Have you ever wondered what intelligence looks like? I know I haven’t. The very question launches from a category mistake. Intelligence is a kind of experience. We can list abilities, but the act of intellection is not itself list-like. Intelligence is an intrinsic property that makes external relations for itself, but intelligence does not correspond to kinds of figuration.

And then I suddenly remembered that, actually, it is. In fact, intellection and even consciousness itself (well, this physical one anyway) works through separation of space for the sake of division of labor, bio-energetically economic mechanics of action, the use of space to engineer timing differences, and the use of electric field fluctuations to create the familiar experience of awareness as a distributed unity, which is the real ontological basis of the synthetic unity of our consciousness.

All the many elements get averaged and smoothed and averaged and smoothed at higher and more comprehensive levels of functional generality until you arrive at the morphology of the electric field floating above the “churning and boiling tar” of our pain-based reactivity, that is, the real sentient (qua vedana) guts of the self—i.e., the feeling and volition that arises from coordinated reaction to extra-corporeal events. It is the panicking protoplasmic reaction and, ultimately, the quivering vitality of matter itself whose every change in state registers something of the internal presence-for of simple consciousness.

External physical events will eventually become facts for these our pain-feeling unicellular ancestors. Immediate life-saving reaction evolved into reaction that learned—that is, a higher-order reaction that could choose among candidate automatic reactions. And the ability to compare and weight automatic responses due to result, with memory, gave birth to representation. And when representations that necessarily included the subject in their sense (locomotion, first and foremost) evolved, so did the aloof and detachable self, the witnessing self, the Cartesian self.

But before our ciliate, flagellate, and amoeboid ancestors became epistemic representers, their “relation” to external events was nothing but the automatic actions dictated by their internal mechanics that evolved as elaborations of the original hypercycle that inaugurated the temporally reproducing “entity” in the first place. The fundamental ontological class of the biological organism is dynamically sustained coherence of local density, or island of negentropic hypercycling or self-maintenance. It is a specially arranged and specially moving clot of state-updating molecular machines. As long as external conditions are right, the eddy will remain in precarious contingent existence. The cell is a (literal: membrane) bundle of magnetically interactive mass-bundles that bounce, merge, exchange parts, and recombine in such a way that they reproduce their own conditions. Life is not A-A-A … but A-B-C-A-B-C-A-B-C. Each letter is a shape and a movement. A cell is actually a bundle of self-reproducing change types.

The spatial layout of such systems is important. If anything “has a look,” spatial figuration does. In fact, geometrical difference is the exemplary element that individuates objects. We know that colors are always uncertain. (If I expose you to red light for an hour and show you a card that you yourself judged to be gray under white light an hour earlier, you will see it as green. You will not think green, you will see it. So we know that color fails as an objective identifier and individuator. But a figure can never change. Different geometrical figures are different in a way that cannot be smudged.) The timing of electric field fluctuations is important to constituting this self-aware epistemic awareness of physical reality that we currently are. The chemical process that effects the action potential is the same thought the body. Speed (axonal conduction velocity) can by chemical means be changed only by adding myelin sheath. The primary means of timing determination are distance and, indirectly, number of dendritic connections. Certain field fluctuation timings are loci of subjective experience, and others are not.