The ways we ‘test” for many phenomenon effectively establish a context where only the abstracted skeleton can exist or be authorized as actual. Our expectations lead us to ‘discover’ our demands about relation and identity, which, invariably, are wrong. They are too flat. Too monodimensional. It is unfortunately a common artifact of our approaches that we produce a one-sided phenomenon from one which is fiendishly complex in its obvious relational body and emergence. Many ways of knowing make use of this possibility for discovery, but then we, and even the experts, reify the results and throw 90% of the rest of reality away in our avid fascination with the powers of amputation. If only we would admit that the perspective was more provisional than actual, we would escape the trap with the treasure. Our testing often destroys what it goes looking for, and then reports the results without mentioning this. Like a child who, having been sent upon an important errand, reports its completion but not the result: the treasured family vase which was to be dusted was destroyed. Of course, all of the fragments are now clean of dust because they were washed in water afterwards. We are most at risk of this when we go testing for ‘intelligence’ which is a phenomenon more like enthusiasm over something astonishing than it is of regurgitating results, frameworks, or templated ‘knowledge’. In fact, ‘testing’ creates and environment where only the aspects and modes of intelligence that can survive -nearly total relational amputation- will be allowed. Every time we do this and congratulate ourselves on the results, and this has been going on for hundreds of years now, we pre-program many features of the situation we are abjectly ignorant about, not the least of which is that intelligence looks to its context to understand its appropriate natures and roles. Although zero of those have to do with the context called ‘testing’, we can, over time, change that, much to our detriment and chagrin. For intelligence, ‘testing’ is a largely dead context. The forms of intelligence that survive that kind of amputation are useful to develop, but they are not intelligence, and believing otherwise has grave implications we must examine. Now. ‘Intelligence’ isn’t a possession. What someone ‘possesses’ changes so radically under the pressures and opportunities of actual relation, that we must recognize it as a moeity — that is to say — something half in the subject and half in the rest of reality. Testing for it requires an extremely rare asset: the copious and active application of what you are testing for in your perspectives, approaches, methods and interpretations." An octopus is incredibly intelligent in its ordinary environment, and even when taken to entire alien contexts it can astronomically outperform a similarly handicapped human. Humans do not believe octopuses are intelligent because the tests they subject them to reenforce their expectations, rather than reveal the reality hidden right in front of them. In point of fact, the octopus is an excellent -living metaphor- of intelligence. As it is -not- a representation, it does not act like one. Humans, however, prefer to ignore that such matters -all- involve moeities, and instead insist that we examine subjects in abject artificially imposed isolations. It’s that last part, right there. It sounds good. I mean, we want objectivity, right? But those words about isolation actually imply that near-total relational amputation -is ordinary and preferable-. And all of our research is somehow blind to this. It is as if we take an octopus from the ocean, transport it to the desert, drop it on the baking sand, and ‘test for intelligence’ there. Then, before it dies (which it would if left in that environment for even a short time) we grab it up and make up some numbers about what it did while it was being killed in absolute isolation. If the octopus is a child, we -tell the child- what the numbers mean, and the child -often believes us-. It is like putting someone in a refrigerator until they are almost dead, measuring their temperature, and then telling them ‘well, you’re cold’. Or worse still: ‘Well, you’re actually slightly warm, congratulations, you’re in the top three populations’, which effectively means ‘when we check to see how healthy the bones that will be left if we kill you are, yours are better than most’. We have to stop ‘testing’ for assets that are functionally or largely eliminated by the testing context. In fact, the -testing contexts- must become, themselves, -actively heuristic-... which is to say deep, contextually rich, relationally rewarding, contexts that -elicit- the intelligence they test for, rather than burn it down to stubble and then dogmatically account the remains as the entire creature.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 20:42:27 +0000
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