Chapter 14: Intelligence

Chapter 14: Intelligence

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Intelligence in action is the application of cognition outside of the context in which it involved [...] the flexibility to be able to transfer those skills.” 

Nathan Emery (Bird Brain)

Operationally Defining Intelligence as Metapraxis with Situational Reuse

Hubert Dreyfus emphasizes that organisms and humans are not rule-following machines. Dreyfus’ Heideggerian conception of intelligence does not involve cognitivist rule-entailed algorithmic manipulation of symbolic representations. For embodied and enactive frameworks, especially radical versions (Chemero, Hutto & Myin), intelligence needs a new definition based in practice.

Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu would challenge intelligence as defined under “good old fashioned action theory” with his conception of practice theory. From Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo (2016): 

“Good old fashioned action theory” (GOFAT) (Martin, 2015, p.217), as the default mode of theorizing action in several social science disciplines, defines belief as explicit, conscious representations expressible in linguistic format and supporting propositional content regarding the entities, processes and states of affairs that are taken by actors to exist or obtain in the worlds in which they act. For the purpose of theorizing the sources of action, sociologists treat beliefs as inference-supporting internal representations of the environment and the consequences that follow certain lines of conduct given the existence and efficacy of the “believed in” entities and processes. Beliefs are, in this sense, the primary components of reasoning chains that are constitutive of “rational” (inclusive of “value-rational”) action in the Weberian sense.”

Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory can be an alternative starting point to operationally define intelligence, replacing the definition under GOFAT, cognitivism, and representationalism. According to Pierre Bourdieu: 

“Practical belief is not a ‘state of the mind,’ still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body. Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense” (1990, p. 68).

In accordance with practice theory and Nathan Emery’s definition: Intelligence can be redefined as an agentive meta praxis with situational reuse. In this way, intelligence is a processual activity structure and is modality-flexible. Thus, intelligence is operationalized as a skilled second-order behavior acting on the skilled use of other behaviors, having directedness (intentionality) for behavioral reuse in a novel situation. This is a know-how for deploying and redeploying one’s know-how; i.e. a directed phenotypic reorganization of one’s phenotypic organization; i.e. an intentionality with one’s habitus, with know-how for coupling it to various fields. This definition relates to agency as a selective regulation of one’s behavioral coupling with the environment. 

Intelligence can be defined as the skilled reuse of skilled activity-structures (meta practic behavioral structures) in novel situations, involving dimensions of awareness (meta attention), intentionality (directedness), and the cost and time spent in acquiring or learning. Typically intelligence is adaptive during organism challenges of 1. diverse foraging strategies, 2. life in complex social groups, and/or 3. life in a fluctuating environment (e.g. Many Minds podcast episode with Alex Taylor, discussing the intelligence of crows and kea birds: https://manyminds.libsyn.com/clever-crows-and-cheeky-keas).

These dimensional profiles yield a spectrum for different dispositions of intelligence, with  dimensionalities and degree can be heuristically mapped on a spider graph. Example profiles of intelligence can relate to fleshing out local enhancement, imitation, observational learning, and explicit teaching. 

To profile spectrums of intelligence relative to "meta-practic reuse” is an enactive and Heideggerian way to avoid reliance on mechanisms of symbolic representation and algorithmic rule-entailment. The general activity-structure of intelligence is operationally defined as the practic reuse regarding one’s skilled practice (know-how) directed at a changing situation, i.e. intentionally reused meta praxis.

Returning to Nathan Emery's definition, intelligence is learning to use a behavioral structure in a novel context that it did not originally evolve/develop under (hence  intentional meta-practic reuse). Intelligence as a meta-skill (a skilled redeployment of one’s skills) operates upon a general class of behavioral exaptation, i.e. flexibility regarding an organism’s history of phylogeny, ontogeny, and niche construction (eco-evo-devo behavioral flexibility and phenotypic agency). This behavioral exaptation is coupled with an intentionality and selectivity of redeployment, so intelligence is not an accidental nor passive reuse. However, this is not a black and white issue, and intelligence can be profiled with gradual degrees, subtleties, and inconsistencies regarding the intentionality and meta-attention of one’s practic reuse. 

