Instinct and Intelligence

Bergson’s Creative Evolution shows that instinct and intelligence are not stages on a single ladder, but divergent tendencies in life’s effort to act upon the world.

This essay begins a discussion of the problem of instinct and intelligence with respect to two sources: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence? My choice of comparison is to sort out some key differences that have less to do with the correct story of the emergence of intelligence within the evolution of life and more to do with getting at the limitations related to treating intelligence as an engineering problem.

This is one of Bergson’s enduring lessons: we must always be attentive to the problems that are driving the creation of explanations. Often, these problems are unstated; or worse, they are ‘false problems’. The latter problem leads us to create faulty explanations because the framing of the problem has powerful downstream effects on how the explanation unfolds. For Bergson, and this is another of his enduring lessons, time is fundamental—more fundamental than space. We must be attentive to how duration (durée) is unfolding because it is the condition of possibility for our actions being either free or automated.

Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence? is a work of an AI engineer who is answering his question through a combination of evolutionary biology, the history of computing, and moral philosophy. The purpose seems to be to argue that intelligence is computational all the way down. His problem seems to be to justify AI as real intelligence on a par with other intelligences life has devised.

This is different from Bergson, of course, who was more interested in complicating our intellect’s bias toward certainties and seeing things where we should see tendencies and motions—what he called durée.

Yet they both share broad similarities. Both see intelligence as emerging from life itself, so both works start with what life is. Both see evolution as fundamental to the story of intelligence. Both use very similar examples—insects versus humans. Both have a sophisticated understanding of the role that language plays in this story.

But they are also quite different. My initial take, which I will unfold over time, is that Agüera y Arcas remains Aristotelian in his thought as Bergson saw it: he see differences of degree where we should be seeing differences in kind. I will spend some time in this essay unfolding this difference because it is crucial for understanding Bergson’s approach to time and duration (durée). In this essay, I’ll focus on Bergson’s discussion of instinct and intelligence in Chapter II of Creative Evolution. I’ll pick up What Is Intelligence? in subsequent essays.

What does intellect do?

The first thing we must remember with Bergson is this: everything is always in motion. The work of philosophy is not to try to find a foundation—an Aristotelian unmoved mover—and then build from there. Therefore, to understand concepts like instinct and intellect is to observe how they act in the world. ‘We regard the human intellect, on the contrary, as relative to action’ (CE 152).

We have to understand intellect not as a thing with an essence—whether that is a set of eternal capabilities or an essential function. If we wish to understand intellect, we must observe its actions in the world.

Let us start, then, from action, and lay down that the intellect aims, first of all, at constructing. (CE 153).

Verbs are more important than nouns when understanding Bergson. We are accustomed to treating ‘constructing’ as a transitive verb—we construct a thing. But here constructing is intransitive because Bergson wants to emphasize that the intellect orients to the action of construction without necessarily knowing what it is going to construct. This is crucial to understand, and we will return to it at the end of this essay. For the moment, it is enough to emphasize that at the heart of the way Bergson thought is through verbs of motion without the motion being driven by some thing that motivates it.

By tracing the actions of intelligence, we discover its tendency, which is to look upon the world as inert matter, empty of meaning, waiting for the intellect to fabricate it into something useful:

In other words, an intelligence which aims at fabricating is an intelligence which never stops at the actual form of things nor regards it as final, but, on the contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were carvarble at will. (CE 156)

This is a crucial point, and one that we do well to keep in mind, especially as we seek to understand Bergson’s differentiation of instinct, intuition, and intelligence: the human intellect despecializes itself and the world it acts within. Insofar as intelligence emerges from life and is therefore one tendency among many within élan vital, it must be understood in terms of the actions taken to shape itself and the world to its advantage: ‘Now the life manifested by an organism is, in our view, a certain effort to obtain certain things from the material world’ (CE 136).

On the face of it, this is a vague and characteristically ‘woolly’ statement by Bergson. But closer reading reveals, as always, a great deal of precision in his writing and thinking. Life itself is the action of intransitive verbs.

