On the Pursuit of Intelligence
This morning I found myself reaching a familiar point. I wanted to ask better questions about intelligence, but before I could move any further I realised I had become stuck on something much more fundamental.
What exactly was I trying to understand?
At first I assumed I needed a definition of intelligence. Instead, I found myself wondering whether I first needed a definition of the direction I was taking. Was I asking about intelligence as something that exists independently in the world? Or was I asking about the way we use the word itself? The more I thought about it, the less convinced I became that these could be cleanly separated.
If intelligence is a word we use to coordinate social expectations, then questioning the language is also questioning the thing. There may not be an intelligence waiting to be discovered beneath the word. There may only be the practices, assumptions and institutions that have grown around it. That does not mean the distinction is useless. Quite the opposite. It becomes a useful heuristic for attention.
Some days I may notice how the word functions in conversation. Other days I may ask whether the concept refers to something stable beyond language. I no longer feel the need to resolve that tension before continuing. The suspicion itself has become part of the practice.
My thinking has never been linear. I rarely move from Question A to Answer B. Instead I circle around an idea, approaching it repeatedly until something begins to reveal itself from the intersections. So I have started keeping a scrapbook alongside this project. Eventually I’ll add photographs of its pages here. It is untidy, full of sketches, arrows, thoughts and disconnected observations. It feels much closer to how my mind actually works than a polished notebook ever could.
The structure of this project is changing too. Rather than treating each week as a sequence of answers, I want it to become a sequence of returns. Every entry approaches the same problem from a different direction before looping back again.
One day I might ask what assumptions are embedded in AI policy when we decide what should be regulated.
Another day I might ask what we are actually responding to when a language model feels intelligent.
Another might explore the work performed by the word intelligence itself, or what disappears when we forget the body, or what contemporary machine learning systems are actually doing beneath the interface.
If there is a goal, it is not to arrive at a single definition of intelligence. It is to become more attentive to the assumptions that quietly shape how we recognise it, measure it, regulate it and ultimately pursue it.
Till next time.
Reita
