How Intelligence Arises from Nature, One Layer at a Time

The Trouble with Definitions

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” — Lao Tzu

As a mathematician, I’ve long sought clean definitions. Much of my work involves building precise frameworks — starting by defining key concepts, isolating the core of a problem, formalizing it, and tracing its implications to their logical end.

Yet over time, I’ve come to see not just the limits of definitions, but their quiet distortions—the way they can flatten nuance in the name of clarity. The richness of a living idea gets traded for the sterile comfort of formal neatness. Sometimes, defining isn’t just clarifying — it’s an act of power: shaping perception, and granting authority to the one who defines.

Few ideas reveal this tension more vividly than intelligence. We talk about it as if we know what it is — a score, a skill, a spark. But what is it, really? And can something so dynamic ever be pinned down?

I think of intelligence not as a fixed trait, but as an experience — not unlike beauty — arising in context, felt through interaction.

So while we try to define intelligence — because we must — to witness it, to live with it, or to build systems that move with it, we need something else: humility. An attention to context. A willingness to recognize that intelligence, like beauty, is often messy, partial, plural, heuristic, and still astonishingly effective.

But even our capacity to see intelligence is shaped by history. In The Myth of Superintelligence, I argued that our attempts to define intelligence are never neutral. They reflect what we choose to measure, optimize, and reward. This essay is not a repetition of that critique. It is a step back. A shift in lens. It asks not what intelligence is, but when and how it arises—not as a trait, but as something unfolding across time, scale, and structure.

Because the power to define has always been the power to exclude. Colonial systems didn’t just extract labor and land—they imposed ways of seeing. In doing so, they dismissed the intelligence embedded in other ways of knowing, reframing rich knowledge traditions as myth or superstition. These distortions still echo in how we define and measure intelligence today. African polyrhythms were labeled primitive. Classical Indian music was exoticized or ignored. Indigenous knowledge systems—deeply attuned to land, season, and cycle—were reduced to folklore. Intelligence was there. But the lens refused to see it.

This is why any inquiry into intelligence must also be an inquiry into perspective. Definitions don’t just clarify. They constrain. They shape not only what we see, but what we believe intelligence can be.

This series is an attempt to widen the lens—to trace intelligence not as a fixed trait, but as a dynamic unfolding across layers of complexity. We begin with the silent elegance of physical systems, where matter flows under law, solving problems through coherence and constraint. From there, we enter the domain of evolution, where life adapts through variation and feedback, accumulating structure over time. We then move to the responsive intelligence of behavior—organisms without minds that nonetheless solve, coordinate, and learn through interaction.

But these are just the foundations. In the second half, we abstract upward: tracing how intelligence evolves the ability to frame problems, to reflect on and revise its own rules, and finally, to orient itself—to choose what matters. This is where intelligence becomes recursive, contextual, and ultimately, meaningful. Not just a solver of problems, but a seeker of value.

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By nisheethvishnoi

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