Intelligence and the Revaluation of Interruption: From Ant Roads to Enlightenment Roads
In last Wednesday’s essay, I continued expanding upon my conjecture that intelligence is the adaptive and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibilities.
Like all conjectures, this one originates within a problem: we are wagering the future on massive investments in engineering intelligence at unprecedented speed and scale with the hope that the really big problems we face can be overcome—climate change, hunger, cheap and abundant energy, disease, self-governance. These are Enlightenment concerns—the optimistic orientation to the future that we can solve the really big problems of fate and bring about general prosperity.
We seem to have lost that optimistic orientation, which is why I insist on a definition of intelligence that is less about its essential functions than its orientation to possibility. As I presented in my last essay, I don’t offer this definition as replacement or polemic; I offer it as an accompaniment that points out the blind spots of the one who drives—it is riding shotgun.
In today’s essay, I want to look at three episodes in the history of intelligence that spell out this orientation with some degree of clarity. Each episode looks at the relationship of orientation to function and asks a question: what is the orientation of the organism to possibility when it is interrupted?
A note first on the role of storytelling vis-a-vis explanations. Stories must ride shotgun with explanations. They always do. Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence? is a story—multiple nested stories—in the service of an explanation. Once we arrive at suitable explanations through stories, more stories become possible and necessary to further the production of knowledge. The entanglement is deep, wide, and necessary because the universe is so.
Revaluation of Interruption
In my last essay, I argued that a better explanation of intelligence for my purpose would need to dissociate orientation from function. Since Aristotle, Western thought has tried to explain orientation through function. We look at an object, and we try to understand its function, which explains how it is oriented to time and its environment.
This legacy biases our knowledge to space—we reduce things to their functions and how they orient to time is an expression of the spatialized function. This is not wrong; its explanations depend on the problem one is trying to solve.
I wish to trace a different thread and tell a different story related to my larger problem. My story requires tracing how function and orientation bifurcate. For this bifurcation to occur in the history of life, something profound must have happened.
I’ll call it life’s revaluation of interruption.
Bacterium
Bacterium navigate their environment in part by chemotaxis: computing increasing and decreasing concentrations of nutrients. They efficiently sense change but have a limited ability to respond—keep going or tumble. I have no issue calling this computational, and for this to be an observable phenomenon some level of learning and transmission must occur. But how is that computation, learning, and transmission working with respect to orientation and function?
If we shift the question from ‘Is the bacterium computing?’ to ‘How is the bacterium orienting to possibility?’ we find ourselves pursuing a new mix of explanation and storytelling. The second question does not invalidate the first; it enhances it by broadening the stories that can be plausibly told. Additionally, the second question can hold the first in abeyance as the questions don’t form a necessary sequence. Both can proceed separately and be woven together downstream as a new and richer story.
The answer to the second question might be something like this: orientation and function are so tightly interwoven that the bacterium’s capacity for creating possibilities is minimal if not completely non-existent. There is no meaningful sense in which it has a prior orientation toward anything, as opposed to simply being moved by its function of reading/computing a gradient as it tries to maintain homeostasis.
Researchers may argue over the presence or absence of subjective experience, choice, consciousness, or deliberative behavior as opposed to instinct or reflex. These are worthy questions, but they are off to the side of my larger concern over how life turns fate into possibility.
Using my definition of intelligence, I can say that the bacterium has limited capacity to transform fate into options because the gap between function and orientation is very small. This is not to say that it is unintelligent or that is lacks intelligence. We should be hard pressed to draw a clear line between what has or does not have intelligence because, in my definition, it is not a possession—it is a field of inquiry.
Ants
Simon Conway Morris describes a colony of ants building ‘roads’:
In some species there is a remarkable division of labour, in which a rather small number of worker ants leave the nest early, climb the trees, cut away the leaf pieces, and then drop them to the ground. There another group, arriving slightly later, find the pieces, cut them smaller, and carry them to the ‘road’, where a third group of ants transports the vegetation back to the nest.
The scare quotes are Conway Morris's own, and they are philosophically exact—though perhaps more exact than he intended. They signal a hesitation, a hedge that it is somehow misleading to call these structures roads.
Let’s make that intuition explicit by leaning on my definition of intelligence.
Unlike the bacterium, the ants are changing their environment to suit their needs. Whereas the bacterium showed little if any gap between function and orientation, the ants have specialized functions that include road building. The orientation of motion for the ants has more options than a bacterium, and some ants will have different functions than others. But the colony is performing the automated execution of a task.
Like the bacterium, the gap between function and orientation remains minimal. If we use this opportunity to introduce the term ‘purpose’ into our story, it would remain fairly limited though certainly more open to possibility than bacteria. In both cases, purpose arises from a tight coupling of function and orientation.