Regarding the evolution and development of intelligence: organisms converge upon a new meta phenotype of practicing and selectively applying a phylotypically-novel and ontogenetically-novel praxis, especially regarding challenges, complexities, and fluctuations in niche. Again, this relates to the aforementioned pressures selecting for intelligence (diversity of foraging strategies, complex social groups, and environmental flux).

In this way, intelligence has been redefined generally as skilled practic reuse (i.e. meta praxis with situational reuse), with potential dimensions of intentionality (directedness), regulative coupling (agency), and cost (e.g. amount of time required, amount and diversity of repertoire). An example of an organism with high cost and time requirements are altricial species (long developmental spans of adolescence) compared to precocial species (short periods of adolescence). Among non human organisms, the orangutan has the longest altricial adolescent period lasting approximately 13 years, as the adolescent observes and learns a huge and flexible foraging habitus from its mother, living in a diverse field. 

Profiling Intentionality

Compared to observational learning, the intelligence example of local enhancement has a dimensional profile with a relatively lower degree of intentionality and awareness (meta-attention). Local enhancement may involve a lower degree of intentional and agential dimensions, involving an “ur-intentionality” per Hutto-Myin (ur being the German root for original). According to the processual-enactive framework: Intentionality has its operationality as the abstracted orientation of directedness, heuristically considered apart from a conscrescent activity structure. An organism directly perceives an opportunity to act (affordance) with its environment, and interacts in consequence. Intentionality is the post-hoc abstracted orientation and directedness between the perception and interacted-upon affordance. As an abstracted part of a general substrate-flexible activity structure, minimal intentionality is likewise substrate flexible. Intentionality is operative as an activity structure of a perceiving organism interacting with an afforded opportunity to act. 

Minimal intentionality specifically regards the abstracted directedness of behaviors, and comes in a continuity across evolutionary transitions and concrete situations. Intentionality involves a continuous spectrum, not a digital presence/absence nor a distinct, clear-cut taxonomy. Due to the self organizing nature of complex systems, intentionality (as an abstracted orientation of a processual structure between organism and environment) has self similarity/scale invariance between evolutionarily transitioned scales, across species, and across different concrete situations within a species. This point is to emphasize the continuity, dimensionality, degrees, and evolutionary transitions of intentionality as the abstracted directedness of a concrescent processual structure. This is not to equivocate types of intentionalities between concrete examples. On the other hand, this is also not to dichotomize intentionalities as genuinely present, or otherwise absent and only speakable with an “as if” intentional stance. This framework avoids fallacies of inter-level equivocation while recognizing a continuity, scale invariance, and modality flexibility (Chapter 7).

Compared to observational learning or explicit teaching, the abstracted intentionality of local enhancement is relatively passive to the attractor effects of an environmental affordance. The intentionality of local enhancement is likewise relatively passive in its development and instantiation for an organism; the manifestation of local enhancement is mostly due to the exposure of passively accumulated behavioral opportunities in an environment. Local enhancement manifests consequent to a positive feedback loop between accumulated opportunities-to-act, and the signal boosting accumulated by conspecifics being attracted to this area of niche, and transducing further niche-construction effects. 

This is not to exclude the possibility of local enhancements gradually elaborating in intentionality over the course of an organism’s developmental and experiential reiterations. For example, the clam-smashing behaviors of capuchin monkeys may begin as a relatively passive intentionality, boosted and stabilized by positive feedback loops of local enhancement and niche construction. However, a seasoned monkey may begin to redeploy rock-smashing tools with more agential and regulated degrees of directedness, and less passivity of directedness. The monkey may employ meta behaviors to fine tune and agentively regulate the technique, i.e. meta-skills directed at behaviors for modulating speed, handling, and even gathering supplies. Occasionally the capuchin may even redeploy and exapt this behavior via a situational reuse of these meta-practices (this would be exciting to ethologists studying the species). Perhaps the monkey begins smashing an enemy with a rock as a weapon, or using a rock to make a sharper rock (a meta-tool use). These latter examples “meta practices with situated reuse” haven’t been observed in capuchins, but they would be examples of intelligence of an elaborated dimensionality, degree and intentionality. Intelligence is not a digital present/absent function or trait of an organism or a brain, but presents as a continuous spectrum to profile a modality-flexible processual structure. 

