A Meditation on Intelligence

Ants are interesting creatures. They serve in cohesion. The work in cohesion. There is order and hierarchy. No one seeks power for the sake of Power. The Queen Ant is the true philosopher King by Plato’s definition. To everyone’s surprise, the philosopher King is a Queen.

I have mostly been fascinated by the ants for their intuitive elements. Two ants touches antenna and information is communicated. No miscommunication. No misinterpretation. No scheming. No plotting.

Most ants aim for no harm. The work hard. Like us immigrants. They keep their heads down. They dig. They bring food back home. The eat. They do that again.

I had an ant farm when I was younger. It was one of those flat ones with clear blue gel like substance. Supposedly, if you capture a Queen ant and one or two her subordinates and put them in there. She would develop her own commune. They would dig complex routes and you would be able to observe the structure of their home from a dissected view. The nutrient within the gel like substance would sustain the ants and their production.

That was a gift my Dad got me. Dad and I also went out to catch ants. We managed to get a few of the pawns but not the queen. We came home and put them in the farm. I was excited to see them work and be fed. They all died a few days later, with minimum digging. I felt a lot of pain. That was the end of the ant farm.

I also never liked ants. They travel in a straight line. Intimidating. They are orderly little buggers. Scarily strong. In elementary school, back in the days when kids still played outside, we’d be looking at the ants in the school yard during recess. Some kids would try to squish them. The step on them. Try to squish them. Most of the time they were never crushed on their first try. They kick their little legs. They pop back up. They have so much life in them. Scarily so. When they seem good and well, they don’t seek revenge. They just flee in a hurry. They retreat as a group. All the ants of that straight line would retreat. Coordinately chaotic.

Sometimes when I try to imagine creatures of a high intellect, the product of that imagination is always analogous to ants. Unlike the traditional three-legged one eye skinny skeleton you see in popular science fiction movies. I’d always imagine a creature of high intellect is much sophisticated than that. They are formless, voiceless, but thoughtful. They have no need to embody a three-dimensional form like we do. They exist in a form with the fluidity of time is taken into consideration. They embody time and transcend time. They need not to reason. Their thinking are not constituted of discrete elements like Artificial Intelligence. Their thinking is not the product of a series of calculation and prediction. Their thinking is fluid. Their thinking is all encompassing. They strive not to obtain another form. They strive not to conquer and tame. They simply exist, with the utmost ease and intuition.

Intuition brings up back to the ants. The mode of communication of my imagined creature possess the same mode of communication of the ants. They use no language. They uses no touch. Their communication is simply a form of exchange of intuition. Think and the others will know. They feel and the others will know. They exist and the others will know.

Language thickens our communication. It simplifies our communication and troubles it. It is also what makes it fun. Language is what gives us the form of intellect that we have - a different kind of intellect than those of the intuitive ones. Compare to the intuitive ones, languages makes our ideas external. We articulate what is in our heads. The language shapes and makes visible our ideas. The ambiguity inherent in language is both what misleads and generative. Misunderstanding intention creates conflict. Thought taken in with a twist generates new thoughts. The culprit is language. We also have language to thank.

The form of intelligence that is molded by language is then different from the form of intelligence of the Artificial ones. Language is readily discrete, the intelligence of AI takes it to another level. Languages are constituted of words, letters, or characters. In between the letters, words, and character, there is a negative space that is never bridged. As much as “I” and “am” can be conjugated, “I” exists in distance to “am” - “I” exists in distance to ”’m.” AI quantifies and makes use of the distance.

In “Cybernetics and Ghost,” Calvino thought of language and writing as a combinatorial game. But he ultimately suggests that human creativity posses the “ghost” that will never be production of combinatorial games. If we for a section think along what Calvino suggests, ghost embodies our form of intelligence and cybernetics embodies the one of AI. Our ghost it not quite intuitive, not as quantitative.

The spectrum of intuition and citification is also a reductive scale for measuring intelligence. The contrasting characteristics are what makes the difference explicit. With the vast network that comes with each form, I would only believe the differences are more multidimensional than I make it to be.

What I liked the most about my imagined formless intellectual beings is the fact that they never impose. They exist. They don’t aim to conquer. They understand. They hold their space. That is also to say they experience no competition. Their existence does not premise on the allocation of resource of the resources. You can imagine them as monk-like floating pieces of non-matter. What qualifies them as intelligence is that they are conscious.

But I do imagine them to be mortal. Calmingly so...... (working on the rest of it)