Our story becomes a better explanation if we envision a moment of interruption. For the ants, the interruption could be treated as a defect to be fixed. (Whether experience or consciousness arise at all is a different question.) This is not substantially different than how the bacterium might treat gradient changes as they seek homeostasis. The broader division of labor in the ant colony, however, could provide a richer opportunity for orientation to find other possibilities. I emphasize could because all that we see happening is the foreclosure of possibility to get back on track.
Does the bacterium have the opportunity that the ants have? We can only continue to speculate, but if our attention is on function, orientation, and purpose, we find in the bacterium an entanglement of these such that little if any temporal gap appears that would be the condition of possibility for deliberation of alternatives. In neither case does an open field of possibilities emerge, though the ants clearly are building roads and have achieved a division of labor that is recognizable to human beings.
Again, asking if this is intelligence or not begs a question that can be held in abeyance as I focus on how life is finding opportunity in necessity. We could call the ant’s behavior intelligence or instinct, but that would require us to find a hard boundary that distracts us from the larger explanation that I seek. It too quickly unifies concepts that need not be settled—at least not yet.
Enlightenment Roads
Conway Morris’s scare quotes (‘roads’) suggest a hedge in his explanatory story. From the perspective of orienting motion, these ‘roads’ are quite different than the Enlightenment’s roads, which formed networks of possibilities—a field of possibilities that is represented as such. The system is not necessarily going in a predetermined direction. It is better understood in terms of what it makes possible.
Richard Whitworth writes of the growth of British roads and canals (he called it ‘inland navigation’) in the Enlightenment as a re-orientation of desire and aspiration to a future open to unimaginable possibilities:
It is an undoubted certainty that all passage and communications bring trade into a country, and into those parts where not the least idea of traffic, among the inhabitants went further, or was brought to a higher pitch, than a coat to cover them, and bread to satisfy their hunger; these are the people who will soon feel the great advantage from inland navigation, who have hitherto been bread up for no other use than to feed themselves, and I may number them as some millions that have thus been buried alive, as it were, from the public service; what advantage will not accrue to this nation when so many millions will be allured out into the world of men, robust by nature, and become useful to the state, by the temptation of gain.
We cannot equate the ‘roads’ of the ants with these roads (and canals) for at least two reasons. First, Whitworth is describing an entire infrastructure of ‘inland navigation’ that goes beyond the mere building of roads and canals—it includes desire (temptation) as well as all the commodities, money, vehicles, people, and information traveling through this infrastructure. Second, this infrastructure creates a field of possibility because orientation, function, and purpose have formed a completely different constellation of motions. The ants, by contrast, do not price their leaves and respond to price changes. Nor do they have the capacity to write treatises about the importance of their roads or detailed engineering specifications for what constitutes better and worse road foundations.
We can re-read Whitworth’s explanation through the lens of intelligence as life’s evolving and expanding capacity to turn fate into options. In Whitworth’s story, life evolves from being ‘bread up for no other use than to feed themselves’ (bacteria, ants) to being ‘allured out in to the world of men’ through ‘the temptation of gain.’
The allure of temptation is the hinge that changes intelligence from orientation by function to orientation as an open-ended cultivation of possibilities. Some aspect of function becomes the possibility of choice. How do we wish to spend our time? What desires for gain will we cultivate and pursue? Purpose becomes more open-ended in this story because it is decoupled from orientation and function.
We should try to better understand this decoupling. It is another chapter within the story of revaluing interruption.
Time Turned Inside Out
The movement from being ‘bread up for no other purpose than to feed themselves’ to ‘the temptation of gain’ retraces the history of intelligence as the expansive and adaptive capacity to turn fate into possibilities.
We should not see this, however, as a linear development. Something far more complex is happening than a simple change in degree. Time is becoming a tangent departing from the closed cycle of local customs. The departure is both individual and collective. Each individual will experience it for himself while ‘the world of men’ represents the collective realization of that personal re-orientation.
Whitworth uses the word ‘allure’ from lure to mark this individual and collective re-orientation. Allure traces the movements of orientation, purpose, and function that we are tracing in this essay. Originally a term for the object that entices a hawk back to its master by instinct, ‘lure’ comes to mean any act of enticing. The lure originally closes the system—the hawk returns to its starting point. ‘Allure’, from the Middle French addition of à to leurer, encodes the pull itself in desire as the subjective experience of being-drawn-toward the lure. Whitworth uses allure to open the system by granting individual desire the capacity to separate from the closed cycle and pursue its own economic gain.
