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Dr. Schund, what is the source of human intelligence?
Human vanity and mechanical analogies have spawned theories of intelligence embodying profound anatomical intricacies. Rich complexities of ordered neural matrix are postulated as the physical basis of thought. Silicon simulacra and their massive software emulating the supposed form and logic of cogitation - artificial intelligence - are hopelessly inept at trivial human endeavors like recognizing shapes and drawing logical inferences.
Consider ants, bees, termites, and other eusocial insects. So little intelligence flickers from an individual's few micrograms of brain. Successful models of insect locomotion dispense with centrally processed thought altogether. They favor at-the-limb analysis of primitive inputs like resistance to movement, local terrain gradient, and the other legs' current position. Output is one of a small set of movements. One ant is an idiot. One hundred ants efficiently and retrieve food for their colony. One hundred thousand ants, a full colony, successfully resist extermination by all but the most extreme, prolonged, and sophisticated efforts of human technology. How can a collection of idiots so vastly exceed an individual's capabilities?
Consider electroencephalography. The rhythms of electrical discharge echoing throughout a normal human cerebral cortex are noisy and irregular, within bounds. Patients trapped within impenetrable depths of schizophrenic withdrawal have remarkably clean EEGs. Before sophisticated instrumentation existed and before the molecular precision of psychopharmaceuticals was realized, patients were restored to more normal function by giving their brains a mammoth WHACK! Any physical or chemical equivalent to a sledgehammer smashing grey matter worked.
Beef slaughterers remarked upon the preternatural calmness of a steer that had been badly put down by an intended fatal blow to its forehead with a zestily swung five pound sledge. Were psychiatrists to pop patients with big chromed hammers they would get callouses on their hands like common laborers. In deference to professional sensibilities they instead administered technological assaults like insulin shock, perfluoroether inhalation, pentylenetetrazole, and electroconvulsive therapy. Patients lost within the armor plated corridors of their own corrupt thoughts spasmed and convulsed as their physicians benignly observed. They snapped bones and grinned a drooling rictus as they edged toward death. After eventual recovery their memories sustained damage, but remarkably often the workings of their remaining minds approached normalcy.
The human mind is expansively more than the sum of it physical anatomy. The four pounds of its 100 billion neurons and their trillions of synapses, supporting astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, blood vessels and whatnot, are far too coarse a fabric to contain its obvious contents. The warp and weft of its weave are deeply fractal. At its base there flutters quantum mechanical indeterminacy gushing unending stochastic input into a spiraling ascent. Passing through virtual and physical anatomical filters the raw stuff of human awareness, randomness, is shaped and selected. The idiot noise of creation itself is sculpted into the pleasure of a cool summer night shared with a mate and the vague uneasiness that led a primitive ancestor to grasp a rock when its own fist proved insufficient to conquer a planet.
Intelligence draws forth from exquisitely molded chaos as the entropy of one hundred thousand ants begets the potency of their colony. To be rigidly ordered is to be destroyed. Man is that organism substituting cultural growth for physical evolution. How interesting then that the primary reward of civilization is the loss of all that is unprecedented.
Our most creative scientists and artists are viewed as being odd. They may be child-like, wandering without adult constraints, seeing what everyone sees but thinking that which intrudes upon nobody else's thoughts. They may suffer from drug dependencies, beset by the hallucinatory revenge of their chemical master yet launching creations of power and majesty from within their pain. Teenagers poised at the brink of adulthood, their last chance for growth, pursue chemical explorations and doggedly disavow all that is proper. Would this be less an aberration than a healthy acquisition of their last original thoughts?
The human essence founders if denied novel input. A cloistered immutable order of religious, cultural or political hegemony is the one true sin against intelligence. A measured access to utter disorder is the thin membrane separating us each and together from a descent into madness.
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