This is not to say that intelligence (or instinct) is reducible to a survival mechanism. At the heart of Bergson’s project in Creative Evolution is to undo the neo-Darwinian reduction of evolution to a blind survival mechanism based on random accidents, as well as the bias toward ‘finality’—the idea that evolution is a linear movement driven by a pre-programmed perfection.

We shall have to return to this point, but for this essay I want to dwell on the despecialization that occurs at the heart of intellect.

Differences of Degree versus Kind

We will be confused too easily if we fail to understand Bergson’s distinction between differences of degree and kind. By differences of degree, Bergson generally takes on the bias toward seeing a progressive linearity that moves from the simple (inferior) to the complex (superior). This is a bias we get from Aristotle, who saw in living things degrees of the same tendency.

The cardinal error which, from Aristotle onwards, has vitiated most of the philosophies of nature, is to see in vegetative, instinctive and rational life, three successive degrees of the development of one and the same tendency, whereas they are three divergent directions of an activity that has split up as it grew. The difference between them is not a difference of intensity, nor, more generally, of degree, but of kind. (CE 135).

If life were built out of a single tendency, it is difficult to see how vegetative, instinctive, and rationality would emerge. To see these as ‘divergent directions’ of a single activity—‘a certain effort to obtain certain things from the material world’—splitting up as it grows is to try to break thinking free of the Aristotelian cardinal error.

We have seen this with Michel Serres’ reading of Lucretius and the clinamen. Interruption of an equilibrium must be possible for divergent directions (branches, rameux) to form, and as the branch proceeds it retains something of the root while developing along its own line. This is not to say, however, that what remains of the root in the branch is the branch’s essential identity. The branch is moving into the world and forming its own ways of acting. Attentiveness to the specificity of these actions is what Bergson (and Serres) ask of us.

A difference in kind, therefore, is not a difference in an original ordained essence. Rather, a difference in kind is the result of diverging tendencies—it is the result of duration. The difference in kind is a downstream difference that can appear as an essential difference but only because evolution has made it so.

In the effort of life to ‘obtain certain things from the material world’ (136), we find not a single tendency, but ‘themes and variations’ of which intelligence and instinct are vitally important. We should not, following Aristotle, see instinct as a lesser form of intelligence. This would be to assert a difference of degree and therefore to draw a developmental line from the lesser to the greater. Evolution is not a line (nor is it a cone of increasing complexity); it is a development of tendencies that can branch and converge as evolution moves along.

Instinct and intelligence are ‘tendencies, and not things.’ They are ‘two different methods of action on inert matter’ (136). This is a crucial statement. Instinct and intellect must be understood as two different tendencies in nature that are deeply mingled but have separated in some lineages to pursue their own modes of action.

Unorganized and Organized Tools

To begin his differentiation of instinct and intelligence, Bergson starts with tool use—a familiar starting point for those wishing to find the fundamental difference between mankind and other animals. Bergson complicates the distinction by discussing the ability for instinct to use tools; it’s not just intelligence that uses tools.

The distinction has to do with what he calls ‘organized’ versus ‘unorganized’ tools. Perhaps ‘specialized’ versus ‘despecialized’ would be better terms:

…instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments . . . . Instinct is therefore necessarily specialized, being nothing but the utilization of a specific instrument for a specific object. The instrument constructed intelligently, on the contrary, is an imperfect instrument. It costs an effort. It is generally troublesome to handle. But as it is made of unorganized matter, it can take any form whatsoever, serve any purpose, free the living being from every new difficulty that arises and bestow on it an unlimited number of powers. (CE 140-1).

We are beginning to tread in the direction of open and closed tendencies in Bergson’s thought. Instinct is centripetal. Insofar as it arranges the material world to suit its needs, it draws the world into its orbit. Instinct itself might change in the process, but its change is minimal. Intelligence, on the contrary, stretches its reach outward and uses tools to open a field of possibilities that the intellect may not fully understand. It creates an excess of desire which it must inhabit:

For every need that it [the unorganized tool] satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it it driven further and further, and made more and more free. (CE 141)

Intellect as a fabricator of tools is the creator of its own freedom. This freedom is the ability to despecialize itself and its tools so that adaptability can move faster than nature can develop new mutations: ‘This we hardly realize because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to change our tools’ (CE 138).