This means re-orienting the moral meaning of temptation.
Desire and Temptation
All concepts are operational, which means that they are temporal before they are meaningful. In other words, concepts shape time as they move toward meaning. We should treat this quite literally. Concepts can only become meaningful because they use energy to exist, which means that they direct motions—speaking, typing, writing, printing, LED screens. They are direct interventions into energy and motions that would be occupied doing other things. Meaning can only occur downstream as more energy and more motions are directed to repetitive use. Those motions leave traces in a word’s history. Accordingly, we must look at temptation in terms of its operational work in this paragraph. It is profound and historically consequential.
The word temptation, as it arrives into English from Latin through Old French and the theology of the Middle Ages, is one of our most durable words. Its Latin origin is temptare—to feel out, to probe by touch, to handle—the root of which is related to tendere, meaning to stretch or to extend. Temptation, then, carries with it a persistent physical metaphor: to test something is to put it under pressure, to stretch it toward its limit.
Cicero uses the phrase temptare fortunam, 'to tempt fortune,' meaning to court uncertain outcomes by pressing one's luck, often in the Stoic sense of seeking to influence what is beyond our control. Fortunam is not exactly our modern term luck; it is more accurately rendered as fate—the events that affect us but are beyond our control. He is therefore suggesting that temptare fortunam is related to our ability to test the limits of fate—to see how far we can find elbow room within necessity. The phrase itself is an important part of the history of intelligence that I am weaving.
The attachment to moral concerns will come later, and its psychological trajectory begins in the late fourth century with Augustine’s Confessions. Its main function is to mark desire’s defective state and therefore to seek alignment with other standards of behavior. In the famous recollection of his stealing of the pears (Confessions 2.4-1o), we find this early formulation of sin and temptation that remains powerful today:
Our only pleasure in doing it was that it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart: yet in the depth of the abyss You had pity on it. Let that heart now tell You what it sought when I was thus evil for no object, having no cause for wrongdoing save my wrongness. The malice of the act was base and I loved it—that is to say I loved my own undoing. I loved the evil in me—not the thing for which I did the evil, simply the evil: my soul was depraved, and hurled it down from security in You into utter destruction, seeking no profit from wickedness than to be wicked. (2.5.9, F.J. Sheed translation)
Augustine’s temptation has no orientation to the future; it is the purity of an urge that has no object other than the experience of the urge in motion. It only understands the right-now of its own motivation. This is the abyss that he repeatedly invokes in this chapter—the complete lack of orientation to anything other than an urge that does not transcend itself. This is the ‘utter destruction’ that seeks ‘no profit from wickedness than to be wicked.’ This urge has no object and ‘no cause for wrongdoing save my wrongness.’ It exhausts itself in its own performance.
This collapsing of orientation into the abyss of an urge that cannot transcend itself is the dominant trope of this recollection. It composes a closed cycle that has no alignment with any object other than itself. The force of Augustine’s spiritual biography is the story of how to open desire to something more than its own urge without an object. Confessions is the opening of the closed cycle to the possibility of time being other than that closure. Temptation and sin name the closure that must be overcome.
In Whitworth’s text, temptation gains transcendence. It is a positive force oriented to the possibility of one’s own economic gain. From the Augustinian perspective, time is turned inside out insofar as it is extended into a future that temptation itself makes possible rather than forecloses.
How that gain will be achieved by the tempted individual is as yet to be determined. The future is an open-ended possibility whose truths are the ones we create downstream, where the stream is the entanglement of desire in the infrastructure of roads, canals, currency, information, commodities, et cetera.
This is not a process that was without massive violence. We shall take this up in subsequent essays. but for the moment let’s conclude with open and closed lineages.
Open and Closed Recursive Lineages
The roads of the ants form a closed system; Whiteworth’s roads are an open system. In terms of recursive modeling, the ants are modeling themselves and their environment as closed, efficient systems tuned to the task of gathering enough food to sustain the growing colony. If there is anything like desire or experience or consciousness, it is channeled into the repetition of the motions. Their motions are not oriented to ever greater colonization of the ruliad, although, as Conway Morris points out, the repetition of the task can cover a continent. The successful repetition of the motions leads to increasing populations, which leads to expansion of the space necessary to complete the purpose. The geographical scope has broadened but the purpose has not.
Whitworth’s roads inhabit human desires and transform them into an open field of possibilities for new desires and new wealth. Progress and improvement are the intentional open-ended outcomes of road-making. Again, we could compare the ants and the Enlightenment humans in terms of a definition of intelligence, but a better explanation for my purposes is a story about how these two different forms of road-making orient time and motion according to fundamentally different tendencies.