John Thornton

The Questioning of Intelligence John Thornton

The Questioning of Intelligence is an inquiry by intelligence of intelligence. It is a questioning of the ground on which we understand our selves and our capacity for intelligent thought and action. Our means of inquiry is the way of phenomenology, the way of entering the immediacy of consciousness, now. It is from here we investigate the philosophical and scientific inheritance that has formed the collective understanding we currently have of our place in the universe. In questioning this inheritance we are asking after the source from out of which it has emerged, the same source that manifests our conscious experience in each and every moment. According to the scientific materialism of our age, this manifestation of experience is no more than an effect of microphysical events occurring in our nervous systems, events that in turn have been determined by an inexorably mechanistic process of physical evolution. It is this materialistic presupposition that stands in the way of recognising the essential form of our natural, innate intelligence. For it is unintelligible to think a system of purely mechanistic calculations could produce the experience of meaning that is the hallmark of human consciousness. Seeing this is not a matter of argument or proof, it is a matter of direct phenomenological insight. It is on the basis of such insight that we look again at the meaning of the findings of contemporary science. For scientific materialism is not science, and its denial does not invalidate what science has discovered. On the contrary, it opens up the possibility of a scientific understanding within which consciousness and intelligence can be intelligibly integrated with what we already know of the objective form of the universe. In the final chapters we show how this integration can be realised in the action of a universal intentionality that is willing itself into explicit consciousness.