What is intelligence? As I developed from childhood through adulthood my understanding of it has changed, beginning in grade school.
Human. As a young boy in the third grade, I lived in Lexington, Kentucky where I knew a boy who lived down the street. His name was Chris Wolfe. People said Chris had an extremely high IQ – like “genius”. I hadn’t yet heard of Thomas Edison’s famous remark that genius is “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” But in any case, it was the first time I heard of something called “intelligence”, and people seemed to admire it. That early encounter with the concept of intelligence would come to shape me in ways I could not have predicted including how I saw myself.
I never gave much thought to my own intelligence until I had difficulty with a physics problem in junior high school. I wondered just how smart I really was. Somehow, I discovered that the school kept intelligence information on each student. So, one day, when no one was around, I slipped into the records office and found my file. My file said “above average” – a relief, even though it didn’t solve my physics problem and I certainly was no Chris Wolf.
Years later, after earning my PhD – primarily through perspiration – I was working in medical research at the National Institutes of Health. A respected physician scientist on our team, no intellectual slouch himself mentioned a colleague at Harvard, saying “with his brains, he’d be a real asset to our research”. That struck me, much like my mother’s praise of a “big vocabulary” had years before. Intelligence, it seemed was valued and the more the better.
Non-Human. Today, we recognize that humans are not alone in possessing intelligence, however we define it. We see distinct forms of intelligence throughout nature: in the functioning of ecosystems, in the underground networks and “mother trees” in forests, and in the communication and organization of bees, ants, and elephants, and even in the quickly evolving capabilities of artificial intelligence. Intelligence, it seems, emerges in countless ways. But does materiality have intelligence?
Indigenous peoples of North American often say before a story, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know that it’s true”. This view is in harmony with Louis Kahn’s belief that "even a brick wants to be something." Kahn, a famous architect, saw potential and purpose in his building materials, as if they had a true nature–or perhaps intelligence– that architects could reveal through design. Likewise, the traditional Japanese drum maker will walk the forest, seeking the tree that is ready to become a drum. And the Shakers, members of The Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearance, practiced a “religion of wood”, as Edward Andrews described it, crafting chairs, chests, brooms, storage boxes and other objects with reverence—to express a particular wood’s “vocation”. Perhaps all these creations reflect an intelligence shared between the maker and the material.
Divine. Finally, what of spiritual or divine intelligence? Returning to the human mind there is difficulty in it describing something that transcends concepts and language – I leave you with these words of Eckhart Tolle, who speaks of a freedom and intelligence beyond thought:
“The beginning…is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence…all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.” ― The Power of Now