Intelligence and Instinct II: Contingency and Possibility
In my latest Substack post, I make this claim:
Intelligence, I wish to suggest, is the adaptable and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibility.
Intelligence discovers the rhythms by which the world unfolds and learns to manipulate them before those rhythms play out. Intelligence wants to move faster than nature does on its own. In humans, fate names whatever arrives with the force of necessity when our intelligence cannot get ahead of it.
I would like to spend some time in this Wednesdays essay unpacking these sentences.
Intelligence and Instinct
Let’s start with the distinction between intelligence and instinct. The difference can be understood in terms of the assertion of purpose under changing conditions.
Instinctive movements are designed to stay on track and remain aligned with a given purpose or goal. They seem to lack anything like consciously deliberated and selected intention—at least not over a long period of time. When intention does appear, it likely is experienced as an interruption in the execution of the instinctual goal or purpose. Instinct will want to shorten the duration of the interruption because it is a defect, a deficiency, or an obstacle.
Creativity may emerge in the interruption, but it is not valuable in and of itself. It seeks a return to the purpose and is valued by how quickly it achieves that return.
I don’t want to be understood as drawing a hard distinction between instinct and intelligence. Both exhibit a capacity for purpose that is likely to be a key feature of life on Earth. I don’t see instinct as any of the outdated definitions ‘described as inborn, pre-programmed, hardwired, or genetically determined’. Instincts can be learned, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest this. Instincts are also context dependent and not purely the expression of internal programs running through their automated and sequential rules. Instincts assert purpose as well and can be divided and subdivided into a division of labor worthy of Adam Smith’s pin factory.
I wish to suggest that the difference between instinct and intelligence is attributable to how the assertion of purpose has evolved. To trace this lineage is to engage all of the history of life, and especially to see the Enlightenment and Modernity within that history. Hans Blumenberg saw the history of Modernity as humanity increasing its capacity to ‘assert purpose’ and therefore take over the trajectory of history. Taking Blumenberg seriously requires us to see Modernity—and therefore the history of ourselves—as not just a human achievement, but the achievement of life learning how to gain more and more influence over necessity.
Intelligence is not wholly separate from instinct because both are rooted in purposive action at the heart of life. What makes them different is the role that intention plays in the assertion of purpose.
Instinct and intention are tightly bound. Instinct wants to stay on track, and its capacity for making choices is limited to the context in which instinct is operating. Intelligence puts intention to work by intervening in the causal sequences of its relevant surroundings. Both assert purpose, but how that purpose is envisioned and executed differ significantly.
We shall return to the speed and scale of these surroundings as well as ‘consciousness’, but for the moment let’s dwell on this capacity to intervene. It is, first of all, a capacity to bring about contingency in a causal sequence otherwise running on its own.
Intelligence and Intention
When Seneca teaches us that ‘assent’ occurs somewhere between our initial impression of an insult and our angry desire for revenge, he is teaching us that our minds can introduce contingency into what otherwise seems automated. The force of his teachings is that assent can be made conscious, which effectively means slowing down the movement from instinct to action so that we can deliberate with ourselves about the reaction we want.
Anger shouldn’t be ‘stirred,’ it should go on the offensive; it’s a kind of pursuit, and no pursuit ever occurs without the mind’s assent, nor can one act to gain vengeance and compensation with the mind all unaware. Suppose that someone has reckoned he was harmed, wants to take revenge, and then immediately calms down when some reason urges against it. I don’t call this anger, I call it the movement of a mind still obedient to reason; anger’s something that leaps clear of reason, that snatches reason up and carries it along. (On Anger, Kaster and Nussbaum trans., 2.3.4)
Here we see the interruption of instinct as a positive moral capability. This is not an interruption that seeks to get back on track, but an interruption that can be cultivated, habituated, and therefore become increasingly conscious of itself as an interruption of an otherwise automated movement.
For Seneca, reason is not primarily a logical faculty so much as it is the capacity to interrupt the movement of instinct to enter into examination and deliberation before one selects an action. Reason introduces contingency into time to make it possible to consider alternative actions.
We should see the entire movement of anger as an example of how intelligence (here ‘reason’) emerges from the interruption of instinct, but in doing so, it doesn’t automatically seek to get back on track. Rather, it prolongs the interruption deliberately so that consciousness can envision more options. Down the road, we’ll call this ‘attention’ and ‘discernment’, but for Seneca, it is simply reason.
Let’s push this further. The somersault of causal reversal is on full display here. What is reason doing as it interrupts? It allows for an instinctive purpose—seeking revenge ASAP—to be interrupted and for that interruption to become a future deliberately considered.
Accordingly, we must struggle against the passions’ first causes. The cause of anger is a belief that one has been wronged, to which one ought not lightly give credence. One shouldn’t immediately assent even to what is clear and obvious, for some things are false that look like the truth. One must always take one’s time: the passage of time makes the truth plain. (On Anger, 2.22.2)
This is what intelligence does with respect to the arrow of time—it introduces contingency into immediacy as the first step in asserting purpose. It requires us to see contingency in the movement of necessity and to take the steps to cultivate that contingency. In so doing, necessity and fate—both crucial Stoic concepts—start to look a bit more flexible, if only with respect to our responses.
Nonetheless, by turning to our own reactions, we learn that necessity isn’t always what it appears to be. Reason cultivates the power of contingency so as to make alternatives possible.
We can draw a line from this moment in Seneca to the Enlightenment as the history of our intelligence expanding this twofold dance of contingency and purpose.
Separation and Intention
To experience the ability to make causation contingent, one must have the experience of separation from necessity. I’m not ready to call this consciousness, but I am treading in that direction. At minimum, there must be a sense of some elbow room in the otherwise inexorable flow of causation. Time is therefore experienced first as contingency within necessity.
This elbow room is what Seneca describes using the terms reason and assent. Intention can emerge from the interruption of instinct when that capacity for interruption becomes part of the organism’s repertoire of purpose. This is exactly what we saw with Seneca’s notion of assent. By learning of its existence, its power of interruption can be cultivated, even habituated. For a truly accomplished practitioner, it can become automated.
The wheel turning out of itself circles back again through habituation and automation.
This essay accompanies my most recent Substack essay: ‘Faster than Nature II: Intelligence against Fate’.
This essay is also part of my Computational World series and my Rejuvenation series.