Excerpts from Introduction to Third Phase Transition: Solving The Anthropocene Crisis
On forming and feeling intelligence
“Progression of human knowledge could not have been possible, in the absence of reduction to rules and systems of thinking. Mathematics is the most exact, and also the most abstract, way of conceptualising cognizable patterns. It has led science to insights way beyond what could have been approached by pure sense perception and common sense. Formal logics is the most general way of assorting and organising the results of accumulated empirical experience. That does not mean, however, that the process of human intelligence would be reducible to these extremely successful and indispensable conventions.”
“Human emotions are bred out of love for cooperation. Human memories are re-formed and held selectively latent, by their relative affective loading in the brain and the rest of the body. Memories give echo, from the experiences in which they were once based, jumbled up with other experiences. Creative thinking is heavily dependent on the emotional life being formed within the social senses of human relations, and thereafter accumulated within the individual.
In fact, emotions seem to work à priori, as the pro-active moment in display of individual intelligence, while logical analysis seems to play the part of individual and potentially collective reconstruction after the event.
The formal side of intelligence, so to speak, ‘harvests’ emotional ‘yield’ from what had been ‘sown’ within human cooperative experiences. Emotions also seem to work á posteriori, in selecting what memories to keep, how to associate them, modify them, and to what degree of latency to hold them. The emancipated territory of emotions – dreaming – probably plays a leading part in such arrangement.
The fact that individual emotional life originates in human cooperation hardly needs restating here. And humans have been genetically adapted and socially predisposed to a rising degree, for feeding into its dynamic. Empathic behaviour activates the reward system in the brain of its agent, releasing a sense of pleasure. Creating and expanding human association is intelligent, whether in direct interaction or individually and indirectly, creating promoting artefacts. This is the very process of intelligence, and it feels nice in the body. And this insight works within the individual with the power of combined neurological reflex patterns – intuitively.”
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