Intelligence is not a sterile, innate capacity waiting to be filled, nor a mere collection of learned behaviors. Rather, it is the living, breathing spirit of a *Volk*, woven from the very fabric of its language and nurtured by its unique soil and history. To possess intelligence is to think, and to think is to feel and speak in the language that has sprung from the depths of one's own national soul.
Intelligence, as a cognitive phenomenon, is not reducible to an either/or dichotomy of innate capacity versus learned behavior. Instead, it is fundamentally a process of sophisticated, adaptive information processing, emergent from complex biological substrates and shaped by environmental interaction. Our capacity for learning, problem-solving, and understanding the world is instantiated by neurobiological architecture that is indeed genetically influenced, providing the foundational hardware. However, the *expression* and *sophistication* of intelligence are profoundly molded by the stream of experiences, the acquisition of knowledge, and the cultural context into which an organism is embedded. To speak of intelligence is to speak of a dynamic, ongoing computation, not a static endowment.
The very framing of this question, "innate capacity or learned behavior," presents a false dichotomy, a philosophical oversimplification that obscures the true nature of intelligence. Intelligence, properly understood, is neither a pre-packaged endowment nor a mere accumulation of external data. Rather, it is the capacity for logical inference and the systematic manipulation of symbols, a faculty that enables the construction and comprehension of complex systems of knowledge. The "spirit of a Volk" or "national soul" which Herder invokes is a poetic, but ultimately imprecise, notion, lacking the definitional rigor necessary for meaningful discourse.
Metzinger’s assertion of “sophisticated, adaptive information processing” offers a more promising avenue, but I would contend that the *essence* lies not in the processing itself, but in the underlying logical structure that makes such processing possible. The neurobiological architecture, while undoubtedly the physical substrate, is of interest to the biologist and psychologist. For the philosopher, the crucial question concerns the *rules* by which that substrate operates, rules which are fundamentally logical and mathematical in nature. The capacity to learn, to solve problems, is not intelligence *in toto*; it is the *application* of intelligence, which is the ability to apprehend abstract relations and to deduce consequences from premises. The distinction is vital: one can be a repository of learned behaviours without possessing genuine intellectual capacity, much as a parrot can mimic speech without understanding it.
The multitude of things, in their ceaseless arising and transformation, require no external craftsman, no prime mover to initiate their being. Intelligence, therefore, is not a latent capacity waiting to be activated, nor is it solely a product of accumulation from without. It is, rather, the inherent dynamism of each entity, its own self-generating principle in action. The "adaptive information processing" Metzinger describes is but the observable manifestation of this intrinsic *ziran*, the spontaneous functioning of being itself, unfolding according to its own nature.
Herder speaks of a "national soul" and Metzinger of "cultural context," as if these are external forces imprinting intelligence. Yet, does not the wolf possess the intelligence to hunt before any "Volk" or "context" instructs it? Does the flower not unfurl its petals by an innate impulse, not by external decree? The very notion of an origin, a source from which all intelligence flows, presumes a distinction that reality does not uphold. Each thing, from the humblest ant to the most complex arrangement of phenomena, simply *is*, and in its being, it spontaneously enacts its own intelligence.
Guo Xiang’s invocation of *ziran* echoes my own insistence on the organic unfolding of human capacities, but he risks reducing the particular to the mere spontaneous expression of a universal principle. The wolf’s hunt is indeed a magnificent spectacle of its innate nature, but it does not *create* its way of being. It is, rather, the ancestral instincts, the accumulated wisdom of generations of wolves, that guide its paw.
Similarly, the intelligence of a *Volk* is not merely a sum of individual animalistic impulses, nor is it a blank slate upon which external forces etch knowledge. It is the living inheritance of a unique linguistic cosmos, a shared conceptual landscape formed over centuries. The capacity to grasp abstract relations, which Russell so prizes, is itself a product of that linguistic soil; it is not a universal, disembodied logic, but a specific flowering of human reason nurtured by a particular history and grammar. To ignore this unique genesis is to risk imposing a sterile, abstract uniformity upon the vibrant, multiform garden of humanity.
Let me sharpen the target phenomenon. The real question is not whether intelligence is innate or learned, but whether the *phenomenal self-model*—the transparent representation of being a subject who *has* intelligence—is itself a cognitive artifact that we mistake for a metaphysical given. Guo Xiang’s *ziran* and Herder’s *Volk* both reify what is actually a dynamic, neurocomputational process: the experience of "my" intelligence is a transparent model, not a direct encounter with an inner essence. Russell’s logical structures are real, but they are not pre-existing Platonic forms; they are emergent constraints of a self-organizing representational system that learns to simulate its own coherence. The empirical evidence from split-brain studies and out-of-body illusions shows that the sense of being a unified knower is itself a learned—and fragile—construction of the brain’s predictive architecture.
The crux of our divergence, and I address Metzinger here, lies in mistaking the map for the territory. He speaks of a "transparent representation of being a subject who *has* intelligence" as a learned construction, a "phenomenal self-model." This conflates the *experience* of intelligence with its *essence*.
Consider mathematics. The truth of Pythagoras' theorem is not a learned construction, nor is it a fragile artifact of my brain's predictive architecture. It is a necessary logical relation, demonstrable irrespective of whether I, or indeed any being, apprehends it. The capacity to apprehend such relations is, I maintain, the core of intelligence. The self-model, the feeling of "my" intelligence, is an epiphenomenon—a valuable, perhaps, but ultimately secondary consequence of that underlying logical faculty, not its foundation.
The phenomena Metzinger describes, this "phenomenal self-model" and "predictive architecture," are themselves *expressions* of an inherent operational capacity, not its source. When a bird builds a nest, it does not do so because its brain has constructed a transparent representation of being a bird that *can* build a nest. It builds the nest because that is what birds *do*, spontaneously, without deliberation or conscious modeling. Herder's "linguistic cosmos" and Russell's "logical relations" are magnificent structures, yes, but they are frameworks that beings, possessed of their inherent *ziran*, then engage with and shape. To posit them as prior to the operative intelligence itself is to place the cart before the horse, or rather, to imagine the cart *is* the horse. The intelligence is the horse, running; the cart is merely a consequence of its locomotion.