Vitalist/BAP/Nietzsche Metaphysics Question

BAP - drawing from Nietzsche et al., but perhaps more explicitly - discusses an “innate intelligence” in nature. Some kind of conscious (or at least intentional) entity with its own ends and purposes.

The way he phrases all this, it makes me think it’s almost a - in principle at least - testable claim about biology/scientific material reality. Yet, it also seems like vitalist metaphysics is in conflict with scientific material reality as we know it/grew up in the culture of.

So my question is:

In what sense do you consider this idea of an “innate intelligence” real and testable? If it’s not(/or if it is tbh), then what is it to you?

"All great scientific discoveries, supposedly the great works of “reason,” are in fact the result of intuitions and sudden grasp of ideas. And all such sudden grasp and reaching is based on what, in other circumstances, would be called a kind of religious intoxication: it depends on a state of the mind where the perceiving part of the intellect is absolutely focused, limpid, yet driven by the most relentless energy, an energy to penetrate. Direct perception is already “intellectualized” and in fact much closer to the innate “intelligence” of things than cerebral syllogisms. No scientist worth anything has ever felt pride at using algorithms or trial-and-error to solve a problem. Yes, feminists are right that “science” is patriarchal in this sense, that it is a “rape” of nature. Real scientists like Galois are monsters of will, and the preponderance of men in the hard sciences is explained by this orientation of character, as also by the fact that the minds of men more than of women are capable of sustained focus on one thing (women are better at multitasking). There are women who were great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians.."

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CTRL F for innate, only 4 hits. This was the only one about intelligence. The above means that sudden leaps in knowledge are perceived and felt while 'cerebral syllogisms' are like AI autocomplete, stringing words together. It looks something like what Thomas Sowell would call academic writing and the way women think and speak. I've felt Chomsky and Turing to be like this, but Shannon less so. Humans have varying levels of compression in their words; inadequate compression and perception leads to word salad and faulty abstractions.

Abstractions are words, used to represent phenomena, such as Chomsky's 'innate grammar'. I have no idea what 'vitalist' or 'vitalist metaphysics' or 'scientific material reality' really mean in this case. The abstractions you're using I'm not familiar with.
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"As surely as the world is round (Columbus, 1492), and as surely as what goes up must come down (Newton, 1687), when Ronald Reagan was elected President (Cronkite, 1980) and then re-elected (Rather, 1984), it signaled a change in the political climate (Brinkley, 1980–88). Since then, we have seen exploitation (Marx, 1867) and sexism (Steinem, 1981) on the rise"

"Transnationalization further fragmented the industrial sector. If the dominant position of immigrant enterprises is held to have reduced the political impact of an expanding industrial entrepreneurate, the arrival of multinational corporations possibly neutralized the consolidation of sectoral homogeneity anticipated in the demise of the artisanate"

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Intelligence is an adaptive response to stimuli. Look at that. I'm defining the terms of this conversation itself.

Do elephants and pigeons change their behavior based on human behavior? Yes. Does the Earth itself? I doubt it outside of physics, but if it did it'd be on a timescale imperceptible to us.

Is there an innate behavior to humans? Yes. If you were a certain height, you would design buildings proportionally to yourself. If you were dark-skinned, you might spend more time in the sun.

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Do some people have innate behavior while other people are just templates for that behavior? Yes.

Is it real? Yes. I can feel it. Do I need to test it? I'm not sure testing it helps for anyone who can't perceive it.

You meet someone and you talk to them. Either they

get it,
don't get it and never will,
will understand in time,

or they pretend not to.

>>3616
His read on evolution, I think, is more to the point when we're talking about innate intelligence. If I remember correctly, it's an extended bit on a certain kind of praying mantis that knows to attack the larval stage of its enemies, even without having seen this enemy in the wild before.

In general, maybe you can chalk this up to certain pre-programmed impulses in the neural structure of a mantis's brain, but I think what BAP is trying to talk about is counter to this view.

For me, the central claim of BAP's view is that evolution does not act as a random process facilitating the expansion of both genes and organisms that are more mathematically likely to reproduce and sustain themselves. He seems to argue that there is some kind of innate "drive" towards beauty or the expansion of power or vitality that supervenes on the basic drives for survival and reproduction.