There exists continuity between dimensional profiles of intelligence, and not absolute, clean distinctions. Ethology is the study of animal behavior, the study of organism “ethos,” and each example of animal behavior can be concretely situated and holistically profiled, with contextual and experiential embeddedness, and contingencies to eco-evo-devo histories.

Observational learning has an intelligence profile (metapractic reuse) with relatively higher degree of intersubjective awareness, and likewise a relatively increased orientative focus of directedness and intentionality. Observational learning has costs involving more active attention, more directed intentionality, and more time directly engaging in practice and learning. 

Explicit teaching and learning has an intelligence profile with the relatively highest levels of explicit intentionality, attention, intersubjective awareness and regulation, and agency. 

To recap: animals converge upon a meta phenotype of meta-practic reuse. Intelligence as a processual structure involves the practice of selectively redeploying behaviors in phylotypically, ontogenetically, and experientially novel ways, with flexibility to novel environmental situations, and exapted opportunities to act. Such niche challenges can include diversity of foraging techniques, social life, environmental flux, and niche complexity as agents, competitors and environments dynamically coevolve in a dancing landscape.

Dancing Fitness Landscapes 

A dancing landscape is a type of dynamic fitness landscape studied in complexity sciences, and metapraxis would confer a fitness benefit as landscapes become increasingly complex. Local peaks and global peaks in this landscape are in a state of continuous flux. The decision-making state of an agent acts upon its landscape of opportunities, but the landscape is composed with other deciding agents. The landscape and the agents’ decisions coevolve over time: peaks flatten out as everyone climbs and dip into valleys, whilst new peaks dynamically self organize. If an agent can selectively deploy meta-behaviors for sensing and reacting to the fluctuating reactivity of its fitness landscape, then this is a form of intelligence conferring transient fitness. For an ecology and food web, the landscape is literally alive, and everything “dances” in coevolutionary complexity with each other, dynamic over different and differentiated time scales. This is true from the soil (of detritus, bacteria, micro organisms) mistaken as dead “dirt,” the plant life all around mistaken as “background,” to all the other agentive life forms mistaken as deterministic “mindless animals.” The fitness landscape is dancing, both metaphorically and literally with a background-dependent ecology of living organisms. Dancing fitness landscapes in complexity science do not have background independence; the background is continuous with-and-of its agents and their interactions, and emergent peaks, valleys, and rugged features are in a continuous, living coevolutionary flux across different spatial scales and timescales. 

Phronesis and Processual Ethics 

To recap the first half of this chapter: intelligence can be operationally defined as meta praxis upon the use of one’s practices, with situational reuse. Intelligence as an abstracted modality-flexible processual structure has different dimensions and degrees of intentionality, agency, evolutionary transition. Intelligence is an abstracted activity-structure that self organizes as concrete organisms interact with concrescent situations, in situ. Intelligence is not a property of an organism nor a function of the brain. Intelligence can be profiled on a continuous spectrum with varying degrees and dimensionalities. Potential suggestions include intentionality, agency, evolutionary transitions, situatedness, and pressures such as the complexity of dancing fitness landscapes, diversity of foraging behavior, intersubjective life with dynamic social complexity, and the ecological complexity of a fluctuating environment. Resultantly, intelligence can have a continuity of different concrete dispositional profiles, e.g. local enhancement, observational learning, and explicit teaching; this is an issue of relative continuity, not absolutist taxonomy. 

Phronesis was considered by the Greek philosophers as a type of intelligence, or wisdom. Phronesis is sometimes emphasized as a type of practical wisdom or mindfulness, and has an intersubjective and ethical dimension (Gallagher, 2020). There is a dialectical tension between automatic and consolidated phases of learning such as skilled coping (Dreyfus), and intentionally attended, reflective forms of learning. In a way, pre-reflective capabilities of intelligence and phronesis are consequential to the positive feedback loop between pre-reflectively consolidated skill learning (e.g. skilled coping), and meta-attended reflective practice (e.g. effortful intelligence). Phronesis has a specific reference to the modality/domain of the intersubjective field, and correlates with social intelligence and processes regulating abstracted ethical frameworks. 

