Human Nature & Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence will make knowledge more accessible than ever before, our human capacities will become more valuable. Not less.
At an early age, we are taught how to gain a place in today’s society
We learn to go to school. We learn how to study. How to build a career. How to get a title. How to solve problems. How to achieve. How to become productive ánd how to stay productive, which can also be phrased a ‘busy’.
Perhaps the greatest freedom which you can find, isn’t found in achieving more. Perhaps true freedom is found in becoming fully present in the life you already have.
What if the most important education begins the moment we start questioning the way we live?
The majority may think that school teaches us how to think critically. Today, critical thinking is often associated with analyzing information objectively. We are encouraged to question media, evaluate information, understand politics, navigate professional environments and reflects on ourselves. These are all essential skills.
Yet, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the technology reshapes the way we acquire knowledge. The world and life we know today will change and AI will increasingly become part of that process.
The real question is no longer whether we can think critically, but the ability to remain deeply connected to ourselves while the world around us changes at an unprecedented pace. Perhaps this will become one of the most valuable human skills in the age of AI, the question to ask: How do we awaken a deeper level of awareness?
How do we distinguish between reality and artificial intelligence…
How do we learn to recognize our intuition and to become familiar with our inner world…
How do we discover our own essence before the society tells us who we should become…
These are all self-reflective questions and skills we should not only develop as adults…
…They are human capacities that deserve to be nurtured from an early age.
Built before we are born: where the capacity to feel and think begins
While Human Nature is what we are born with, Human Intelligence is how we learn to honor it.
Long before we learn to speak…
Long before we take our first steps…
Long before we develop memories…
Long before we ever learn to question the world around us, we were already, quietly, building the capacity to do so.
Our bodies begin by creating one of the most remarkable systems we will ever possess. In the first weeks after conception, somewhere between the eighteen and twenty-two-days, the earliest structure of the nervous system, the neural tube, the foundation through which we will one day sense, perceive, connect and experience in the world, begins to take shape. It forms before the rest of the body does. By the fifth week, this early structure has already organized itself into five distinct regions, the beginnings of what will become the brain (in layman's terms):
The Telencephalon: which will one day carry thought, memory and awareness.
The Diencephalon: which will relay what our senses pick up and help keep the body in balance.
The Mesencephalon: which will coordinate movement and alertness.
The Metencephalon: which will govern balance and coordination.
The Myelencephalon: which will regulate the most basic functions that keep us alive, such as breathing and heartbeat.
None of this means an embryo at this stage can already think or feel, the nervous system is not yet functional, it is only forming. But it is a striking fact that the foundation for noticing, sensing and eventually thinking is among the very first things nature builds in us, before we even have a body we would recognize as human.
Long before we learn how to perform, we first learn how to receive. Perhaps that’s no coincidence. Perhaps Human Nature reminds us that before we become productive, successful or recognized, according to what you believe are the society’s standards, we are first designed:
To feel. To observe. To connect.
Perhaps that is why noticing ourselves is not a distraction from thinking clearly, but part of it, and perhaps it is a reason, not just a metaphor, for why the capacities described here deserve to be nurtured early, and taken seriously as fundamentally human.
Yet somewhere along the way, many of us become disconnected from that original intelligence. We become experts in doing, but beginners in being.
Human Intelligence is not about becoming someone else. It is about returning to the awareness that has been within us from the very beginning. Not by rejecting progress, technology or Artificial Intelligence.
But by remembering that the most advanced intelligence we possess has never been artificial.
It has always been human…
Critical thinking is a human capacity, not a credential
Critical thinking is not reserved for those with the highest IQ, the most impressive title or the longest academic education. It is a human capacity that can be practiced. It begins with attention.
Listen. Observe. Ask questions. Look for what may be missing. Consider where the information came from. Try to understand the argument rather than merely agreeing or disagreeing with it. Be willing to discover that your first assumption could be wrong. And then allow yourself something we often forget: time to think.
Not every opinion needs to be formed immediately. Not every question needs an instant answer. Not everything you hear needs to become something you believe. Sometimes intelligence is found in the pause between receiving information and responding to it. And within that pause, there is another source of information we should not ignore:
Ourselves…you.
Critical Feeling: The Overlooked Half of Human Intelligence
We will still need critical thinking: the ability to question information, examine evidence and distinguish fact from assumption. But perhaps we also need to develop what we might call critical feeling: the ability to consciously explore what we sense and feel without automatically treating every feeling as truth.
To notice what happens within you.
To question where a feeling comes from.
To distinguish between intuition, emotion, fear, conditioning and assumption.
And to bring what you feel into conversation with what you know.
This is where discernment begins.
What are you noticing? What are your senses telling you? What happens in your body when you hear something? Are you responding to the information itself, or to the authority, confidence or beauty with which it was presented? Does something feel uncomfortable because it challenges what you already believe or because something genuinely does not add up?