Natural intelligence on the horizon of Technosophy

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of natural intelligence as a philosophical tool aimed at clarifying the contemporary debate on artificial intelligence and at correcting the cognitivist reductions that have characterized much of modern and contemporary philosophy. Against the identification of intelligence with an abstract, formalizable, and context-independent faculty, the paper argues that human intelligence must be understood as a complex configuration embedded in a historically and technically mediated form of life. Through a systematic reconstruction ranging from ancient and medieval philosophy to phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, and twentieth-century cognitive science, the article shows that natural intelligence is inseparable from embodiment, technical mediation, institutions, and goal-oriented action. Within this framework, the notion of a techno-anthropological circle is proposed to describe the dynamic co-constitution of natural life, technology, objective spirit, consciousness, and second nature. This perspective allows artificial intelligence to be reinterpreted not as a replication or surpassing of human intelligence, but as a selective enhancement of processes of technical capitalization already intrinsic to human forms of life. The article concludes that the difference between natural and artificial intelligence is not a matter of degree but of level, and that only a non-reductive conception of intelligence can provide adequate conceptual criteria for assessing their relationship.