Episode 6.32: The kinds of intelligence anthills or viruses exhibit, and what we learn from it.

If we consider intelligence to be the same thing as the ability to solve problems, then different levels of intelligence are exhibited in the depth and breadth of the problems that different things can solve. The solutions need not be intentional in the sense of self-aware or self-knowing or even deliberately directed because they can be embodied in the structures, in the processes that perform them; what we might in modern terms called the programming that drives the procedures that solve the problems. But that in its turn raises the question of our own sense of separation from the wave function of the universe and how that enables us apparently to show intelligence of a kind that would not otherwise exist but for that sense of separation; for example, the kind of intelligence that over the course of many centuries has brought us to the point where we can manufacture the iPhone on which I am recording this podcast.