he Nature of intelligence he Nature of intelligence 
Conclusion: Intelligence is an attribute given to living organisms such that intelligent actions of all living things taken as a whole together enable the thing called "life as a whole" to largely manifest the order, balance, and harmony both found throughout and desired by Nature and fit into a grander scheme of things.
Preliminary considerations: Here intelligence is considered to exist when a creature seeks "A" and being faced with "A" and "B" discerns and chooses "A" while rejecting "B." With such an understanding, in addition to higher animals, an amoeba and all other lower animals would be considered to discern and possess consciousness of "their" environments (click) and to possess intelligence. In what follows, attention will also be paid to the nature of the organization of life based upon immaterial forces (e.g. electromagnetism) underlying genetic materials. This may seem divergent, but is connected to the nature of intelligence spoken of within.
Discussion: While we think the modern person of the 21st century is the most educated person of all history and the most intelligent of all animals, that may not be true. The hunting society lived self-sufficiently by tribe off the land. But should oil flows stop tomorrow, the means of sustenance of urban dwellers worldwide would come to an abrupt halt and mass starvation, disease, and death to billions would follow. Modern man does not have the intelligence to survive as the hunters of old. Can not survive as any animal or insect could. Intelligence is relative. If we looked for a broader meaning, we might consider the following.
Intelligence is the manipulation of motor mechanisms to derive happiness for the organism inclusive of surviving and entails the gathering of information external to the organism (see entry on the senses above) so by nonverbal communication and wise motor manipulation, it can maximize happiness. And, at root, all living organisms are nothing more than a physical organization of their genotype: the initial genetic blueprint of an organism. Ultimately, at its root, the genotype is actually nothing more than immaterial energy configuring atoms and molecules into genetic code. As it is immaterial as a thought or idea is immaterial the genotype is more like a "thought" or "idea" interacting with the other "thoughts" and "ideas" and set to interact in harmony with its environment also a "thought." Interaction is a "thought being thought-out." This idea is not new nor original. Aristotle theorized that God was pure Thought and prior to the Greeks, the Judeo-Christian idea of the Logos, and Egyptian idea of their God, Amun.
The physical is not the blueprint the immaterial electromagnetic is. The immaterial is idea-like a living thought. As thinking is mediated by plus and minus ions (NaCl, KCl, NA+, K+, Cl) moving in and out of the nerve fibres of our brain and nervous system, thought and thinking is the sophisticated summation of the flows and interplay of positive and negative energies.Neumann Both the medium for thinking (i.e. the brain) and the ability of thinking itself exist in "seed-like" form in the genotype and is "species-specific."
The nature of the genotype is that it is a hand-glove model of its environment both in the sense that all features of a given animal's environment are modelled in the genotype's blueprint and in that the genotype creates the animal's body and behavior to fit hand-glove into its unique environment. In essence, in tiny cells, genotypes taken as a whole at some snapshot of geological time serve as a perfect multi-media picture-record written, imprinted in genetic code, of the heavens, the skies, the waters, and the living earth. Paul Davies, writing of the ability of birds to use stars in their astro-navigation, comments that, "The necessary astro-navigational information is built in DNA ... given a sufficient understanding of the nature of DNA, one could 'decode' this information and reconstruct a map of the stars." DNA is built on an immaterial blueprint.
In the case of you and I, we are, in essence, just the immaterial blueprint of the one-celled genotype that became us: eyes, brain, charming smile, wit, and great brilliance included. Language ability is nothing more than the ability of the genotype to associate random sounds with contemporary objects of evolution (i.e. today's world is different from the first human's world). Reading and writing is nothing less than the ability of the genome to devise and associate random signs (otherwise known as written alphabets, words, and languages) with contemporary objects of evolution such as the words "ice cream" and the "Internet." Rats evolve right along with us finding great comfort in living structures and types of food the prehistoric world had no imagination would ever exist. Insects have also kept pace with human evolution. Even viruses: computer viruses.
We are living witnesses of co-evolution. We can observe the ability of organisms worldwide to harmoniously co-evolve ever upwards: e.g. in the microscopic-level arm's race, viral innovations against medicines force humans to develop better medicines. Harmonious tit for tat co-evolution finds origins in the organizational marvel of the immaterial dimension. One unfortunate effect of imbalance is that it creates new "harmonious" balances and the imbalances the human has produced have eliminated many life forms from the environment that man is destroying in 200 years that took 2 million years to create.
Nevertheless, for living creatures, harmony and balance with nature are written and achieved in genotypes and together, genotypes make the whole living picture of life on earth each specie of genotype one piece of the puzzle fitting perfectly with the rest. With the right equipment, the genotype could play an organism's life like a video in a VCR. Through life via the interaction of living things Nature manifests on yet another level, the balance and harmony found throughout the universe. Balance is found, for instance, in every animal having a strength of defense against others, but a weakness making it available as fodder and the strong have the greatest liklihood of surviving, but death takes an old life away to make way for new.
