Michael Mitchell: Archive

There's a pipe above my bed. It has a ring around it, where two extended sections were machine-welded together, but the pipe runs perpendicular to my bed, so all I see (visually) is a straight line. How do I know the shape of the line is actually circular? Human intelligence cannot be collectivized like this. Only an individual human mind can "see" this. That's indisputable, but what's relevant here is if you abstract humans out of existence, would intelligence even exist? Who would know that cells are "intelligent"? If we say this is intelligence and the power of abstract thought is intelligence as well, then we're actually abstracting ourselves out of existence whenever we try to think of both. That's not a contextual issue. Both forms of "intelligence" simply cannot exist at the same time.