With regards to the present topic of ethics, note that the original Aristotelian usage of phronesis has intersubjective, social, and justice-based characteristics. Shaun Gallagher emphasises this in order to clarify other repurposed usages of the term: 

“Neither Dreyfus nor Lyotard acknowledge the importance of intersubjective interaction in regard to phronesis. A number of critics have engaged Dreyfus on this point, specifically in regard to his failure to mention the importance of social factors in gaining expertise[....] Lyotard goes so far in this direction as to deny that phronesis depends upon education or the development of good habits that we might learn from others.” (Gallagher, 2020).

Stepping back from phronesis, ethical stances will be operationalized as abstractions from holistic, precarious organizational closures. The end of this section will then revisit and reapply phronesis to this framework of processual ethics, and abstracted ethical stances. 

In general, processual ethics are inextricably concrescent with the organizational forms of precarious operational closures, including intersubjective and sociocultural closures. Ethics are contingent and relative to the vital and pragmatic norms immanent to the precarious closures and histories of these general processual structures. Ethical stances are abstracted from concrescent “formal-cause” processual structures. Likewise, ethics are modality-neutral in their emergence, general activity structures, and broad applications. Abstracted ethical frameworks are immanent to integrated but differentiated co-operative and competitive organizational closures. Ethical frameworks themselves differentiate and consolidate in various ways and patterns. Ethical processes elaborate or consolidate when their organizational closures are put under varying degrees of closedness, when they are put under varying degrees of pressure, with differing internal integration/connectedness, and with varying degrees differentiation regarding immanent competition and co-operation. Ethical processes and patterns also elaborate according to the scale of evolutionary transition at play (e.g. intersubjectivity, within a social group, inter-group, and an inter-group hypercycle). 

Ethical processes and patterns are integrated within organizational closures and therefore are not reducible to any element or part. Abstracted descriptions of ethical stances are emergent from inter-group and intra-group iterations of competition and co-operation, and such ethical frameworks diversify under integration of organizational closure. In general, co-operation can be considered precursor to operational closure, achieving closure once the various co-operative interactions become networked together in a circularly closed and interdependent whole. 

For example: Abstracted ethical stances and frameworks can include applications from game theory, coalition theory, and various frameworks from philosophy of science. Ethical stances are abstracted from these modality-flexible organizational-processual frameworks, contingent to precarious closure, organizational/vital norms, and autonomy of the enclosed interacting agents. Such abstracted ethical stances can be applied analogously to various concrete examples across evolutionarily transitioned co-operative and competitive organizational closures, having similarity of organizational structure. 

A hypercycle is an interesting example of a special intra-competitive and co-operative organizational closure, with unique ethical ramifications. Considered at its highest scale of closure, a hypercycle is a weakly integrated circular network between differentiated and strongly integrated sub-closures. The hypercycle is a modality-neutral structure of organizational closure, in a heterarchy with itself. The hypercycle can involve a heterarchy spanning increasingly differentiated/specialized and integrated sub-closures, and increasingly generalized and dis-integrated macro closures. Each individuating sub closure is simultaneously co-operating and competing with the other closures, spanning scales above, below, and alongside its own scale of order in its heterarchy. 

The most macro-scale ethical ramification is thus: if this hypercycle organizational structure is exploited too much by an individuated sub-closure, then the whole robust but precarious hypercycle closure will be weakened, and potentially even collapse. Likewise, all sub-closures are at increased risk of precarious collapse, having lost their facultative or obligate interactions with their macro-state hypercycle closure. A keystone group is especially obligate for the robustness at the hypercycle scale of closure, and if the keystone is removed, then the precarious hypercycle system will collapse. 

A hypercycle is intra competitive within its structure, but on a macro scale the holistic organizational structure is co-operative in its operational closure. This means that all agents and sub closures embedded within a macro hypercycle are in some direct, indirect, obligate or facultative way inter-cooperative with each other. This holds indirectly, even if two sub closures are directly more inter-competitive on a myopic scale. Greed is good, but only so far.

Additionally, another ethical ramification is that the dialectic between competition and cooperation is driving for the coevolutionary dynamics of the macro scale hypercycle. If the closure is perfectly balanced in internal cooperation, then its organizational form is relatively static in terms of its differentiation. The more pressures of competition, the more differentiation and internalized coevolution and networked complexity. With regards to hypercycle differentiation and convolution, intrinsic competition is a driving force, to a point, balanced in a creative dialectic with cooperation. 