Moving faster than nature is the capacity for freedom that is at the heart of intellect and what makes it different in kind from instinct, which moves at nature’s given pace.

Consciousness and Knowledge

When we imagine ourselves tracing these lineages back to their original mixture—a mixture that remains the purity of tendencies that have not yet fully bifurcated—we find it hard to distinguish intelligence from instinct. More than this, it would be difficult to see how intelligence had any inherent advantage over instinct, the latter being much more specialized and adapted than the former: ‘At the outset, the advantages and drawbacks of the artificial instrument and of the natural instrument balance so well that it is hard to foretell which of the two will secure to the living being the greater empire over nature’ (CE 141).

As these tendencies diverge, they do not fully separate. This is where Bergson can be at his most difficult. Within the distance of a couple of pages, we find these seemingly contradictory statements:

Hence intelligence and instinct, which diverge more and more as they develop, but which never entirely separate from each other. (142)

… it [the insufficiency of instinct] is the final leave-taking between intelligence and instinct. (143)

How can divergence become both a never-complete separation, yet be characterized only a few sentences later as a ‘final leave-taking’? Here we must follow Bergson closely because he is carefully moving through differences of kind and degree.

Instinct and intelligence can be too easily characterized by mapping binaries on top of them. In the following paragraphs, Bergson will dispense with consciousness and unconsciousness as a binary that breaks down when we treat instinct and intelligence as different degrees of consciousness. He is after a difference in kind that emerges over time as tendencies diverge.

NOTE: Eventually, he will differentiate them in kind by asserting that they move in different directions: instinct folds back in on itself and favors a closed loop automation while intelligence opens and expands a field of possibilities that it may not fully understand. To treat intelligence as an extension of instinct is to miss the vital importance of the direction of movement.

This divergence must be understood within the problem of life, which we’ve already established as adaptive action: ‘Now the life manifested by an organism is, in our view, a certain effort to obtain certain things from the material world’ (CE 136). In the efforts of adaptation, life comes up with different options—tendencies. But because life is not infinitely powerful, it must occasionally make choices as to which tendencies should become dominant, if only temporarily.

For this reason, Bergson can see flashes of intelligence in what appears to be pure instinct:

One the one hand, the most perfect instinct of the insect is accompanied by gleams of intelligence, if only in the choice of place, time and materials of construction: the bees, for example, when by exception they build in the open air, invent new and really intelligent arrangements to adapt themselves to such new conditions. (142)

And he can see instinct remaining as a crucial part of intelligence:

But, on the other hand, intelligence has even more need of instinct than instinct has of intelligence; for the power to give shape to crude matter involves already a superior degree of organization, a degree to which the animal could not have arisen, save on the wings of instinct. (142)

Thus instinct and intelligence, while divergent tendencies, remain mixed from the perspective of adaptive action. Bees retain a certain gleam of intelligence while human intelligence cannot see the material world as resources for construction without some flash of instinct.

For Bergson, the difference in kind will emerge from the differences in how instinct and intelligence act upon the material world, not from differences in consciousness or knowledge. In the repetition of their tendencies, the divergence occurs.

If we treat them as manifestations of essentially the same consciousness and the same knowledge, we end up with linear differences in degree—intelligence has ‘more’ consciousness and instinct has ‘less’:

In short, while instinct and intelligence both involve knowledge, this knowledge is rather acted and unconscious in the case of instinct, thought and conscious in the case of intelligence. But it is a difference of degree than of kind. So long as consciousness is all we are concerned with, we close our eyes to what is, from the psychological point of view, the cardinal difference between instinct and intelligence. (145)

Consciousness, in other words, cannot explain the difference between instinct and intelligence. By concentrating too much on consciousness, we lose the tread of adaptive action that is at the heart of creative evolution.

But we also risk something else: we treat consciousness as a thing—as ‘something absolute, irreducible and inexplicable. The understanding must have fallen from heaven with its form, as each of us is born with his face’ (152).

