The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Nature of Intelligence / 39
gence of millions of smaller whole parts, working together, making
countless vital connections, and constantly monitoring feedback levels
in an almost unimaginably intricate way. If cooperation and intelligence
in the body break down enough, illness and death quickly and
inevitably result.
Cells that no longer serve the whole or respond appropriately to
feedback have become, in essence, self-preoccupied, and give rise to cancerous
tumors that are dangerous and counterproductive. Our body’s
intelligence knows that these cells would eventually destroy the larger
whole upon which they live and depend, and works constantly to eliminate
them and to rectify conditions that lead to their proliferation. Our
body’s intelligence makes connections and serves us, the larger whole. In
the same way, human intelligence is the ability to make meaningful connections,
and if we are not serving the larger wholes, the larger wholes
will let us know. Individuals who damage society are removed from it
and, we hope, rehabilitated; what happens when societies irresponsibly
damage the earth? If our intelligence is impaired, we lose sight of our
purpose and become increasingly numb to the healthy feedback from
the larger wholes that is vital to us as intelligent systems and subsystems.
If our culture’s intelligence is impaired enough, we become the
rogue cancer cells that we fear so much within ourselves.
Intelligence Is Species-Specific
Intelligence in living systems is thus determined by the quality and quantity
of feedback these systems are capable of receiving, and this ability
to receive feedback is closely related to the ability to sense meaningful
connections. Because every animal species is unique, it is clear that each
species has its own particular type of intelligence that is distinctly suited
to its telos, or purpose, and to the types of feedback it receives and
the connections it makes. To say that one type of intelligence is higher
than another ignores this by imposing an arbitrary standard, and is usually
part of an assumption that enshrines the human mode of intelligence
at the top of an imagined hierarchy.
Yet we know that there are literally countless varieties of animal
consciousness, and that they have many types of intelligence that