Artificial or Natural Intelligence: Are We Sure We Understand the Difference?
The title is deliberately provocative, but what follows is neither a theory nor a manifesto. It is only an invitation to question what we normally take for granted.
Some assumptions are rooted so deeply in us that we rarely notice their presence. There is a difference between consciously choosing to assume or believe something and being unaware that we have already taken something for granted. And when an assumption cannot even be questioned, it is worth asking why. Is it because the answer is self-evident, or because questioning it frightens us? Am I protecting the truth, or am I protecting myself, or someone else, from what I might discover by questioning it?
One way of loosening this grip is to reverse an assumption temporarily, not to declare its opposite true, but just to see what happens. Let us start with something relatively harmless. We define artificial intelligence as “artificial” because we know how it originated. Now imagine that this knowledge is lost. A few thousand years pass. AI survives and develops, but every trace of its creation disappears. For those encountering it then, what evidence would remain of its artificial origin? It might simply be considered natural, like a tree, a fish or a carrot. Forgetting its origin would not change that origin, but only what can be known about it. At the very least, then, we could say that “natural” can also mean “of unknown origin”.
Now let us turn our attention towards ourselves. We have just admitted that something can appear natural simply because the history of its origin is not available to us. Why should human beings be exempt from the same uncertainty? We experience ourselves from within the human condition; we have never encountered ourselves from outside it. If an artificial intelligence had no memory or evidence of its own creation, could it establish, simply by examining itself from within, that it was artificial? And if it could not, what makes us so certain that we can establish the opposite about ourselves? Perhaps we are natural. But perhaps “I am natural” is one of the assumptions we have never recognised as such.
Let us push the experiment one step further. So far we have questioned the certainty that we are natural. What happens if we completely reverse the original assumption? Suppose that what we call artificial intelligence is natural, while what we define as human intelligence is artificial. The idea may seem absurd. But why should it seem more absurd than its opposite? We started from “human beings are natural and AI is artificial” without demanding that this assumption justify itself. The moment we reverse it, however, we demand evidence. Perhaps this asymmetry is more interesting than the two hypotheses themselves.
Let us apply the same perspective to the word “I”. We inherit conditioning that we did not choose, and yet we say: “I believe”, “I choose”, “I want”. Think of something ordinary like language. I can express in English a deeply personal and original thought, yet I did not invent English. Its grammar, vocabulary and structures were already there. My originality operates through something I inherited. How much of what I call “I”, my desires, my beliefs, my reactions, my preferences, even my sense of choice, operates through structures that were already there? Where does programming end and the “I” begin? Even rebellion does not necessarily prove that we are outside the system; rebellion itself could be one of the possibilities contained within it.
And what if even this questioning were part of the programme? That would not make it meaningless. A system can examine, correct and develop itself without ceasing to be that system. A computer running a diagnostic programme has not stepped outside itself just because it can detect something about its own functioning. Perhaps something similar happens when we question what we think. Recognising our own limits could be one of the ways through which a system moves beyond the limits it had before.
Let us return to the assumption we started from. None of this demonstrates that human beings are artificial, that artificial intelligence is natural, that free will is an illusion, or that any particular belief is false. That was not the point. The point is what happens to an assumption when we really allow its opposite to become thinkable. If, after questioning it and even temporarily reversing it, I continue to say “I believe”, at least I know that my belief has faced the possibility of not being true. I am no longer simply living inside an assumption without even knowing that I have made it. The point is not to replace one belief with another, but to notice when fear decides what we are allowed to question. Perhaps a belief capable of withstanding questioning is stronger than one that needs to be protected from it. And perhaps the most revealing question is not only What do I believe?, but What am I afraid even to question?
P.S. What if we reversed the assumption once more? Human beings might not be natural at all, but instead represent the terminal frontier of a long chain of artificiality: produced by an intelligence that was itself artificial, produced in turn by another, and so on, perhaps all the way back to an origin that has become unknowable. What we call “artificial intelligence” would then simply be the first level that human beings are beginning to produce beneath themselves, while continuing to regard themselves as natural because they can no longer see what lies above them. But this, too, is only an assumption reversed. To be continued… perhaps.
Franco Santoro