WE HUMANS have a fascination with minds that penetrate mysteries through sheer intellectual brilliance. Exceptional mental feats, we are convinced, must issue from exceptional individual minds. Albert Einstein’s insistence that success is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration just doesn’t resonate with our instincts.
One reason might be that by fixating on intellect, we further the idea that we stand apart from nature as the only creatures that orient themselves by deliberate reasoning. Yet each day brings more evidence to undermine this view. For example, modern psychological studies show that when people make good decisions it is often by “gut feeling” rather than conscious calculation. It seems our vaunted intelligence is not all it’s cracked up to be.
But perhaps we have the very notion of intelligence wrong. Scientists are beginning to see that the toughest problems – how to control complex traffic flows, for example – are better solved through the random evolution or self-organisation of artificial systems than by human reasoning (see “Law and disorder”). Such thinking appears to be moving towards the mainstream, as societies increasingly face complex problems that overwhelm the human mind. Engineers are finding that their task is not so much to find solutions as to design systems that can discover their own.
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As Socrates knew, the really intelligent know the limits of their own ability, an idea we seem to be relearning. You might say supporters of intelligent design have it backwards: the more we observe the complex workings of our universe, the more we must conclude that no single intelligence could have created them.
