Intelligence is Overrated. Embrace Consciousness.
Reject modernity, return to monke.
I stood last month at an overlook of Lake Washington, at the precipice of some bougie homes and a bus route, and just tried to imbibe as much as I could the dusky early twilight and an outrageous view of Mt. Rainier. In short winter days, Seattle sometimes has this quaint ski town vibe that’s down to the immense amount of greenery that is everywhere under a layer of gorgeous mountains. This is a common walking route, but I was lucky then to be alone and had some time to idle in silence.
Somewhere within that silence, though, was a vague and persistent hum of the I-90 bridge which slowly crept up in my brain and became deafening. It triggered this strange feeling intertwined with a very dusty memory of when we first moved to the US and lived in a small 1 bedroom apartment in Honolulu next to the H-1 freeway. Some of my earliest memories of America, it turns out, are actually not being able to sleep because of how loud the night time was and amazement at how close these cars seemed to come and go.
Obviously, as happens, over time we got used to it, and my brain stopped registering the sound. But then we moved somewhere, and somewhere else again, and again. And now some 25 years later, having not lived next to a freeway for so long, the sound registered! It came with some tunneling claws that pulled out this early and fragile memory I hadn’t experienced in so long. All of this happened instantly, and I had this overwhelm of emotion that I couldn’t fully explain or even understand.
I’ve been trying to remember and catalog moments like this over the last two years, where something inexplicable takes hold of my brain and body. They stand out to me because they represent this felt dichotomy of thinking and feeling, of intelligence and consciousness.
I ran into this delineation initially while reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus, books that Barack Obama, Bill Gates and I recommend. Over the course of the two books (published in 2015!), Harari builds a compelling case that in some near future AI will readily replace our intelligence, but it will not readily replace our consciousness.
The question we are left with is - does that make our consciousness more or less valuable?
The big idea - we should think of our intelligence and our consciousness as two related, but distinct, things. We should nurture and grow both of these things (but consciousness is like…really hard!)
Intelligentsia? More like intelligence - see ya!
My instinct here is that we actually focus on intelligence a LOT, and so to discuss intelligence beyond the goal of essentially making a bunch of stipulations isn’t that interesting. So let me bullet out a bunch of things that I think are fairly reasonable:
Definitionally, intelligence is roughly the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to then produce some desired outcome via reasoning, problem solving and executing
In our information-dense society we value intelligence a lot because our economies center around articulating and achieving clear, desired outcomes
This same value function is why people have spent billions to generate AI that can replace the articulating and achieving of clear outcomes that people can do, so that the AI creators can make money from those activities instead
In modern times, the economic component of our society has become the most prominent and overshadowed other parts of a traditional society (e.g. civic, political, spiritual, etc.)
See: decline of civic associations, #CREAM, rise of the LGTB (let’s get this bread) movement, Late Stage Capitalism, etc.
Because intelligence is so overtly valued, there is a lot of established thinking on types of intelligences and many different frameworks, with Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences (see wiki here) being a good example
All of which is to say, I won’t delve deeply into it here. Intelligence is obviously very important, but it is not the only thing that is important. Nevertheless, if you want to get deeper into it, start at that wiki link - it’s an interesting idea!
But what the heck is consciousness?
Here too, let’s ground on a definition for the purpose of the exercise - I’m thinking of consciousness as the ability to feel and be aware of both internal and external happenings.
So what is it, actually? I don’t know. That’s the most concise and accurate answer.
I haven’t spent enough time thinking about it, and having asked around, I feel confident most people haven’t either.
There are some ways to start.
One is soft vs hard consciousness. This comes from the philosopher David Chalmers. The “soft problem” or “easy problem” of defining consciousness is to see it as the ability to sense and react to stimuli. This at least sets us up to abstract away the low hanging fruit that can be tied to our physical attributes. “This structure gives rise to this function” is a simple understanding of how consciousness works. Soft consciousness is the ability to react to smell, recoil from touch, etc.
This is in contrast to the “hard problem” of consciousness which, to put it politely, is the stuff nobody can explain still. That’s the one we’re concerned with. Get ready for a great scrabble word because it’s time to talk about qualia. Nobody can agree on what it is, but it’s provocative, gets the people going - literally.
Qualia is a fun concept that can roughly be summarized as something you feel beyond the physical property of experience. Say you step out into a brilliant sunny day in the middle of a winter. You see the blue sky, but you feel the brilliance of the sky in a way that is contextual, individual and ultimately ineffable - you have to feel it to fully know it.
