Much of a system's intelligence resides not in its individual parts, but in the system's characteristic patterns -- its structures and institutions, its relationships and operational habits, its culture (or personality), its fields of energy and aliveness, its flows and reservoirs of information, the stories it tells itself, and so on. The collectIVE intelligence of the whole is greater than the collectED intelligence of its parts because wholeness adds synergy -- patterns of relationship and interactivity -- to the mere sum of the parts. Individual intelligences play a crucial but only partial role in the generation of collective intelligence.

— • The Co-Intelligence Institute

(this text is presented in-process, some elements are well-sketched, others are emerging —
some errors and omissions are still present...)

multi-modal intelligence -- the ability to engage our full spectrum of intelligence capabilities: analysis, intuition, narrative, intra- and interpersonal sensibilities (what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence), and so on. The most famous of the dozens of articulations of this are studies of "left and right brain" phenomena and the "multiple intelligence" theories of Havard's Howard Gardner. Each of us has a different profile of the diverse qualities that make up our potential and actual multi-modal intelligence. And each of us faces the challenge of integrating our strengths while strengthening and compensating for our weaknesses. We face the same challenge collectively: Too often the intuitives fight the analysts who fight those who learn by doing, etc. To the extent human systems integrate the diverse gifts of their members, the presence of diversity enhances their collective intelligence. To the extent systems feed the fragmentation or opposition of their diverse members, they become co-stupid.

— • The Co-Intelligence Institute

I find the term intelligence to diversely problematic. No one knows what this is, but everyone seems to have an opinion about it, and the foremost opinion is that humans are 'especially intelligent', on Earth — which I find at once absurd, and totally mistaken. Uniqueness of implementation is not equivalent with complexity. We believe this is true. But there are more deadly prejudices at work in our 'understandings' of this idea which, literally, we've invented and painted with gingerbread in order to please and somehow internally elevate ourselves for thousands of years. I believe we have nearly destroyed our planet, and our species, with little more than bad ideas about what this word means, and 'where' our intelligence 'is housed', as well as our badly broken ideas of how and why our intelligence is what it is, beyond my complaints about the term's experiential meanings and social or scientific misconceptions.

Our usage of this word generally implies, wrongly to my mind, that this is a thing (factual cognitive object: ability) which can be possessed by an individual, and that there are ways to quantify this 'quality' of a person. This is possible, but very rarely certain, or even testable. The word is far too packed with distortions and mimicry for me to feel safe with it, generally. Beyond that, I believe I can prove with very obvious tests and simulations that intelligence is emergent from the cognitive and real complexity of many local environments and scales of living activity simultaneously. We may experience our own intelligence as 'ours', and part of that can be verified — but so can the fact that it breaks down, to the point of organismal death, in the face of sever isolation, or radical reductions in the diversity of living connectivity and experience with other living beings, and this relation is so direct as to fail to require experiment at all. In a blank cube floating through space, with no connectivity to any other living system, and nothing to interact with, our ideas of 'where intelligence comes from', 'where it is housed', and 'what its qualities are' would be moot. We'd have a dead organism, fast.

We and our experiential cognition arise only in very specific environmental circumstances. Remove an infant from the company of symbolic cognitives, and it will not develop symbolic cognition on its own, even amongst peers. This simple fact implies that, our cognition has its basis in connectivity. Much of what we can know is known through contagion, rather than experience — anyone's experience.

I think I'd prefer to say the basis of our cognition, and our 'intelligence' in many of its real natures and features, emerges form connectivity as it applies to living and inert hypersystems, hyperscalar domains of reference, and inference activity.

~#~

Additionally, I notice that the 'co-stupidity combat' modeled at the end of the above quote also happens inside me, and perhaps every person I've ever met,as well. The rationalist beats upon the child — up comes the judge, who credentials what is allowed out of the system, etc, etc. And, just as in society, some virtual bully is quite commonly owning the whole terrain, and determining for all others who may speak, when, where, and at what price. This is, in any life subjected to it, a real experience of total cognitive rape. It is experienced as uniquely by each individual person as it is by any community we might care to identify.

The excuse? "That's just the way the world is..."

Now that is a exactly the kind of deadly and communicable lie-system that can erase our people from the world's surface. It can certainly make a place entirely miserable to inhabit, as well. It does precisely this, and has, for millions of people and quadrillions of lifeForms on Earth, every day the Sun rises.

Essentially, it's a problem of machines, cognitive and real, inhabiting the terrain that rightfully belongs to a nursery of children. A single nursery, in which there are no adults.

We have not solved the problems that arise in our tool use, or even our symbol use, and those 'problems', alive in human minds and populations, are eating our planet and peoples so quickly, that if there is any sort of significant terrestrial upset, we will be sore-pressed indeed to respond in any way. Since these systems generate such an upset by their nature they could be rightfully classified as: auto-catastrophic. Cognitively, and terrestrially.

Such problems are as easily resolved as they are resisted by denial. This is because their structure, though complex in activity, is incredibly simple in basis.

