Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Twenty Two: Local Intelligence

A lot of religious or theistic thinking depends on ideas about intelligence, or combinations of intelligence and teleology. The fact that there are intelligent beings that write poetry, compose music, build houses and towers and cities, invent telephones and cars and computers, develop history and philosophy, astronomy and geology, radio and television, movies and rock concerts – that fact seems meant . Intentional, deliberate, planned, purposeful, meaningful. All the more so because it seems to have a trajectory; it seems both cumulative and progressive. We seem to have more intelligence to draw on than we did in the past, if not in our own heads, then in those powerful computing machines we came up with. All that doesn't feel like something that could have Just Happened. All that Just Happening would be, we are told, like a tornado hitting a junk pile and leaving behind a 747.

And even without all that, without the externals, it still feels that way. Leave aside all the masses of hard physical evidence – Lascaux and Altamira, the Great Wall and the Pyramids, Angkor Wat and Macchu Pichu, Manhattan and Tokyo, all our billions of footprints – our minds, our consciousness, feels like something that matters, that means something, and that therefore ought to be general rather than particular, universal rather than local, cosmopolitan rather than parochial. At least, if not universal, an attribute of someone in addition to mere human beings. When we think about it this way (as theists often do) intelligence can come to seem like a sort of entity itself, independent of us. A thing or stuff or organizing principle that's part of the universe, that we've been given a portion of by someone with more of it than we have – a lot more. Why? To see what would happen? Because intelligence is a good thing so it has made a world with a little intelligence in it? But, frankly, not very much – not, it often seems, in the wake of the latest genocide or atrocity or newly-discovered mass grave, anywhere near enough. In fact, it can seem more and more likely, just enough to invent really effective methods of mass slaughter, and not one bit more. Not enough to avoid using them, or at least to prevent some of us from using them. An unfortunate division of labour, perhaps. The really clever among us develop the weapons, and the stupid put them to use. Quite a mischievous trick on the part of this intelligent entity.

But we probably don't need to impute malicious tricksterism to this Intelligent Designer. Maybe it's simpler just not to think the designer is there. Because what we forget when we think about the search for intelligent life in the universe is how local and specific and parochial our own intelligence actually is. It feels , to us, like just intelligence, general abstract Intelligence, the only kind there is, the only kind anyone could need or want or have, except that it would want more of it. But what it would want more of would be the same kind of thing.

But then it would feel like that to us, wouldn't it. What else would it feel like? But that's just it. It's Xenophanes' old observation – if cows had a god it would be a cow. If whales think about intelligence and intelligent life in the universe, it's cetacean intelligence they think about: it must have a lot to do with salt water, and krill, and holding the breath.

And so with us. Our intelligence (such as it is) isn't general or universal cosmic intelligence – it's primate intelligence, great ape intelligence. We forget how bound up with our bodies it is, for one thing. It's not only our brains that enabled us to build Babylon and the Chrysler Building , it's also our pelvis and knees and spine and hips – our bipedalism, in short, that frees our hands for work. It's our thumbs. Our larynx and tongue. Our eyes. They all developed in concert, which means that we have a particular kind of intelligence, a kind that goes with having hands and speech and language. If we didn't have hands, we wouldn't have the same kind and amount of intelligence except with no hands to help it out, we would have a different kind of intelligence.

So Intelligence is not so much a universal item that we have a little of, as it is a word we use to describe a set of abilities we happen to have. We don't tend to use it of other sets of abilities we don't have – scanning messages other animals have left for us on bushes, for instance, or photosynthesis. But if there is other ‘Intelligence' in the universe, obviously, it would very likely be vastly more alien and different in our view than mere dog or plant intelligence is. Maybe stars are intelligent, in their terms; maybe sub-atomic particles are. None of them really seem to have much concern with us, to want to dandle us on their knee or kiss away our tears, any more than we want to cuddle sawdust or console grains of sand. We're clever enough as primates go, but that's probably not all that far.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

Click here to return to the Philosophy Café

Interrogations will next be updated end of July 2004

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done
12. Mere
13. Influence
14. Other Minds
15. Mystery, Drama, Surprise
16. Work
17. Mutability
18. Do I Wake or Sleep
19. The Right Tools
20. Tap Tap
21. Desert Island Dreams

Join Our Café mailing list

To receive *very* short messages, letting you know when the Café has been updated, just fill in your email address below - and press submit.

[If you wish to unsubscribe from the mailing list, simply fill in your subscriber email address, select "Unsubscribe", and press Submit.]