While from the perspective of the individual, intelligence serves the purpose of striving for, realizing, and maintaining individual happiness, taken as a whole intelligence serves the greater purpose of bringing the whole of the living world and nature into harmonious oneness. Let us remember several things: living things have not the foggiest idea of the technologies that make their organs and forms and make them interact harmoniously within the organism and with the whole environment from starlight to raindrops.
Intelligence is a very highly limited ability (e.g. we see every leaf on a tree and blade of grass but can't number them) but enough to enable balance. For instance, just the right number of people were born to fill every job in society from the stone age to the internet age. Intelligence is just a limited ability: it gathers information external to the individual while the organism simultaneously hasn't the foggiest idea of what is happening inside itself where each cell is a single living creature respiring, obtaining nutrition, dispensing of waste, competing sometimes for scarce resources, often multiplying like living creatures do, and together orchestrating the life of the creature (us) they embody.
Richard Dawkins of Oxford, calls metazoans as ourselves, a "colony of genes ... a survival machine."[A] My favorite scientist, the nobelist, Erwin Schrφdinger, viewed biological harmony as a cooperative and intelligent affair:
They (cells in "survival" machines) communicate with the greatest ease with every feature of the living environment. Intelligence is the feature shared by all living creatures which taken as a whole enables them to find universal balance and act in harmony with one another and all Creation. It is the writer's belief that intelligence is the attribute bestowed upon life to enable it to exist in harmony with the Creator. The above discussion is concluded while the following is an opinion on the physical nature of intelligence.Since we know the power of this tiny central office has in the isolated cell, do they not resemble stations of local government dispersed thorough the body, communicating with each other with great ease, thanks to the code that is common to all of them? [B]
Intelligence a nature of physical processes:
In both the physical and biological world, a supra-human amount of technology is used for oysters to make pearls, bees to make honey, or worms to make silk which further identified and fixated genetic structures exactly at the point where these high technology process take place which interact in hundreds of ways with their environments. As in radioactive decay in a bar of uranium, nuclei decay at random: and if the nuclei within genes or chromosomes likewise decayed at random, random forces would either have long ago resulted in the degradation of biological processes or more likely prevented their evolution. This technology is supra-human. What is the liklihood that intelligence was and is involved in their constructs?
With the Entscheidungsproblem,[C] the concept of the modern computer had roots in a 1936 paper of Alan Turing with his concept that a machine could be intelligent by imitating human intelligence (he also developed the binary code). Based upon many of Turing's concepts, the first computer was built in 1943 by John von Neumann at Princeton University and in his Yale book, The Computer and the Brain,[D] elaborates further on how computers imitate human intelligence. Finally, largely a re-statement of Turing's own words, Marvin Minsky of M.I.T. writes, Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by man.[E]
These three men directly or indirectly characterize artificial intelligence as things requiring intelligence if done by man. Science is the most highly reguarded intellectual endeavor on earth and all of science is based upon human models of nature or natural law: humans must use intelligence to copy nature meaning nature is itself the greater intelligence. The whole of the physical world is an intelligent construct. Built as such, physical processes themselves seek "A" and being faced with "A" and "B" discern and choose "A" while rejecting "B." The physical world is conscious of its environment, discerns between "A" and "B" and manifests and is designed to manifest intelligence in choice though restricted to science in physics and chemistry, etc., as we have observed it.
Behavior found in the physical world could be called "natural law." However, the writer shares the view of those that believe that "natural law" is synonymous with "Thought," such as Sir James Jean,[F] Socrates, Plato, and the Egyptians before them (click here). Therefore, when Richard Feynman[G] and James Wheeler[H] speak of choices made by even particles, the view of the present writer is that these are intelligent choices, nature is intelligent, and physical nature manifests intelligence.
Of human thinking, von Neumann wrote that:Frequency (in nerve pulses) ... is a property of a single train of pulses whereas every one the relevant nerves consists of a large number of fibres, each of which transmits numerous trains of pulses. It is, therefore, perfectly plausible that certain (statistical) relationships between such trains of pulses should also be transmitted information. In this connection it is natural to think of various correlation-coefficients, and the like.[ I ]
We can imagine that it is the flow and interplay between positive and negative energies that make the things we call thought, feeling, emotion, thinking, and every other mental function from personality to the unending assortment and variations in skill, talent, ability, mood and attitude. And all these things are programmed in the immaterial blueprint of electromagnetic energies underlying the genotype of any given individual or species. In this sense also, the nature of thought and thinking is decidely immaterial.
A closing observation not bearing on the subject of this essay or last point is that it is quite remarkable that the "steadiness" of any visual object (i.e. they don't waver like mirages) is quite amazing when we realize that the visual image itself and memory of it are only energy balances in our neural system.
Bibliography supplied on request
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