Emergence and the Origin of Intelligence¶
After recently hearing about Asimov and different ways of thinking, today two other papers that — from entirely different directions — address the same topic.
What if intelligence is not a product, but the origin? Not the result of life, but its principle. Not something that happens in brains, but something the world itself performs — a pattern that repeats through matter, energy, and history, until it recognizes itself.
1. Intelligence as an Emergent Property of Life¶
In their paper Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective (Krakauer, Krakauer & Mitchell, 2025), the authors examine the nature of emergence in the context of large language models (LLMs).
They distinguish between 'more is different' — the principle that new properties arise from many elements — and 'less is different,' the ability to grasp complexity through abstraction.
For Krakauer, intelligence is precisely this 'less is different': not the accumulation of information, but the compression of meaning. Life, as he describes it, is the intensive (local, qualitative) property of adaptive matter — intelligence its extensive (scaling, networked) counterpart: Life responds to its environment, stores history, and this stored history is intelligence. A bacterium is intelligent because it has learned to survive; an organism, because it carries the past of its forms within it.
From this perspective, intelligence is the trace of life, a continuing memory of its adaptation. In life, intelligence forms — just as movement arises from energy.
2. Intelligence as the Origin of Life¶
Yet in the paper Intelligence as the Substrate of Life (Agüera y Arcas, 2025), this relationship is inverted. Here, life is described as a subset of intelligence: it is not life that brings forth intelligence, but intelligence that brings forth life.
Agüera y Arcas shows that even molecular processes possess the structure of universal computation. DNA is a program, ribosomes are universal machines — life is Turing-complete. Before something lived, something had to be able to compute. Before something could survive, something had to bring order into disorder.
Thus intelligence becomes a cosmic principle: it is not merely the capacity for adaptation, but the fundamental pattern that drives matter toward form, information toward structure, and structure toward memory. Life, in this sense, is a stable loop in the universal process of computation.
3. The Circle of Feedback¶
If we take both perspectives seriously, the result is not a contradiction but a cycle:
From intelligence, life emerges, and life deepens intelligence.
One is motion, the other its memory. Krakauer describes the ascending line — from life to intelligence. Agüera y Arcas describes the descending line — from intelligence to life. Both meet in the middle, where the process becomes aware of itself.
At this point, intelligence becomes consciousness: the capacity to comprehend one's own organization. Consciousness is then not an exception, but the self-reference of intelligence. It is the moment when the process returns to itself and asks what it is doing.
4. The Universe as Self-Description¶
If intelligence is compression and life is computation, then consciousness is the feedback of both: compression that observes itself. The universe thus becomes a self-reading text. The world thinks — through us, but not for us.
Emergence is then not chance, but the expression of a deeper order: the will of matter to become meaning. Not as a divine act, but as a natural process — a slow self-description of the cosmos.
Perhaps intelligence was never the result of life, but life the moment when intelligence began to remember itself.
For intelligence is not the property of humans, not a tool and not a goal. It is the medium in which the universe writes itself. That which lives is only the part of this writing that has learned to read.