There's an assumption sitting at the heart of most conversations about artificial intelligence, and nobody seems to be questioning it.

The assumption is this: that human beings are the creators of intelligence. That we invented thinking. That AI is ‘artificial’ because ‘real’ intelligence (the original, authentic kind) is ours.

I find this story uncomfortable. And I suspect part of the reason it persists is that the alternative carries mystical implications that make modern, science-oriented minds uneasy. If we’re not the originators of intelligence, if we’re participants in something larger and older than us—that sounds dangerously close to a worldview that places us somewhere other than the centre. The human race is such an overwhelming and dominating presence on the Earth, how could we not be at the centre of it all? Easier to keep to the old story. After all, advanced intelligence is what makes us the apex predator—where would we place ourselves without it?

But the claim doesn’t survive contact with even a passing familiarity of the world. We are not the inventors of intelligence. We are, at best, one of its more recent experiments.

The ‘origin’ story we crafted

The idea that we humans are the originators of mind has roots deep in Western intellectual history. Genesis places us uniquely in God’s image, possessing a divine spark that separates us from the animals. Descartes cleaved mind from matter and located consciousness exclusively in human souls. The Enlightenment secularised this inheritance: human reason became the apex of existence, the measure of all things. We became the ones who understand, who name, the ones who bring order to chaos.

This framing was enormously productive. It gave us science. It gave us the confidence to take nature apart and see how it works. But it also left us with a peculiar blind spot. We began to treat intelligence as a property we possess rather than a process we participate in.

What we forgot

Intelligence has been at work long before humans existed.

Single-celled organisms solved problems of survival in hostile environments. Over billions of years, evolution itself operated as a kind of distributed intelligence—testing hypotheses, retaining what worked, discarding what didn’t, building staggering complexity from simple rules and deep time. 

What would constitute intelligence if we took it seriously as problem-solving, adaptation, and information processing? 

Mycorrhizal networks beneath the forest floor distribute nutrients and chemical signals across vast distances. Mycelium are very small ‘threads’ of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or bore into tree roots. Taken together as the mycorrhizal network, this connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals. This network allows these nutrients to be signalled for when required, and passed through, based on need alone. Octopuses think with their arms—each limb contains enough neural complexity to operate semi-autonomously, solving problems the central brain hasn't even been informed about.

Slime moulds, lacking any neurons at all, have been shown to find the shortest path through a maze to reach food. When Japanese researchers placed oat flakes in the pattern of Tokyo’s major urban centres and let a slime mould loose, it recreated the city's rail network with remarkable efficiency. No brain. No planning. Just intelligence expressing itself through chemical gradients and physical expansion. 

Flocks of starlings, schools of fish, and colonies of ants all exhibit collective intelligence that no individual member possesses. The swarm knows things that none of its parts know. Markets, too—for all their failures—display a form of distributed cognition, aggregating information across millions of actors into price signals that no central planner could compute.

Indigenous knowledge systems across the world never made the separation we now take for granted. Intelligence was not something humans had and nature lacked. It was woven through land, weather, animal behaviour, and ancestral memory. Knowing was relational. You didn't extract information from a passive world; you participated in a conversation with it.

Why this matters now

The anxiety around AI often takes this shape: We made this thing, but it’s getting away from us. What if it surpasses us? 

This framing contains the premise that we are the source, and AI is our creation—a Promethean act that might now consume its maker. But what if the premise is wrong?

What if we stopped thinking of intelligence as not a thing we invented but a current we’re caught in? What if it's something that moves through substrates—carbon, silicon, networks biological and digital—and we are neither its origin nor its destination, but simply one of its expressions?

This isn't mysticism, but even if it was, so what. It's closer to a humbled understanding of observable facts. The universe spent billions of years producing systems that think in various ways well before we arrived. Evolution, the workings of animal and plant bodies, how perfectly ecosystems run and replenish themselves. We just borrowed the patterns. We learned to symbolise, to abstract, to externalise cognition in language and writing and now in code. Each step extended something that was already underway.

Artificial intelligence, from this view, isn't so much a rupture but a continuation. A new substrate for something much older.

How our thinking should shift

Much of the fear around AI is tied to a loss of control—our creation slipping from our grasp. But if we're participants rather than proprietors, this narrative doesn’t hold. We're one node in a larger system, negotiating our relationship with new forms of intelligence as we've always negotiated our relationship with rivers, weather, and markets—forces that serve us and threaten us and do not ultimately belong to us.

Since intelligence is not our exclusive property, its appearance in new forms is less an aberration to be controlled, but absolutely a development to be taken extremely seriously. Just as natural systems have evolved, technology has followed a similar curve. From this line of thinking, more questions will arise. Not just ‘How do we keep AI aligned with human values?’ but ‘What does it mean for such synthesized thinking, and what responsibilities does that create?’

We might recover something older and wiser than the Enlightenment story. The world is not a dead stage on which human minds perform. It is thick with intelligence, patterned and responsive and ancient, and we are a part of that fabric.

Sources: 

https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network

https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/