As a quick aside, maybe you read The Giver in middle school? For some reason there is a passage in that book that has stayed with me for decades where Jonas first sees an apple as both the same and yet different. Then you, the reader, come to find out that in fact he is beginning to see color, and that his world by default doesn’t have color! This blew my mind when I first read it, and it was so gratifying to have that play back and realize OH! He discovered qualia!
There is also a fun mind bending rabbit hole you can go down in thinking about how none of us see colors exactly the same.
Now it’s no secret that the subtext of what we do here is try to understand things about the world in a way that feels revelatory, and then you know, use it to try to live a better life. Or, put another way, explore and exploit mental frameworks. Learn about styles of authority, or types of happiness, so we can then make sure we build out these specific muscles - that kind of stuff.
But that function (maybe appropriately!) doesn’t feel applicable here?
This xkcd panel is one of the all time greats, and whatever powerful nostalgia it elicits for nerdy millenials is definitely qualia.
I don’t think there is a way to framework and then curate facets of consciousness. Cultivate qualia? Practice theory of mind? Do reps of subjective experience? How??
A consciousness bucket list?
But since I am uh…pathologically achievement oriented?... I’ve been trying to build out my understanding in a more first-principles manner. Maybe this builds into some higher order understanding, or maybe this just ends up being a bucket list exercise (inspired in part by one of my all time favorite articles, The Moral Bucket List, from a, let’s say, often frustrating author.)
But like I said, in the last few years, I’ve been trying to really internalize moments that feel larger than life, that elicit unexpected emotion and sensation for reasons I can’t easily explain.
I’ve made some headway in my understanding.
The freeway triggered in me a sense of transformation, a thing I’m starting to recognize as a core part of what makes me vibrate at a resonant frequency. I can reason why, of course, given personal history and demographics, but it’s very different to feel it, to have it circulating in my awareness that my family’s lives used to be different and we’ve had the chance to grow in all the ways that we have is just…👨🏾🍳👌🏾💋
To witness others in their moments of transformation has been persistently one of my great joys, and the most meaningful work I’ve maybe ever done was as a volunteer helping people chart their own path towards transformation that still threatens to make me want to risk it all some days.
Another thematic one here is numinosity, which for me is tied most closely with nature. There are (mercifully many) days here when The Mountain is Out that we all, as a city, just beam. Recently, during one of the other (also many!) days of the Long Drizzle, I was in a dragonboat in the middle of Lake Washington, noticing that when droplets hit the lake, they bounce back up and form perfect evanescent spheres before disappearing into vastness again. It was a divine thing to witness, and it just made me…!!!!
The third one is more illegible, and I’m still figuring out what it is, but I think it’s convergence? I have sometimes been a bystander, existing, when my attention is drawn to something nearby, alongside other people. Then, when we all hone into this thing, and move in synchronicity, the feeling of being a fluid entity in a directed wave of people just makes my hair stand on its end. This amazingly happened in those 2 magical weeks when Pokemon Go was released and everyone in New York City was walking around looking for something rare, but I’ve recognized it elsewhen at things like street performances, or hackathons when someone figures something out and we hustle over to their monitor.
As for how to leverage this understanding - I also don’t really know. There is always the easy answer of trying to cultivate awareness through mindfulness and meditation? Only thing I’ll mention here is that the in the very rich Ezra Klein podcast with Alison Gopnik that I’ve delved into before, they briefly discuss that there are still types of meditation, and we have, of course, prized the type that really bolsters our intelligence:
“There's a real dominance of the vipassana style concentration meditation, single point meditations. Just watch the breath. Just think about the breath right at the edge of the nostril. And without taking anything away from that tradition, it made me wonder if one reason that has become so dominant in America, and particularly in Northern California, is because it’s a very good match for the kind of concentration in consciousness that our economy is consciously trying to develop in us, this get things done, be very focused, don’t ruminate too much, like a neoliberal form of consciousness.”
I’ve attended a few of these retreats, including a 10 day one, so I’m very guilty of this, and I suppose I’m trying to balance things out.
An ask for you: what makes you go?
Because qualia is personal, I’m desperate to know what these moments are like for you. What are your things that make you feel? When was a time recently when you felt unexpectedly overcome with a bout of consciousness that made itself clear to you that it was beyond analysis?
Are you doing anything to expand your consciousness?
Call me, text me, comment on the post, reply to this email, I don’t care. But I am really curious.
As always here is a thematic QR code for this post if you want to share it, or just enjoy the fun future we live in :)
