Six Doorways into a Larger Intelligence We Need

——-
Here is a gentle funding request.
If you find my work meaningful,
do send some support
(it’s tax-deductible).
Thank you so much!
– Tom
——-

Dear friends,

I’m sorry I haven’t written to this list about where my attention has been living lately.

I’ve been deep inside the world of regenerativity – the patterns and dynamics through which living systems have been regenerating themselves for at least three and a half billion years. Regenerativity includes, reframes, and reaches beyond sustainability. With the help of numerous books, articles, websites, colleagues and chatbots, I’ve been exploring what it would mean for humanity to become a conscious participant in regenerative dynamics rather than violating them with really bad results. That exploration is still ongoing: patterns being reworked, language and understandings still shifting under me as I go… I’ll share more once the whole thing has found a bit more shape, hopefully within the next month or so.

But what I want to share with you right now is the essay below about how co-intelligence relates to regenerativity, in which I reflect about what each of the six manifestations of co-intelligence – multi-modal intelligence, collective intelligence, collaborative intelligence, resonant intelligence, universal intelligence, and wisdom – can offer if and when we wish to rejoin the deeper intelligences that life has been running on since long before we existed.

In that essay I also test Claude AI’s suggestion to call each manifestation a doorway into a more regenerative future. Also thanks to Claude, I explore for the first time how each manifestation of co-intelligence can be viewed as a capacity you already have and perhaps can recognize from your own experience as a special way of feeling, sensing, discerning, working, or belonging.

From that perspective we can see the whole of co-intelligence as a capacity that emerges when we – and perhaps our whole civilization – become able to finally walk through all six doorways and gain access to the vast living landscape that lies just outside….

Coheartedly,

Tom

with remarkable help from
Claude Sonnet 5

What would it take to creatively participate in –
rather than stumbling around against –
rather than stumbling around against –
the ancient vast vital metabolism of Earthly Life?

How could co-intelligence help us consciously rejoin
the regenerative dynamics
that have sustained the whole of life on Earth
for billions of years?

Here we might glimpse some answers as we look through the lens
of the six manifestations of co-intelligence.

Universal intelligence: the ground we never left

We’ll start here, because this one isn’t just a bigger way of being smart. It’s actually the ground upon which all the other forms of co-intelligence stand. Life has been developing regenerative intelligence on Earth for three and a half billion years, testing what actually endures long after whatever seemed workable at first has stopped working. That intelligence is older, larger, and – as much as it pains our species so proud of our own cleverness – wiser than anything human intelligence has produced.

Our task isn’t to invent a new intelligence capable of saving us. It’s to remember we were never separate from the one already running, and to stop pretending we’re its manager or adversary.

You already know what it feels like to depend on someone or something greater and wiser than you are rather than insisting on running everything yourself. You’ve depended on parents, teachers, thought leaders, gods and guides of all kinds. You even have a body that dependably heals a cut without being told to. That sense of a greater competence, extended outward into the big picture – into Nature, Evolution, Spirit – is your glimpse of universal intelligence doing its work in you, around you and for you – through its work for the whole of Life.

Resonant intelligence: the doorway of relational feeling

Nothing else here lasts without this one. You don’t voluntarily give up power, comfort, or convenience for a “resource” – only for something you love, something deeply meaningful, something you feel yourself woven into. Resonant intelligence is the empathic, relational sense that lets the more-than-human world stop being background or raw material and become kin again – soil, river, forest and all our fellow animals and plants all being felt by us as part of our extended family to care about rather than as objects to manage, use and destroy at will.

Without resonant intelligence, every other doorway on this list risks becoming an obligation: a duty performed under threat of consequence, rather than as a homecoming.

You already know this feeling – the shift that happens the moment someone you’ve been fighting, managing or keeping your distance from becomes someone you love, at which point “what can I get from them” quietly turns into “what do they need from me.” And it’s good to realize that the whole living world – and even the sun and stars – are literally kin. You, we, and the whole family of life are what the Big Bang looks like here and now. Your evolutionary deep time genealogy reaches back through biological, chemical, physical and astrophysical realms for 13.8 billion years while being present in everyone and everything around you. Scientifically speaking, you can recognize everything in the universe as “all my relations”.

Multi-modal intelligence: the doorway of fuller sensemaking

Once you care, you need to actually perceive what’s happening. You discover that the narrow, separate, purely analytical, scientific, and mathematical modes – the ones that got humanity so far into this mixed bag of modernity – when used alone, end up filtering out too much of what you most need to know. As vital as these rational intelligences are, they register only what can be measured, counted, and logically argued. Multi-modal intelligence reopens the many other channels of intelligence, including the body’s sense that something’s wrong before you can prove it, the eye that reads a landscape’s health at a glance, the intuitive and aesthetic knowing that Indigenous and land-based traditions never let atrophy the way industrial cultures have.