Consciousness must be treated within the broader movement of life as adaptive action. Therefore, as Bergson treats this topic, we’ll find a tendency and not a thing. It can take the form of being totally absent—as when a rock falls—or it can take the form of being nullified (143). The latter definition helps us understand the primacy of action, which can neutralize an emergent consciousness.

From what does consciousness emerge? From instinct. It is not a positive capacity that rides on top of instinct by guiding it. Rather, it is the interruption of instinct and is therefore a kind of defect, deficit, insufficiency, thwarting, accident, inadequacy, void—all terms that Bergson uses to describe how consciousness appears:

The obstacle creates nothing positive; it simply makes a void, removes a stopper. This inadequacy of act to representation is precisely what we here call consciousness. (144)

From this point of view, the consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity. It measures the interval between representation and action. (144-5)

Where consciousness appears, it does not so much light up the instinct itself as the thwarting to which instinct is subject; it is the deficit of instinct, the distance, between the act and the idea, that becomes consciousness so that consciousness, here, is only an accident. (145)

Therefore, the possibility of consciousness is always present in instinct, but only as the interruption of its natural organization. It is from the prolonging of this interruption that a capacity for indeterminacy and contingency appears, which is the hallmark of intelligence. This capacity is also implied in Bergson’s understanding of the intellect as aiming, ‘first of all, at constructing’ (153). Without this capacity to suspend the movement of instinct, nothing would appear choosable in the first place.

It is in this sense that we can understand Bergson’s assertion that intelligence and consciousness arise as what happens when the inherent capacity for instinctive actions to be thwarted—perhaps externally, perhaps self-imposed—depends upon a defect, deficit, or inadequacy in instinct itself.

To emphasize this deep mixture of tendencies and ‘the cardinal difference between instinct and intelligence’, Bergson returns to the concrete behavior of insects and human infants.

Insects and Instinct

The journey of the Sitaris beatle involves instinctive movements that appear to be intelligent. But, as Bergson insists, we have to look not at an assumed consciousness of a knowing organism but at the actions themselves and how those actions are organized. The Sitaris larva need not be understood as contemplating its next move. It is not speculating about when or where the male Anthophora bee will appear. When it does sense its presence, it acts—it leaps onto the moving male bee ‘and remains attached until the “nuptial flight,” when it seizes the opportunity to pass from the male to the female, and quite waits until it lays its eggs’ (146).

And equally all this happens as if the Sitaris itself knew that its larva would know all these things. The knowledge, if knowledge there be, is only implicit. It is reflected outwardly in exact movements instead of being reflected inwardly in consciousness. It is none the less true that the behavior of the insect involves, or rather evolves, the idea of definite things existing or being produced in definite points of space and time, which the insect knows without having learned them. (147)

Bergson is hesitant, rightly, to call this knowledge, but only because his interest is moving from a focus on consciousness and knowledge to ‘the behavior of the insect’, i.e., what the insect is actually doing. We inject too much if we see deliberation, contemplation, and speculation. Rather all that we see is instinctive movement that responds to the presence of ‘definite things existing or being produced in define points of space and time’.

Instinct reacts to things in its environment in an automated and pre-programmed way. This is not to say that it does not display ‘gleams of intelligence’ or moments of consciousness, but these are not prolonged. When and if they occur as interruptions of instinctive reactions, they serve only to get the instinct back in gear—to find a solution without necessarily laying out all the options and taking their measure: ‘it is incapable of going so far in quest of its object; it does not speculate’ (151).

This is where we can begin to fully understand intelligence and its relationship to time. Instinct does not have broad capacity to intervene into the movement of time. It wants time to be smooth and determined. When it experiences interruption, it wants to get back on track as quickly as possible. Its range of motions may be very limited in doing so. It may not even survive the interruption.

