Intelligence & Human Systems
Intelligence is the flame from systems thinking’s tinder.
It is an emergent property present in some systems in action.
5 years ago I began enquiring into the nature of intelligence and in 2016 and 2017 gave lectures to Interdisciplinary students at UCL. Their essays were amazing and insightful
Last week in an episode of the New Agreements Podcast Ray Ison explained Systemic thinking to me in a way that helped me see that among other things I been trying to apply our notion of intelligence in a systemic way of thinking not just a systematic way.
The evidence that I have successfully managed to communicate the decoupling of intelligence from the human system is found in the feedback from the student essays finding incredible and flexible ways to apply this theory to any and all systems from political science, cancer and mathematics curriculum to name a few and seamlessly moving from system and environment being both larger and smaller than each other and the human level system yielding incredible intra-disciplinary insights which may not have arisen otherwise.
I think that connecting This superconcept of intelligence into a systems thinking framework will be a good place for it to find rooting in the Academy to find its place amongst its peers and provide a flow of those interested in creating their own projects with this tool as a key diagnostic or indeed helping to strengthen the human experience projects I am working on.
I wondered how I might apply this theory in my own expression and over the last 3 years living in the woods of Sussex two pieces of work won’t leave me. Creating both an individual model and a collective model for humans to optimise for both our quality of experience (singular) and likelihood of existing to having one (collective).
Collective — Money
Numbers are the alphabet of the modern world and Money is the language of governments and corporations. Money as a representation of relationship is arguably the deepest and farthest reaching social technology we have generated and thus what money we design and how we use it says a lot about us, we need it to behave with the same characteristic that has ensured our survival thus far… intelligence
Intelligence has 3 ingredients which must be present, Stimulus, metabolism and expression. There must be feedback dynamics between the system and environment and with this information available the order of complexity of the system can be seen in comparison to others.
Much like fire, if even one of material to burn, oxygen or heat are not present then fire will simply not emerge. If there is not water or the bank is not present then our idea of river disappears and there can be no river flow.
Unfortunately due to the fundamental divorce of money from nature and thus divorce from the great constraint of death which is ever present in the biosphere this feedback loop and dynamic has been cut off which prevents intelligence to emerge from the system of global money and our environment. This divorce means that GDP will always pull in a different direction from nature — measured in soil quality, atmospheric carbon ppm, biodiversity and nutritional content for human life. we need this connection back if we are to survive. We need a money system which grows with intelligence flow.
Given that humans have survived thus far through our collective intelligence giving rise to technology and story telling we must ensure that our money supply is designed with the highest degree of potential of intelligence to flow as a result of this systems (money) engagement with its environment — ( our biosphere.)
The money supply must lead to flow and growth, it must support life itself to flourish and create space for humans to do likewise. It must not block life from emerging. It must have sufficient complexity to handle the complexity of the biosphere and human needs. It must have a governance process which allows for feedback to be metabolised and expressed with agency.
We must clearly identify and examine the stimulus, metabolic engine and creative output from this engagement. One could start this enquiry with this draft structure and see if it holds up to scrutiny. probably best represented in overlapping circles.
Denizens <> Stimulus
CORCO <>Metabolism
Corco Creators <>Expression
In recent months we — many small groups of individuals have made great progress on the collective journey. Recently I have been able to connect our community of artists (corcocreators) with our community of governors (denizens) through developing a TREE backed economy of carbon. with a group from TELOS blockchain community (CORCO.)
CORCO is a new global community currency which with every TREE token created plants a diverse and natively grown tree with the aim to reforest our world with native woodland where mono-culture farming has been taking place. And at the same time support global connection of creators who make amazing products!
The denizens are now granting TREE tokens to corcocreators — the equivilent of $100–500 in TREE tokens for projects which carry at least one of the values of the corcovado community.
With the foundation of intelligence as a superconcept, finding its rooting as an emergent property within systems thinking and applied to money’s relationship to the biosphere we may have just created intelligence with money. Our work on the Individual with Flow Measurement as an alternative to the IQ paradigm may arise more naturally if we are able to make a bit more progress on the collective piece.
Thanks for reading!
*As I am pressing ‘Save Draft’ I receive in the very first submission from a Corco Creator for funds from the Denizens group. A three minute audio note from a friend and exceptional portrait photographer looking for support for creating 150 copies of a photo book during lockdown showing photos he has already taken with a focus on humanities proximity and relationship with nature aiming to inspire people to look at nature more intently and think about their impact.