Co-sentience: hypersymmetric beings in unified autopoetic elaboration

In what we refer to as 'nature' - some idealized urEnvironment which commonly is implied to exist somewhere we are not - the death of a single bee can set off several wars, depending upon where the carcass (food) falls. The cutting or burning of a single rainforest tree can be seen as equivalent to demolishing a large metropolis of humans, from the perspective of the beings who depend upon and whose lineages depend upon the tree in question. And also from my own personal perspective — a very real and functionally human perspective.

We can be certain at this point in time that even simple animals and plants have analogs of emotion, even if these analogs are not easily parsed by humans, or their sciences. I can be certain they have emotion. We can be sure that most of the living systems that comprise the non-industrially developed world are more than flags on a scientific or corporate map. They are living elements in a complex and holarchic hyperstructure, which the largest local manifestation of is Earth. If we teach people, or act as if they are commodities to be converted or erased, we will end up in an extremely embarrassing and definitively lethal position: We will find ourselves nearly alone in a world of machines and uninhabitable domains created by the processes of that world. And what's more, we will become responsible for the constant upkeep of an atmosphere that can sustain us. This is not a job we as a species, 'nations' or individuals should desire, and we cannot succeed at it.

We can easily personally observe that linked systems of living beings and environments form a subject/context relationship that determines the available complexity of cognitive and autoelaborative experience in a variety of domains, not the least of which is mind. If the 'mating place' or the 'eating place' is filled with nothing but copies of rocks, there is no opportunity to eat or mate. If all the linked domains become more generally like this all visitors must keep stumbling through endless empty terrains, watching pictures of potentials they will never taste or experience flash before their eyes. Soon, they may learn to eat pictures, and replicate them, and use the signals of frozen forms more than those which tend toward greater flexibility.

What this means in real terms is simple: complexity and diversity are the arbiters of the availability of opportunity. This is why nature is constantly at work to engineer and sustain more seamlessly integrated whole complex ecologies — resulting in the species of creature writing and reading this text.

When one refers to mind one refers not to something someone owns or controls, or even something physically housed in a given body — that is consciousness — but rather to something vastly shared amongst all the local and perhaps all distant constituents. A shared mind such as the one we participate in requires a lot of diversity to accomplish its purposes. Reduce the diversity, and you create a feedback problem since your own mind and groupminds are dependent upon it. You can't kill without killing a piece of everybody in any game where cognition is dependent upon context, and there appears to be no other kind of game.

We can further see that the reverse is true - by choosing to support and reCognize connectivity we encourage the available diversity and complexity that we are connected with to flourish and expand, and thus greater degrees of distributed expressivity result in the availability of greater localized expressivity.

The result doesn't require complex language: Scalar growth in domains of liberty, resource transformation, and complexity. It's a self-regenerative cycle. And it carries with it a variety of fascinating questions — one set of which I'd like to examine is this:

What were these systems designed to preserve, how does what they preserve appear in their design, what are the mechanisms of preservation, and against what do they actually struggle?

The last, to me is the most interesting, at least in the beginning. The common answer is general, they struggle against death, or, even more generally, against a set of momentums which tend to limit their elaborative endeavor, temporally.

But the more interesting answers lie in deeper explorations of this phenomenon, and when we enter this terrain we find something interesting: Catastrophe is perhaps the single most important consistent player in the dance of species elaboration and extinction. We further find that it has been vastly more central to human cognitive and communicatory evolution that has been explored or expected. And it functions, as we might forget to expect, at every possible scale of experience and consciousness.

Part of the reason is this: nature is designed to leap gaps. That's the whole purpose of genetics, and perhaps the mitochondrial contributions of the egg-cell. Consider how unlikely an invention this is, a bipartite seed the size of a single cell, that breeds whole complex universes of cognitive beings. Its forms and dances are no accident, they are effective reflections of history, processes, goals and strategies - and the shape they form in toto is one that focused intently on leaping gaps. Gaps that are, functionally, impossible to leap. At least at first glance.

But as more of the terrain of our inquiries is revealed, we find that the purposes and larger outcomes of these momentums in nature and living beings is not fundamentally selfish at all - it is autopoetically engineered by evolution, symbiosis, and competition — for intra and intersystemic benefit. Real success, in evolutionary terms, is seamless integration into systems of other living beings which are themselves pressing ever more rapidly toward their own integrations. The whole terrain is self-optimizing, hyper-inclusive, scalarly communal, and self-obscuring. Invisibility is the ultimate goal in the adaptations that result in survival of communities and individuals, as the environment grows more competitive, or complex..

In a planet's 'life-game', a serious set of problems arise when a given omnivore begins converting whole branches of ecosystems to non-living matter. In a very real sense, taking a living planet as our subject - this qualifies as a mind, eating itself. It could reasonably be called (and addressed problematically as) biospheric auto-immune disorder, and if it is not the disorder itself, it is certainly amongst the most responsible of the behavioral pathogens involved.

in process....