Bergson offers this example of a hive of bees:

… when we see the bees of a hive forming a system so strictly organized that no individual can live apart from the others beyond a certain time, even though furnished with food and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism, of which the bee is a cell united to the others by invisible bonds? (166)

The bee cannot function separately from the hive because that is where its instinct functions. Its only recourse is to rejoin the hive. It cannot speculate on how to build a life on its own, even if given food and shelter. It may not even ‘know’ that it is separated. Perhaps it only experiences the ineffectiveness of its function—if there is any experience at all.

This is what Bergson means when he says that the movements of the Sitaris larva are ‘reflected outwardly in exact movements instead of being reflected inwardly in consciousness’ (147).

Instinct, therefore, should be understood as actions that are automated, yet they retain some potential for consciousness as an interruption of the automation. This consciousness, however, is not prolonged in instinct.

The potential consciousness that accompanies them [instincts] is generally actualized only at the outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by itself. (166)

This ‘potential consciousness’ that arises in a flash is not, however, a moment of knowing. It is pure interruption of an organic movement—an interruption that is not emanating from a subject contemplating its object. We should not imagine the lone bee saying to itself, ‘What should I do now?’ Rather, if there is anything like consciousness, it could only say to itself, ‘How do I get back to doing the things I know how to do?’ Or, ‘How do I re-automate my actions?’

Dogged by Automatism

If intelligence diverges from instinct, it is because this momentary interruption is full of potential. But this potential never fully jettisons its relationship to instinct. This is one of the most powerful and challenging ideas Bergson’s philosophy presents. It is important that this moment is philosophical and not scientific. This moment requires speculation, but speculation is governed by the way we think. Science thinks in a particular way—it wants certainties, objects, and clear boundaries—what Bergson calls discontinuities. This is not appropriate for thinking this divergence.

When instinct is interrupted, it is not because the instinct chooses to stop. There is no capacity for choice; there is no conscious subject contemplating its next move as if there were an open field of possibilities already. There are only the automated movements of the organism. Yet, an interval opens, and time is momentarily out of joint. That interval does not, however, stay empty.

It can run in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, it runs itself back toward instinct. The potentiality reorients toward automation and shrinks the worldview back to simple programmed movements. Bergson will use verbs of automating, restricting, shrinking, and narrowing to describe this movement.

On the side of intuition, consciousness found itself so restricted by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into instinct, that is, to embrace only the very small portion of life that interested it; and this it embraces only in the dark, touching it while hardly seeing it. (182)

On the other hand, consciousness can move in the more expansive direction of freedom. This movement of consciousness turns the interruption of automatism into an indefinite expansion of possibilities—the pure excess of an ever widening field of possibilities that are not fully understood. Returning to the intellect as fabricating matter into a means toward chosen ends, Bergson traces the movement of this excess:

Though we derive an immediate advantage from the thing made, as an intelligent animal might do, and though this advantage be all the inventor sought, it is a slight matter compared with the new ideas and new feelings that the invention may give rise to in every direction, as if the essential part of the effect were to raise us above ourselves and enlarge our horizon. (183)

Bergson could stop here, and we would have profited mightily from this insight. But he makes one more move that makes his philosophy transformative. If we see tools as instruments of a linear progression of cause and effect—I pound this nail with this hammer to secure this piece of lumber to another—we lose the most important insight imaginable. Human intellect—as the channeling of the expansive tendency of consciousness—breaks free of cause and effect by creating an open field of possibilities.

Between the effect and the cause the disproportion is so great that it is difficult to regard the cause as producer of its effect. It releases it, whilst settling, indeed, its direction. Everything happens as though the grip of intelligence on matter were, in its main intention, to let something pass that matter is holding back. (183)

The hammer, to use but one common example, does in fact allow us to imagine the simple cause and effect sequence of pounding a nail. But this would be much closer to instinct. A hammer also allows us to imagine nails and other devices to fasten one thing to another. Beyond this, we imagine building a house, and we design the house using models of other houses.

None of this is contained by a linear sequence of causes and their effects. We are in the realm of reverse causality, where the effects we want lead to the invention of causal chains of our own design. Yet instinct remains a tendency within intellect as a temptation for returning to instinct and the comfort of things, which means foreclosing possibility and reverting to autonomism.

Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. (127)