On Intelligence

Darin Stevenson
4 min readSep 20, 2024

Intelligence can be thought of as the ability to recognize useful or revolutionary paths (or shortcuts) in traversing developmental structures. This involves intuition, pattern recognition, and metacognitive skills. There are many orders of this ability. Throughout our lives, barring lucky accident, many of us remain largely at an order of development and activity that resists interpretation as intelligence at all.

Although we ascended the first rung, and acquire representational capacities and nominal membership in fictional cultures, very few achieve the necessary metacognitive perspectives that allow them to escape the relatively dangerous cradle this first developmental rung comprises.

The scientific method potentially comprises a powerful asset in this domain, but does not generate intelligence. It generates models of relationships. Intelligence lies in the insightful interpretation, linkage and both the application and refusal to apply the resulting principles. This obviously involves relationships. But since we are alive, relationships are not actually abstract in the senses we too easily imagine.

“It is as bizarre as it is absurd that if you image-search the term ‘Intelligence’ on Google — the result is endless images of machines and computers. These have nothing to do with intelligence, and are, instead, the fossils left by its disappearance into technologies that obliterate its origins and activities as organisms in Nature.”

How and »why the results of science are interpreted or enacted as technologies (cognitive and mechanical) has unimaginable impact because, frankly, our relationships with context are damaged, and thus, our relationships with purpose are often purely abstract.

Having nothing to do with either living reality or life on Earth… these purposes acquire a ‘demoniacal’ agency in human collectives, driving them like cattle into theaters of deadlier and deadlier fictions.

The history of life on Earth is an intelligent, intelligible structure that exists beyond our capacities to model adeptly. We arrive at a moment when the entirety of lived history forms something like a sum over possible intelligence. This sum is expressed fundamentally as the biosphere. Our ‘technologies’ exist largely in direct opposition to and ersatz ‘domination’ of these webs of transentient ‘structure’ as organism, relation and metarelational opportunity generation.

I have excellent reason and evidence to suspect our minds were evolved to directly participate with another order of intelligence, and that, additionally, many psychic forces can appear or attempt to emulate this (thus creating an actual pretender). Having lost and distorted the original senses and ideas that were crucial to these relationships, we lost them… and began to be dominated by the results of that loss.

One or two rungs beyond the initial positions on the developmental ladder, it is immediately apparent that the forms of nature are peculiar sums over various modes of intelligence as path.

These are so intimately related that the loss or destruction of the relationships amounts to the obliteration of unimaginable fields of advanced developmental acceleration. Our own minds are a sum over the paths taken not only by our genes, but by our minds. Our actions and purposes as environmental and relational participants.

Intelligence can be thought of as the actively self-advancing capacity to recognize (and then enact) useful or revolutionary paths in traversing structures. This involves intuition, pattern recognition, and metacognitive skills. There are many orders of this ability.

To ascend the ladder, you must reconstruct its basis, and the initial traps that held you back. All of these traps are highly authorized in human culture, but this jailbreak is more crucial to your own mind, spirit and development than any other I can imagine because… it doesn’t merely get you out of the trap… it gives you a glimpse of vast portions of the ladder itself.

And that ladder is at once you, the universe, and beyond all possible category.

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.

As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.

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Darin Stevenson

Cognitive Activist. Linguistics/Semantics researcher. Intelligence artist.