In general, a hypercycle as a type of complex system closure will have more robustness the more it is tightly enclosed, integrated, interconnected/entangled, redundant, evolutionarily transitioned, and differentiated. In this way, a complex, dancing and dynamic balance between competition and cooperation contributes to the robustness of a precarious hypercycle. This macro scale closure continuously faces collapse as an open and ordered thermodynamic system. Keystone members as sub-closures are especially relevant and obligate to preventing precarious collapse. 

In the most minimal and modality-neutral sense of the term, minimal ethics can be defined as relative to the vital norms of a precarious inter competitive and inter cooperative hypercycle closure. Minimal ethics are operationally defined here as the interactive stances relevant to an agent’s macro scale cooperative closure (i.e. their trans-individual closures), relative to precarious collapse vs robustness. At any given situation, a concrete individuated agent will take up dynamically varying ethical stances contingent to its situatedness within an inter competitive complex dancing landscape. Ethical stances take up a plurality contingent to which specific networks interaction is considered, and contingent to organizational/vital norms. At the most macro scale, an organism is facultatively cooperative with its hypercycles, and the hypercycle is obligate to the internal closure of its constituent agents. Agents might be obligate to their hypercycle, in which case excessive exploitation will lead to their own precarious collapses. Each individuated agent has to balance and re-calibrate its interactions and meta-regulations of competing, cooperating, exploiting and exploring with its fitness landscape and hypercycles. In this way, agents are not background independent of their hypercycles and fitness landscapes, they are embedded and co-constitutive. As background dependent constitutive-continuities: agents have a processual ethics consequent to the dynamic organizational form of their macro-scale/trans-organism closures. Agents have organizational norms and ethical norms made relative to the precariousness of this closure. A plurality of ethical stances can then be abstracted from this special processual structure. Prior to an abstracted cross-section, ethical stances are always continuously concrescent, relativistic and dynamically changing. Ethics are not absolutist, permanent, essentialist, nor reducible. 

A hypercycle-enclosed agent takes up varying stances of inter competitive relationships between other closely networked agents. Still, the individuated agent is always in some indirect and weaker way co-operative with its neighboring competitors, just by being embedded in the same precarious hypercycle closure. Each agent must navigate its own paths and stances, embedded in a concretizing hypercycle with other agents, in situ. Each agent exploits, explores, competes and cooperates. Each agent can interact both within its macroscale order, and above and below via meta-interactions. However, each agent in some way is facultatively enclosed in macro scale trans-organism closures, and may even be obligate to trans-organism closures. 

Phronesis is operationalized as the agent’s process of navigating this complex and dancing landscape with ethical intelligence. In turn, ethical intelligence is operationally defined as the meta practice with directed situational reuse (intelligence) involving regulatory agency with one’s abstracted ethical stances, made disclosed to oneself. Next in turn, ethical stances are operationally defined as a form of abstracted pragmatic awareness regarding one’s interactive ramifications, made relative to the consequences upon the agent’s trans-individual operational closures. Examples of trans-individual closures include one’s hypercycle scales of closures, reproductive closures to progeny, familial closure with kinship, etc. These closures span beyond the immediate embodiment and heredity of the individual, hence the usage of trans. The individual is consequentially affected by the organizational norms spanning beyond and through its individuated closure, as a class of trans- instrumental normativity. 

The meta topic of this chapter has been to increase insight into the processes responsible for generating ethical frameworks and stances. This is to increase awareness and respect for ethics, as immanent and highly consequential for the viability of ontically real organizational processes. This chapter’s meta-phronesis contradicts claims of moral nihilism, moral absolutism, purely self-ish individualism, and purely pro-social altruism. This is to defend an ethical plurality, to outline the impactful enabling constraints that contribute to dynamically organizing and stabilizing ethical pluralities. This is also to warn against types of interactions that may lead to precarious collapse of an organism and its trans-organism closures. 

Life, mind, norms, and ethics are all continuous but differentiating; concrescent together under a processual-enactive organizational doctrine. Life, mind, norms, ethics, and the organism itself are irreducibly enactive and processual organizational structures.