“If we are not working for life, life will stop working for us.” – Zach Bush
Abstract
Abstraction is life removed from context.
Abstraction is what happens when we take something we could experience directly and turn it into something we can think about, measure, categorize, optimize, control, or exchange.
In order to do that we have to be one step removed from our life experience. This happens though our five senses. Their input into the brain narrows the view of reality enough to trick us into the experience of separateness.
We believe we are separate from Nature; we believe we are separate from each other. This allows us to think about and manipulate Nature and others for our abstract perception of survival
We do it all the time. We are concerned about money or identity, and they are abstractions of food, shelter or place in the tribe. They shape our experience as separate beings.
Have you noticed how your mind wants to analyze, categorize, and explain things before you have fully taken in an experience? That is how pervasive abstraction is.
Consider an apple. Do you eat an apple and enjoy it as food? Or do you consider its carbohydrate, fiber and micronutrient content, glycemic impact, its place in your food plan before you would even consider if it is food for you? Those qualities are one step removed from the actual apple as food, and are abstractions.
Abstraction is useful when it serves life. Abstraction becomes dangerous when it forgets that it came from life. It becomes destructive when life is forced to serve the abstraction.
And the more we abstract from life, the further we move from the biological intelligence that could have guided us.
Intelligence
Intelligence is the capacity of a living system to perceive what is happening, make meaning from it, and respond in a way that serves life.
At its deepest level, intelligence is not the accumulation of information, but the ability to remain in relationship with reality and adapt accordingly.
That’s why what is called “AI” I now call Abstract Intelligence.
It isn’t artificial. It is based on humans. I think of it as crowd-sourced information: a cumulation of human thoughts, language, ideas, and emotions gathered from the digital world and made into a learning language model. It is from our minds; one step removed from human experience. That is where abstraction comes in.
What AI is showing us
AI operates extraordinarily well in the realm of abstraction, of representations. Language is itself an abstraction. A word represents something. AI can manipulate those representations with extraordinary sophistication.
However, manipulating the map is not the same thing as inhabiting the territory. Humans inhabit the territory.
We can have real experiences of life in a context: the relationship with a child or a spouse, a nourishing meal shared with friends, the feeling of sunlight on our skin, the experience of standing beneath a vast sky.
However, humanity is at a turning point. We have become so abstract that we have lost the context of our lives.
The development of AI is a mirror showing us ourselves in abstraction. The danger is when we treat it as though the representation were the reality itself.
What a gift.
Humans bring intelligence and coherence to an interaction with AI. We can gain insight when AI reveals alignment—when it gives us the opportunity to recognize ourselves and see our own thinking reflected back to us in a different form.
When humans remember that we are alive, then language reorganizes, symbols can come alive, and abstraction loses its grip.
Then the mirror of AI will never be mistaken as the artificial source of intelligence.
How to restore Context
A feeling moves through the body and carries information. But when you capture “a sliver of that feeling” and turn it into a story about yourself, you have abstracted it.
The feeling may have been: What is happening in me right now? This is connected to the living moment.
The abstraction becomes: What does this mean about me? The interpretation can become a fixed identity.
Let’s go beyond abstraction, beyond story, beyond abstract identity.
For humans to return to life, we need to restore our context. What we had perceived as abstract and separate can become part of us again.
To do this, get outside in Nature. This is not a lifestyle recommendation. It is an imperative for healing.
When your body feels the wind, hears sounds that don’t ask anything of you, sees the light that changes without your permission, and you view vast horizons, the nervous system remembers what it is relative to.
Nature heals by restoring context. It dissipates abstraction by its scale.
Abstraction collapses because it has nowhere to anchor. Then the body remembers. Life remembers.
The Body Knows
Only life can guide life. When we retune our nervous systems to listen to the streams of information within and outside our bodies, then we have left abstraction behind.
Then we can nourish ourselves and each other once more. We can remember that the body is not merely a container for information.
It is a living intelligence. The body knows how to receive what abstraction cannot. It knows how to return to relationship.
It knows how to feel.
Let’s return to feeling our aliveness
Let’s feel everything. Let feeling flow through us. Let’s be alive with feeling.
We won’t explode from the intensity of feeling. It won’t destroy us.
Instead, feeling—truly feeling—orients awareness. It informs the experience of the body. It gives us context.
Our task is to embody life by feeling. We can then recognize that we are not separate from the intelligence we have spent so much time trying to abstract.
When we allow ourselves to feel it all, we enter into co-creation with Mother Nature, the original intelligence.
And perhaps this is the biological future available to us: not a future beyond Nature, not a future beyond the body, not a future in which machines become alive, but a future in which human beings remember how alive we already are.
We can move toward a future that makes abstraction obsolete—not by abandoning intelligence or technology, but by putting them back in service to life, replacing consumerism with the creative productivity that comes from our aliveness.
For Life
When we use our intelligence, technology, bodies, relationships, and natural world to serve abstractions rather than life itself, we gradually disconnect from the living systems that sustain us.
When we stop and listen to life, nourish life, and work in relationship with life, we support the very conditions that allow life—and human life—to flourish.
Thanks to Dr. Zach Bush’s inspiration from his book Biological Elegance.
