explanations of human nature.
Science
Etc.
Work in progress