On Intelligence
We talk of collaboration as if it’s a virtue. Something we should all strive to do better and more of, like exercise or saving money. But what if we start to think of collaboration as an inventive force of randomness? As the catalytic generator for the dynamic and the new?
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I’m a slow, slow reader.
A lingering vapor from my dyslexia and dysphemia as a kid. Words and their shape arriving in my mind as if from separate directions. Language as a fluid, swirling mix of concept and syntax. A slog through the mud.
Books hang around my neck for a while. Piled in directionless heaps upon my desk. Often untouched for months as I reach for another, then another. Failing to be faithful until the end.
I’ve been reading James Bridle’s “Ways of Being” longer than I care to admit. A text that enriches how I think about intelligence and consciousness—the relational sparks that inspire communications between people, animals, and things.
I learned today that John Cage used the I Ching as a way of "decentering the composer and the work" in his score for "A Dip in the Lake" in 1978.
The I Ching is a divination (God, I love that word) text that’s about 3,000 years old and translates from Chinese as the “Book of Changes.”
I’ve never practiced it. I want to. Maybe next week.
You have a question. You toss three coins six times. And through the combination of heads and tails, you generate one of 64 possible hexagrams—a stack of six lines, each either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Each hexagram corresponds to a chapter in the text. Oblique. Interpretive.
The idea is that the “answer” you receive isn’t an answer but is instead an opening. A way of pushing past the assumptions and expectations that often jam us up in the traffic of our minds.
The I Ching gave Cage a way to open his compositions by creating “a random list of specific intersections and urban locations" that the audience could visit "to generate their own chance-driven experience of each spot's unique sounds, sensations and encounters.”
By working deliberately with randomness, Cage placed his music into a world beyond the score, creating a sound that’s as unexpected and unpredictable as it is infinite.
Bridle goes on to connect Cage's composition to evolutionary biology, where (like capitalism) randomness has been woefully undervalued as an effective and efficient engine of change.
Natural selection has long been the dominant theory for evolution and capitalism alike. But randomness, it turns out, is much more crucial to the creation of life and value than previously credited.
The chance encounter.
The lucky break.
The thought in the shower that tilts the trajectory of a company.
A team of unruly polymaths, experts, and dabblers who launch the next big thing in technology or healthcare or apparel.
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We talk about collaboration as a virtue. Something we should do because, I think, it’s hard to do.
Everyone thinks, talks, and acts at different paces. And so working effectively as a unit is never a given. It takes training, attention, and time. It takes will.
To listen, really listen, to what people who think differently from you have to say. To consider the perspectives, opinions, and expertise of others with as much weight as our own.
I sure as fuck struggle with it.
But what if we start to think of collaboration as an inventive force of randomness? As an opening. A way to push past the assumptions that ensnare the emergence of new approaches to old problems.
A cacophony of perspectives that generates new directions.
New possibilities.
Injecting mutations into systems that would otherwise optimize themselves into a sameness that threatens to swallow us whole.
