The quantum nature of intelligence

As far as we know, all intelligence is contained within brains. Some of those brains belong to humans, others belong to dogs or other species. The important point is that we have no evidence that there is any actual intelligence in our Universe outside of the brains of living beings.

I think of this when I see a crowd of people walking around, and I also see around them the manifestation of human intelligence in the form of human made things, be they cars, buildings, clothing, books or smart phones. All of these objects are the result of collective human thought, yet none of those objects possesses any actual intelligence — only brains possess intelligence.

This in turn makes me think of quantum theory. For most of human history, the Universe was thought to be continuous. Solids and fluids were believed to be undifferentiated masses of homogeneous stuff.

Then we learned that matter actually consists of little components called molecules, which are built from still smaller components called atoms. Still later we learned that those atoms are themselves comprised of still smaller particles called electrons, protons and neutrons.

Eventually we learned that even the behavior these elementary particles is discrete in nature, since an elementary particle can exist in only a finite number of quantum states.

All of this reiterates the way intelligence works in the world. We see its manifestation all around us, which creates the illusion that it permeates our world as a sort of continuous property. But in reality, it is entirely contained in relatively tiny things called brains — which collectively hold, as far as we know, all the intelligence in the Universe.

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