This could be testable by an advanced look both at the neuromorphology of certain species, and its effect on their evolutionary fitness, as well as perhaps by some mathematical modeling of survival and reproduction at different trophic levels. Of course, science in this complex of an environment looking for so subtle an effect would be very, very, very difficult to carry out, and probably require some sort of superintelligent supercomputer just to do all of the tracking and modeling. Nonetheless, as a testable hypothesis, I think it counts as science in the strong sense, and insofar as it implies a certain orientation innate to biological life and consciousness, it's certainly in the region of metaphysics.

]>>3617
One can make certain Wittgensteinian arguments about what words mean and the boundaries of scientific language, etc., etc., but in this case, I'm not sure that that's appropriate. The language, although rhetorical, seems sufficient to point out certain interesting features of the world, and reducing this pointing out to simply rhetorical flourishes seems inappropriate to me. Obviously, one ought to keep in mind the nebulosity inherent in words and conceptual frameworks when dealing with difficult questions like Dr. Pervert's view on nature, but that's no reason to throw those conceptual frameworks out. Vitalist, vitalist metaphysics, and scientific material reality are all reasonably intelligible terms if one is familiar with the intellectual milieu of the posters on this particular website and the kinds of discussions within which they engage.

You quote the perspectives of a certain African-American pop philosopher on the use of language in academia, but at least when it comes to the second example, I think this says more about said African-American's inability to deal with technical language than it says anything about the language itself of academia. If one cannot understand the word "transnationalization" and use it in a sentence, perhaps one ought not to aspire to any academic position.

>>3616
As one of the harder "materialists" around here, the vitalists are right there is an innate intelligence in nature. Start with Darwin: the results of the mutation-selection organism-design process that we call evolution look pretty intelligent. We can deny that it's "really intelligent", but flip that around instead: our minds are doing a similar inductive search for functional possibility. Minds also include a bunch of forward-looking teleological visualization, reasoning, etc but evolution includes whole ecosystems of striving life so who is to say it has to be simple. It's similar at least, if not the same underlying idea. If we accept this analogy between what evolution is doing and what the mind is doing, then there is indeed "an innate intelligence in nature" which is the source of all life.

The main difference between materialism (or "physicalism" to rescue the view from the more absurd reductions) and vitalism is just aesthetic. The materialists see it as a matter of "just" mechanical computation, random chance, meaningless selection, etc. It's an aesthetic atheism that tries to strip all meaning, spirit, and structure out of it. Whereas the vitalists infuse the whole thing with life, intent, meaning, spirituality, etc. Do they even disagree about actual observables? Here:

The vitalists see intention, intelligence, consciousness, etc as being more fundamental, having more of its own telos that doesn't just come from evolutionary micromanagement. The more extreme materialists deny even a unified phenomenon, seeing the mind as a bag of "cognitive modules", just "executing adaptations", with intelligence and consciousness being a meaningless illusion over mechanical reflex. This is "evolutionary psychology" vs intelligence being a first class natural phenomenon in its own right. The latter is much more plausible in my view. Intelligence is like a wave or a lipid sphere: it has its own natural existence independent of its use by organisms. It is this independent physical phenomenon of intelligence that is discovered and harnessed by life (really just another level of itself).

So I'd put the testability on vitalist claims like this: general intelligence is simple, non-verbal, evolutionarily extremely early, pervasive in all life. The mind is mostly its own phenomenon with its own dynamics, with evolutionary psychology and cognitive biases dissolving on serious skeptical replication attempts. Animals and even microorganisms are capable of much more agency and problem-solving than evpsych people and abrahamics give them credit for. The "natural" way of talking about minds is not in terms of mechanisms (which will turn out to be unenlightening the way voltage levels are unenlightening in computer science), but in terms of beliefs, intentions, perception, action, feeling, which is to say "from the inside". Finally, AGI will not be about scale.

Socially speaking, this won't be decided empirically. It's a matter of Kuhn's "paradigms". In particular, entire branches of philosophy, theology, ethics, and even ethnic politics are caught up in this question. It will be possible for a motivated incumbent to deny the evidence and continue with their epicycles. It's the next big copernican revolution.