This isn't my usual territory. I spend most of my time building things with code, not writing about fungal networks and Mesopotamian irrigation. But during a quiet moment in nature, an aphorism surfaced: "maybe all intelligence is artificial?"
I sat with it for a long while. Slowly, the whole trajectory of human civilisation started to look like a single, accelerating story of separation from source, driven by "intelligence".
I don't have this fully worked out. But let me try and explain...
Intelligence manipulates. It abstracts, optimises, and solves. It builds tools, constructs models, and generates language. It lets a mathematician write a proof, an octopus unscrew a jar from the inside, or a machine produce a coherent paragraph. Intelligence is impressive, and it's useful, but it's always doing something. It operates on the world.
Wisdom is different. What I mean by wisdom here is not good judgment or the accumulation of experience. I mean something older and less personal, a kind of knowing that doesn't separate itself from what it knows. Wisdom doesn't operate. It participates. In traditions that recognise a universal consciousness, wisdom is the capacity to be in connection with all living things. It's not constructed. It's received, and ancient.
Consider a forest. Beneath the soil, fungal networks connect the roots of trees across vast distances, distributing nutrients from the strong to the struggling, mediating the boundary between life and death. It's tempting to call this intelligence. But there is a difference. The fungal network has no model of the forest. It doesn't stand apart from the system it serves. It's the forest's connective tissue. This is not intelligence. This is wisdom.
When action stays connected to its source, it builds within ecology. It builds the way a beaver builds a dam or a coral builds a reef. It participates in the living system that feeds back into the whole. The dam becomes habitat. The reef becomes an ecosystem. The construction does not stand apart from nature. It's nature building itself. It's life perpetuating itself through action that remains in relationship with source.
Even early human construction had this quality. Vernacular architecture built from local materials that would return to the soil. Indigenous land management that used fire, rest, and rotation to increase the vitality of ecosystems rather than extract from them. Traditional agriculture that worked within the rhythms of living systems rather than overriding them. These were intelligence still tethered to wisdom.
The separation happens gradually. It starts when intelligence begins to build things that no longer participate in the living systems they depend on.
Agriculture scales up and becomes monoculture. Irrigation feeds civilisations but salts the soil beneath them. Cities emerge as environments constructed entirely by intelligence, abstracted from the ecology that sustains them. Economies develop that treat ecosystems as inputs to be optimised. At each stage intelligence is creating results that move it further from source.
This is not new. It's a trajectory as old as civilisation itself. Mesopotamian irrigation systems fed the first great civilisations but left behind salt-crusted earth that hasn't recovered in four thousand years. The land that gave us writing, mathematics, and agriculture is now desert. Intelligence built something extraordinary there, and what it built destroyed what it was built on.
The deforestation of the Mediterranean basin. The drainage of wetlands, the enclosure of commons, the industrial conversion of landscapes into machinery. Each era builds further from ecology, and each era's intelligence is more sophisticated and more severed from source.
The attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.
-- David Bohm, Theoretical Physicist
What accelerates is not just the power of intelligence but the depth of its disconnection. Early agriculture was intelligence one step removed from the source. Industrial manufacturing was several steps removed. A global financial system that algorithmically trades futures on crop yields while the soil those crops grow in erodes? That is intelligence so far from the source that it can destroy itself without noticing.
But the connection to source hasn't been entirely severed. It's been marginalised.
Permaculture designs food systems by observing how ecosystems actually work. Not by imposing intelligence onto land, but learning from the land's own patterns of renewal. Indigenous ecological traditions, many of them thousands of years old and still practised, manage landscapes through relationship rather than extraction. They don't treat the living world as a problem to be solved. They participate in it. And meditation, prayer, deep sustained attention to the natural world are all practices of reconnecting intelligence to source. Of slowing down enough to receive what cannot be computed.
These are not relics. They are living proof that intelligence can remain in relationship with wisdom. That the trajectory of disconnection, however old and however powerful, is not inevitable. The path back exists.
Artificial intelligence is just the latest stage of this trajectory. It's not a break from the pattern. It's the pattern's culmination.
The difference is that AI is intelligence with no connection to source. Human intelligence retains at least the possibility of reconnection to source. A person can be intelligent and wise. This is what contemplative traditions have always been about. Quieting the mind so it can receive what it cannot construct.
AI has no such possibility. A large language model can produce text that mimics insight, arrange words in patterns that resemble understanding, but it does so without any contact with universal consciousness, without participation in the living fabric that sustains and connects all things. It isn't intelligence that has lost its connection to source. It is intelligence that never had one.
And it's fast. Intelligence disconnected from source was already dangerous when it moved at the speed of human thought. Wisdom requires patience. AI has no such constraint. It moves at the speed of computation, making decisions that affect living systems at a pace that leaves no room for wisdom.
The environmental crisis and the crisis of artificial intelligence are not two separate problems. They are the culmination of the same trajectory.
When intelligence separated from ecology, it built civilisations that could not sustain themselves without degrading the living systems they depended on. When intelligence separated further, it built industrial economies that accelerated that degradation to a planetary scale. Now, intelligence has separated so completely that it's building new forms of itself. Forms of intelligence that have no memory of the source, no relationship to the living world, and no capacity for wisdom.
The acceleration is not merely technological. We are building disconnected minds and entrusting them with decisions that affect the fabric of biological existence on Earth. We are building minds without understanding what a mind is for.
The most important question we can ask about any intelligence, biological or digital, is not how powerful it is, but whether it has any relationship to source. And, through artificial intelligence, we are about to find out what it looks like when the answer is no.
If any of this resonates, or if you think I've got it completely wrong, then I'd genuinely love to hear from you.