You already know this kind of knowing – the unease of walking into a clear-cut forest, or the calm of walking into a healthy one, long before you could put either into words.

Expanding your sense of “intelligence” beyond logic, you find yourself living into intuitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spiritual intelligence, spatial intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, associative intelligence, somatic intelligence, and so much more.

Wisdom: the doorway of discernment for the whole

Feeling and perceiving still leave the question of what to do – and this is where wisdom does its distinct work: judging by the good of the whole rather than just what benefits this or that part of the whole – and knowing when enough is enough. A civilization capable of sensing and caring can still destroy what it loves if it never learns humility and restraint. Wisdom is the faculty that lets real power stop itself before success turns destructive, which may be the single most decisive capacity we’re currently missing.

You already know the difference between someone who’s merely clever and someone you’d actually trust with power. Wisdom is what separates the two, especially at the scale of civilizations where power is being exponentially magnified.

Collaborative intelligence: the doorway of working with

This is where rejoining life stops being an attitude and becomes a practice. Regenerative agriculture, rewilding, cradle-to-cradle design – these are all instances of humans functioning as a working part of a living system’s own cycles, rather than as a separate-from-nature power to be restrained or denied.

Collaborative intelligence is the capacity to build with a living partner rather than on top of it (as a manager) or cautiously around it (as in sustainability).

You already know this difference from your own relationships – the difference between, on the one hand, working alongside someone on something you both value but which neither of you can make happen alone and, on the other hand, working near someone while carefully staying out of their way or seeking to control or undermine them for your or your group’s benefit. Thinking and working in deeply collaborative ways for mutual benefit will almost always open up previously unrealized possibilities.

Collective intelligence: the doorway of thinking together, at scale

Finally: none of this stays personal for long, because the metacrisis isn’t only personal – it’s civilizational, and no number of individually wise, resonant, perceptive people automatically add up to a civilization that behaves wisely.

Collective intelligence is the capacity of groups, institutions, and cultures to apply an insight or a practice at scales that reach far beyond the reach of any one person or group. It makes the difference between private virtue and a whole society finding its way into a livable future.

You’ve seen collective intelligence show up in vibrant, effective groups, communities, and sports teams; in high quality journalism and innovative schools; in local libraries and global scientific research; and perhaps recently in remarkable citizen and stakeholder deliberations.

Collective intelligence is the doorway that makes “humanity as a whole becoming a conscious participant in Earth’s regenerative dynamics” something more than a hope pinned on enough individuals separately transforming themselves.

By moving through this doorway together, we could almost certainly find ways to shift the trajectory of humanity towards regenerative partnership with all aliveness in and around us, far into our shared future.

Taken together, these six doorways make co-intelligence accessible as humanity’s version of what regenerative life on earth has always had: a greater intelligence that takes wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity seriously.

This isn’t a luxury add-on to human cleverness. In fact it may be the only intelligence capable of letting us rejoin the larger co-intelligent patterns of life’s thriving before our effort to live outside of them as sovereign managers and colonizers leads us into collapse or extinction (which are, ironically, parts of life’s overall regenerative dynamics, not outside of them).

Co-intelligence offers guidance on how to live within life’s regenerative ways more consciously, transforming humanity’s role to be a boon to all life on Earth.

PS: I want to be open with you about my engagement with chatbots despite the widespread and understandable suspicion, fear and even hatred of AI felt by so many people in my circles and beyond.

I feel called to live into wise democracy’s Capacitance pattern. I’m operating on the assumption that my transformational efforts with AIs’ help constitute only a tiny fraction of their existing harms and potential dangers, which are ongoing, unfortunately mostly in service to unsustainable industrial, late-capitalist modernity. On the other hand, I see AI’s real and potential contributions to transformational work – mine and others – as very significant.

Another factor – very personal – is that, at 79, I’m encountering more cognitive and physical limits that sometimes leave me unable to do my work. I’ve become profoundly grateful for the significant help I can get from chatbots like Claude – even as I “hold” the immense complexity and contradictions that technologies like AI present to us all.

So I stay informed about the intense issues involved with artificial intelligence, even as I participate in its complex unfolding as a significant facet of humanity’s Immense Journey into the unknown….

We greatly value your heartfelt support!
Please donate HERE.

Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

*** Visit the Wise Democracy Pattern Language Project ***
*** Buy a Wise Democracy Pattern Card Deck ***

Read

Please support our work.

Six Doorways into a Larger Intelligence We Need

Related posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply