why investigate intelligence through the lens of nature, brain and AI ?

Imagine walking through a lush green park. Bird’s call ripples through the air, one call, then another. Your head turns almost instinctively, drawn by the sound. You search, and then you see it, a small, radiant bubble of life, chirping away with quiet insistence. It feels good to be surrounded by this living presence.

Yet within this simple moment, something extraordinary is unfolding.

Between hearing the sound, locating its source, and feeling joy, your brain has activated countless systems in mere milliseconds. Neural circuits assess safety, classify the sound as non-threatening, and prepare the body to respond. You recognize the bird’s call, turn to look, and in doing so recruit another network of neurons. Your brain readies itself for a new stimulus, the visual source of the sound. And there it is, the bird.

In an instant, shape, size, motion, and pattern are processed. A quiet sense of awe arises. You feel fortunate to witness such a marvel. All of this happens faster than conscious thought.

From the bird’s perspective, a story is unfolding too.

A large presence moves through the landscape, a giant walking the land. The bird senses you, sends signals to its kin, monitors your actions. Perhaps it categorizes you as harmless. Perhaps it communicates safety through subtle calls. Like us, birds sense, act, and react, continuously negotiating survival, care for their progeny, and life on Earth. (And yes, they can fly too)

What is beautiful is that our existences have long been intertwined, shaped together over billions of years. Each interaction, each perception, each response has refined life into what it is today telling us that intelligence did not evolve in isolation.

This deep interconnectedness, however, is largely absent in present-day Artificial Intelligence.

Neural networks do not begin with relationships. They begin with fragments. Structure is not assumed, but must be slowly learned, if at all. But the real world is not independent. It is relational. Encouragingly, a countercurrent is gaining momentum in AI, the development of spatial intelligence through world models.

So what is spatial intelligence?

It is relational intelligence, which we use effortlessly every day. Without it, generative AI can place a cat on the moon. With it, AI would understand that the moon lacks oxygen, that a cat needs to breathe, and that survival would require an astronaut suit. This basic relational understanding between cat, moon, and life, is missing, in most present day artificial systems.

In contrast, this relational intelligence is deeply embedded in our brains. Evolved over the course of six hundred million years. When systems thinkers attempted to define life, they arrived at the idea of a living network: a system of continuous feedback, capable of sensing itself, adjusting its behavior, and organizing from within.

To understand the intelligence that lives across the natural world and in our bodies, and to draw parallels and perpendiculars to the world of Artificial Intelligence, Unearth Intelligence has come to be.

Each month, come in to listen deeply to the natural world, and return with stories, patterns, and truths that will help shape Artificial Intelligence to empower life.