Natural Intelligence

A 23-year-old lily resurrects after a full year with no growth, having been nibbled below the soil last season. What intelligence is embodied within, converting pattern into form, potential into life, water and minerals and sunlight into beauty? (Photo by the author, April 20, 2025.)

I have to say I am not much enamored with artificial intelligence. It simply does not excite me, in my current experience of life, embodied, on Earth.

AI can think, analyze, summarize. AI can write coherently. AI can create images and music and video. But let us consider, for a moment, what lies entirely outside the domain of artificial intelligence.

Hearts beating-touch-relationship-family-community-locking eyes-I see you-intimacy-lovemaking-orgasm-dance-long hugs-birthing-nursing-snuggling-dying-swimming-skiing-April showers-sun breaks-seeds germinating-buds bursting-nose in daphne-hands in soil-mourning dove songs bringing back a lifetime of memories-warblers-kinglets-mushroom hunting-dad’s pancake recipe-first June strawberries-cheesecake-friendship-trust-instinct-intuition-inspiration-imagination-dreams-singing-speaking-sharing-fingers on guitar strings- potlucks-bonfire smoke-hot springs-body pressed against ancient trees-moon rising-breathless on mountaintop-sweat stinging eyes-sleeping under stars-cottonwood scent on the breeze-every snowflake unique-love-grief-wonder-lightning-thunder-rainbows-cloud formations-open roads-riding the rails-waves breaking-tidepools-farmers markets-backpacking-swimming in mountain lakes-whippoorwills and owls and nighthawks-fireflies-planets-galaxies-northern lights-ancestry-culture-childhood-immersion-floating on rivers-skipping rocks-contemplation-presence.

Are we here, alive, to think and analyze and translate inputs to outputs and create products and content, or are we here for all of these other things?

From my perspective, AI is only a revolution, a game-changer, an existential dilemma if we are committed to a paradigm of mind, to the idea that what we think defines us. “I think, therefore I am”, in the famous words of Rene Descartes. If our thinking defines us, and now machines can increasingly out-think us, we fear they are becoming more than while we are becoming less than. And yet, we can do far more than think. We perceive, we experience, we feel. And all of these are integral parts of our is-ness, our being, our existence.

In my life path, I spent twenty-five years primarily within an experience of mind, my identity tightly interwoven with my ability to perform, to achieve, to write dry scientific prose, to be validated by other minds. I remember, painfully, when it began in adolescence. In many ways, the Dendroica Project has been a chronicle of my journey out of mind-identity, back into grounding in experience, in intuition, in immersion and interconnection.

Our entire evolved and living planet is intelligent. Our bodies are intelligent. Our bodies know, without thinking, how to develop and maintain immunity, how to heal wounds, how to grow new bodies inside, how to shift heart rate and blood chemistry and hormone balance in real time. Thinking makes humans different, perhaps, but whether it has made us more intelligent is open to debate. Railroads, airplanes, sterile surgery, electricity – maybe so? Capitalism, clearcutting, strip mining, caste systems, homelessness, pollution – maybe not? What does machine-thinking mean for our intelligence, our wisdom, our evolution? I think it depends on how we use it.

For the most part, we no longer employ humans solely as muscles – pounding railroad spikes, digging ditches, carrying logs. I consider this an improvement. Thanks to AI, it seems probable that we will soon no longer employ humans solely as language processors or analysts – transcribing, translating, coding medical expenses, writing legal briefs, sitting day after day in cubicles. None of these jobs are especially creative or soul-fulfilling, and if we can ever create an alternative to our extractive economic system that demands full employment for survival, this substitution could feel freeing, opening time and space for all of these other things, our true reasons for exploring this embodied experience.

I feel differently about AI in art, in writing, in music, in creation.

We all have, within ourselves, a “large language model”. It is the collective of our experiences, our conversations, everything we have read and watched and listened to. When we are inspired to create, we create from within that, and sometimes from beyond it. Sometimes melodies simply drop into our consciousness from somewhere, or phrases, or concepts, or images. That is part of the great mystery of embodiment, the way that our experiences and memories and passions are unique and yet we can tap into a larger current, a collective unfolding, an interweaving.

If we relegate ourselves to the role of prompter and editor, allowing AI to do the creation, we lose something important. We lose the moment of choice: how exactly do I want to say this? What words or phrases are resonating within me at this moment, waiting to be expressed? It is no longer our creation. We become, in a sense, passive, allowing our own discernment and will in crafting each element to atrophy. And as we lose something, so too does something else slip in. An un-ensouled, un-embodied mind. A creator with no true emotions, no memories of childhood, no experiences of running barefoot in summer rains, no humanity, no unique experience of self, no innate connection to a greater whole. We do not truly understand how these machine-minds work. We train them to sift through the sum total of past human creativity and give us what we want. And as we accept their output as our own creation, the weaving of the creative pattern shifts in subtle ways: toward sameness rather than uniqueness, repetition rather than innovation, bland comfort rather than spontaneous surprise, reinforcement rather than shift.

If AI can take root in art and music and literature, it is perhaps only because all of these have already gone too far down the road of becoming products. For buyers: pretty pictures on our wall, pleasant sounds in the background, words that distract us or entertain us or give us the feelings we would like to feel. For creators: money in the bank, ratings, reviews, followers, recognition. As we are inundated with a proliferation of AI creations – as art “products” lose their value – perhaps we will begin to rediscover art as conversation. Unique human moments, experiences, perspectives, insights expressed in word and sound and form. Chosen into our lives based on our love for their creators and the stories of their creation. A restoration of relational reverence.

AI is a polarizing topic, and as with most polarizations I find myself feeling both-and more than either-or. I believe in denaturing the duality between “natural” and “artificial.” I see AI as a tool that can eliminate tedious work, that can quickly compare and summarize research, and that can perhaps help us to see our shared reality and experience across divides of culture and ideology and language, so long as we do not allow it to hide our humanity or supplant our creativity. I would encourage all of us to get out of our minds, to open to natural intelligence: the wisdom within our bodies, our intuitive and innate ways of knowing, our sensate, sensual experience of presence on Earth, our natural gravitation toward that which we love.

Perhaps by inundating us with derivative and ultimately meaningless thought, AI will help us to realize that thinking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that there is far more to life as embodied beings if we can relax the preeminence of the analytical mind. And that would be a very good thing, from my perspective.